Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Sweetback, while re-mastering the nationalized eros of the U.S., anyway needs to escape it—to leave the nation’s discursive universe. Evan Heimlich reads _Sweetback_ through filmmaker Van Peebles’ own transnational move—to Paris. Black transnationalism has flourished in Paris, where African-Americans historically have gain exposure to Haitian anti-imperialism, as expatriates’ _communitas_ binds disparate members cohesively.

In Benedict Andersen’s and Thorsten Veblen’s accounts, Western Europe developed modern nationalism and nationalistic modernity largely via expatriates’ role of cultural “doubleness”: largely because MVP had learned to sing an expatriate’s Parisian song, his movie is a hybrid, pointing the way toward new options for representation and for social organization.

_Sweetback_ is not merely an inauthentic portrayal of Black sexuality: as a kind of working of the codes for racial representing, it further expands options for slippery signifying around identity. Perhaps one can transcend some level of confinement by reterritorializing the social and symbolic structures of sexual stereotypes.

Van Peebles’s winking at stereotypes manifests self-reflexive emphasis on the workings of racial coding itself. Particularly since Jazz-Age Hollywood, blackface fetishized a spectacular mode of performativity. As self-coding became a sex fetish, such racy moves have helped Hollywood studios control, for the U.S.-based culture industry, access to an apparatus of representation of global modernity. American, nationalistic mass-mediation has based this mode of self-coding largely on the sophisticated “parodic and deconstructive ‘signifying’ of . . . Afro-diasporic art.”