Richard Thune Lecture - Eve Meltzer, New York University, "Not Me, Mine, Ours: The Work of the Negative in I Am Not Your Negro"

Meyerson Hall, B3

This lecture is drawn from a book in progress (Not Me, Mine, Ours: Belonging and Psychic Life After Photography, University of Chicago Press) that takes up the question of belonging that has been preoccupying many scholars in recent decades. Proposing that the relationship between the psyche and the camera is more important than we have yet to describe, Meltzer explores the ways in which scenes of subjection operate photographically both in us and around us, making us adhere to one another in particular ways.

In this talk, Meltzer looks closely at Raoul Peck’s 2016 film, I Am Not Your Negro, and argues that “the negative”—at once a psychoanalytic concept, a photographic technology, and a notion invoked by some Black Studies scholars—illuminates the workings of the fiercely proprietary relation that Baldwin refuses with the phrase “not your negro.” Meltzer argues that the psychic maneuvering that Baldwin attributes to the white subject’s fearful relationship to his own interior life and disclaimed history takes shape as a negation—first and foremost, as the figure of “the negro,” and then repeatedly throughout the twentieth century in countless cinematic redramatizations of the “not me”—to borrow another term from psychoanalysis. I Am Not Your Negro, moreover, illuminates Baldwin’s words by showing that the relation of “my negro” is deeply visual, and that that visuality is predicated on the camera and the psyche, together.

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