Introduction

A. O. Scott noted the ways in which James Baldwin’s spoken words and writings speak with great prescience to the moment that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, in which white supremacy has been once again revealed in all of its structural and material power. This sense of timeliness applies not only to Raoul Peck’s film but to Baldwin’s work in general. Indeed, the recent renewed interest in Baldwin’s writings as a whole points to the ways in which the post-racial fantasy expressed in certain circles during Barack Obama’s presidency never coincided with reality. This chapter outlines the formal features of Peck’s mode of addressing absences and, despite the film’s elision of Baldwin’s queer identity, theorizes them as a form of queer poetics. Scott seeks to remedy this exclusion by placing Peck’s film in dialogue with other recent, more intersectional documentary representations of blackness.