Between Life and Legend

Abstract

This article sets out to explore the multiple “senses” in Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro from several perspectives. First, it focuses on Peck’s cinematographic ambitions with reference to his social experience of geographic mobility and to his current position in the transnational field of cinema. The making of I Am Not Your Negro, ultimately led the Haitian-born director, with a commitment to producing a critical “auteur cinema” to create a cinematic testament to the opus of James Baldwin, an author in whom he discovered a language for thinking and for deconstructing racialization. This multi-facetted analysis of Peck’s documentary film and its making will enable us to shed light on the form and meaning of the intellectual quest Peck undertakes in his dialogue with Baldwin.