Dragons!: George Jackson in the Cinema with Haile Gerima—from the Watts Films to <em>Teza</em>

Abstract

This article examines Haile Gerima's film work from his earliest cinema (Hour Glass, Child of Resistance, and Bush Mama) to his latest cinema (Teza) with the political and intellectual work of George L. Jackson distinctly in mind. It analyzes these Pan-African screen texts with other seminal texts such as Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye and thus locates "Comrade" George L. Jackson, "the Dragon," in the theater of African cinema of liberation. Finally, it recalls rather than overlooks the filmmaker's own radical invocation of the revolutionary prisoner as a source of artistic inspiration toward new possibilities of African film criticism and Global African social and political consciousness.