Prefigurative Politics: Collective Work is Practice
By jazz franklin, PATOIS Film Collective
I was 19 when I read Gordon Parks’ A Choice of Weapons. Shrunken down in the back of my dad’s champagne colored 1993 Acura TL, shielding myself from the Alabama summer heat, I read a section of his book every day for 20 minutes on my lunch break. The summer of 2009, I was a credit union teller, bored to death with the job and terrible with numbers. During my break, I’d make a beeline to the car, let the windows down, slip into the back seat, and read Park’s crumpled autobiography. Gordon Parks chose the camera as his weapon, a defense against racism, greed, and injustice. And the camera took him all over the world. The camera was the tool that connected him to a movement for social and political change, that camera opened doors that were certainly closed to a Black man from Kansas, and it linked him to communities that were fighting against the same oppressions he was. That summer I spent hiding in the car, I found a sense of purpose. Gordon Park’s life work convinced me that there is power in photography and he expanded my worldview.
Fast forward a few years later, I was working full time at a public television station in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was 2012, I’d just seen Obama be re-elected to the White House. Our communities were brimming with pride, but still, something for me was missing. Something had to be done to change our immediate conditions. Photos and videos aren’t enough to undo centuries of oppression. I photographed injustice, went to protests and documented them, worked at a place where I could create stories about oppressed people, and even though I had my camera, I had no language or tools to actually shift power. After I graduated college, I was invited to join an organization called Southerners on New Ground, a radical grassroots organization designed to build beloved community between Queer and Trans Southerners. They invited me to participate in grassroots campaigns that centered radical frameworks. We organized campaigns against immigration detention centers, the criminalization of Queer bodies, and ending systems of punishment. I began to understand that one person couldn’t shift power alone. I learned that there were power brokers and targets, people who we could hold accountable for the conditions Black, Brown and Indigenous, Queer and Trans, poor and working class people were experiencing. It was my own sort of liberation to realize that we, a small few, could collectively organize ourselves against the right wing and make wins that would shift our conditions. I realized through community organizing that base-building organizations, coalitions, and collective work shifts power. My individual ambitions of fighting with a camera emerged into a collective call.
Amidst the unwavering news cycles: the US presidential election, authoritarian and fascist rhetoric, mass shootings, housing and job insecurity, climate disasters, global conflicts, crisis at the borders of nation states, genocides and war, there is an overwhelming sense of grief that settles in as we bear witness to the consequences of late-stage capitalism. I would even say there is a collective grief amongst oppressed people, a grief that settles into the crevices of our subconscious and seeps slowly into everything we do, how we move, raise our families, protect ourselves, and escape. At times I feel a deep sense of helplessness. As queer Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ resurfaces the revolutionary work of poet Audre Lorde in Survival is A Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Gumbs recounts the poem “Need: A Chorale of Black Women’s Voices” (published in 1990 by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press as a community resource). The poem is written as a response to the murders of 12 Black women from January to May in 1979. Audre Lorde asks “How much of this truth can I bear/ to see/ and still live/ unblinded?/ How much of this pain can I use?” There, in the last line of this stanza is where I focus my energy. “How much of this pain can I use?” How can I reconstruct my pain and grief into a condition that allows growth, collaboration, and compromise in the face of rigid authority, fundamentalism, and/or general apathy.
Within the Black Queer Feminist frameworks that I lean into, many intellectuals name a 3rd space, the space between apathy and unprecedented grief. I have learned in this 3rd space we can use our pain to dismantle oppressive conditions and try to live by the principles that shape the world we want. The in-between space is why I work collectively, why I join organizations that do not lean toward fundamentalism, value horizontal leadership, emphasize the importance of relationship building, and believe in pluralisation of opinions, politics, and strategies. Collective work restores my faith in the human condition. As my political organizing education continues, I have been taught to study how power is organized. There are concrete techniques within the collective model that transform the ways power works and is distributed: horizontal leadership, democratic decision making, principled struggle, and mutual support. Each collective space I work with upholds these values from Patois The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival to Gallery of the Streets, and now, my newest affiliation, Color Congress.
At the beginning of our monthly Color Congress meeting this past September, Sonya Childress offered a beautiful provocation, “What is our solidarity posture?” To me, this means, what can be done with our collective grief? How do we transform the present into the world we want? Color Congress feels like an interruption to the current profit driven cycles of documentary; the film industry’s tendency towards capitalist trends have left us beholden to selling our ideas to brands and algorithms in order for audiences to have access to our work. Sometimes there seems to be no way to move beyond this industry standard. Color Congress, for me, seeks a new way of being, providing critical resources to documentary driven organizations that support communities of filmmakers.
Within Childress’s provocation there are no easy answers. As author, abolitionist, and embodiment practitioner, Prentice Hemphill suggests in their podcast, Finding Our Way, “This moment of disorganization, of discomfort, of breakthroughs and breakdowns gives us an opportunity to become more precise in our practice…what is it we chose to embody in this time?” (May 2021, Season 2 Episode 5). What we choose to embody can also be named as prefigurative politics; engaging in practice, embodying the world we want to see not as a future goal rather, the work is done in the present moment. The here and now. The practice is the praxis. Within the 113 organizations that make up Color Congress 22 identify as collectives. In the array of ways we build power, collective models rise to the top as disruptive and subversive to the authoritarian and centrist liberalism that creates an uneducated citizenry, violent rhetoric, nationalism, racism, sexism, and greed (to name only a few outgrowths). Collective work is crucial to our vision and not only in theory but in practice; we in the Color Congress as a part of the body are embodying our politics. Upholding the value of political diversity makes things difficult but not impossible. The denial of authoritarian politics, and the invitation to create new worlds where fundamentalism is lost begins in places like Color Congress. What do we embody when we engage in collective work? I think it behooves us to take note of the values named during the meeting in hopes to unpack how we embody these values as practice.
Decentralized Power
In some ways, it is easier to lean into centrist politics and hierarchical decision making. The two-party electoral system works in the ways it has been designed to. US citizens resign their autonomy in exchange for their safety. We are bombarded by the mechanics of this system every day, especially during the US presidential election cycle where people are reminded and even coerced into voting for the “lesser of two evils.” We look to the authority of this two-party system, because we may believe that it is the most pragmatic thing to do. Vote. We’ve been engaging in this system for centuries. Why try and change it now? And if we do indeed change it, what do we put in its place? The latter question is complicated. What do we build outside of the binary? How can we be sure it is safe and inclusive of all people? I believe that alleviating ourselves of centrist binary politics and practicing alternative forms of governance allow for a magnificent plurality. Nicole Solis-Sison from Undocumented Filmmakers Collective expands on this point “… we are all trying to reimagine and use space and co‐exist in a space that has never existed before. And we’re trying to imagine that together…I have to retrain and unlearn a lot of things…and I think curiosity in this space is really helpful…” The freedom to experiment with alternative models of governance makes our critical thinking and problem solving muscles stronger. We shouldn’t shy away from alternatives because we haven’t figured them out yet, in fact, I would argue the opposite. The only way we can test our hypothesis is by engaging in experimentation, taking notes, and trying again.
In 2014 I began to work with Gallery of the Streets, a network of artists, activists, and organizers that again challenged my view on hierarchies, decision making, and transformed my relationship to power. In fact, I credit a lot of the intellectual prowess of this article to artist and intellectual kai lumumba barrow who created and shaped the container that is the Gallery of the Streets Network. Networks are organized differently than collectives. Indeed this network relies on a kind of anarchistic autonomy. I say this to be aware of the multitudes of ways in which power can be organized. The importance of the network structure was something we studied as an alternative to centrist politics. During our study groups we read Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and some key points stand out. In the introduction he grapples with rhizomatic networks. More specifically, why centralized leadership might not be the most expansive or useful tool for people who want to keep their autonomy. Instead the rhizomatic network might be an alternative way to look at how power is organized. “The root is unique, a stock taking aIl upon itself and killing aIl around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what one calIs the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (Glissant 1997, translated by Betsy Wing). How within decentralized power can we open up to a variety of ways to organize ourselves? How can we practice giving one another space and still be interdependent? And how do we create metrics to evaluate if our experiments are working or if we need to pivot and change?
Collective Decision Making: Principled Struggle Doesn’t Slow Us Down
Many times in my work within collectives a critique comes up, especially when we are trying to make some sort of deadline, and that critique is that consensus decision-making takes too long and that it halts progress. My question in return is always, where are we rushing to go if we don’t have collective agreement on the direction? Should we be in a hurry? If we rush, might it be too easy to default to the systems that oppress us?
Collective decision-making slows us down on purpose. The pace allows us to strengthen our relationships. Jackie Barragan from Femme Frontera expresses “building trust within our collective is a slow, steady, necessary process.” Slowness feels awkward under capitalism because capitalism requires its participants to place a value on what we produce. However, collective decision-making emboldens its membership to feel collective ownership around what they are building and uniquely we begin to understand where everyone is and where they have come from. Not everyone will agree on the strategies to get from point A to B. It is the job of the collective to take critique and disagreement seriously, not as a threat to progress but rather a disruption to our assumptions of what we think is best. In this posture, when we ask all of our members to step up and participate in decisions, the possibility that a charismatic leader will emerge to coerce the majority narrows. Instead, we come to value our own expertise. We engage an active membership that makes decisions based on study and principles. This kind of collective decision making widens the scope of our work and we realize that the direction of our work is malleable. It can be examined and re-examined because we are not fundamentalist; the collective decisions come from slow thoughtful conversations where everyone can authentically agree.
Horizontal Leadership
Rahi Hasan from the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective holds a powerful reflection from our conversation about collectives. Inspired by filmmakers and leaders in their field, like Ligaiya Romero, Rahi shared how their own practice leads them to question, “who are we building up to lead, how can we constantly be building and re-building leadership?” Horizontal leadership can eliminate opportunities for group think. When we all honor our voices as equal, the multiplicity of voice allows our differences to shine and makes us a robust entity. Horizontal leadership also demands an amount of rigor that is pro-intellectual. The United States dominates through force but also dominates because the general ethos is anti-intellectual. A strong collective works to develop critical thinking skills among all of its members so that they recognize harmful trends and are able to evaluate what is happening in their organization. Horizontal leadership allows our collectives to live beyond the current and active membership. Through principled struggle the goals of the collective are adopted by new leaders with new strategies and this shared leadership keeps our organizations from becoming rigid in our approaches to change.
“What does a solidarity posture look like?” For me a possible answer is practice. I’ll continue to experiment with these aforementioned values in all aspects of my life and work. I’ll continue to define myself and my praxis as critical to building a new world that privileges abundance rather than scarcity. And I believe that collective work is my choice of weapons that will constantly interrupt the violences that are hurled against us in an attempt to isolate and confine oppressed peoples. At the beginning of the 21st century, I see myself experimenting with collective power and how it manifests new techniques, new methodologies and new critiques in order to sustain the future we desperately seek.
jazz franklin is a collective member of the New Orleans based PATOIS Film Collective, a Color Congress member organization. Currently, jazz spends her time filming short documentaries with underrepresented communities suffering from industrial pollutants in the US Gulf South. These short films have been produced and distributed by Frontline Media Network, Healthy Gulf and Counterstream.
