Tapping the source: Raoul Peck’s James Baldwin and the archival backstage of <i>I Am Not Your Negro</i>

Abstract Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) presents itself and was understood as the cinematic counterpart to Remember this House, a book James Baldwin began in 1979 but never finished. In fact less than 20% of the film’s voiceover derives from this or any unpublished source. The rest consists of redacted fragments from Baldwin’s published non-fiction, most significantly No Name in the Street (1972), reassembled to simulate a free-indirect yet nevertheless first-person ‘libretto’. By situating I Am Not Your Negro in relation to the broader Baldwin revival of the 2010s and fresh concerns regarding the film’s excision of Baldwin’s sexuality, this essay contextualizes and philologically traces the ‘archival backstage’ of I Am Not Your Negro to reveal an intricate, almost sui-generis act of literary adaptation, where the imagined completion of an archival fragment stands in for the splintering and re-emplacement of published text. As part of this process, I Am Not Your Negro offsets and triples the usual first-person subjectivity of the essay film onto Peck (as arranger of images) and two Baldwins: an imagined narrator/screenwriter and an embodied historical actor. Most broadly this essay suggests that the epistemic assumptions surrounding the film and its companion paperback should be revisited, not so as to undermine their archival legitimacy but to more rigorously appreciate the power of their intervention.