The Black Woman: The Quest for Radical Womanhood in The New Ark (1968)

Amiri Baraka’s rare 1968 documentary film The New Ark stands as an example among many other similar projects of a wave of Black engagement with the medium of documentary film in what can only be described as a Black documentary renaissance that swept through the 1960s. The era gave rise to a revived interest in documentary filmmaking among Black artists, communities, activists, and organisers. This wave of documentary films brought together years of Black intellectual thought, radical tradition, and struggles for freedom onto the screens. The primary and active role Black women played in this wave of films is often forgotten. The New Ark, focusing entirely on Baraka’s community in Newark, New Jersey, was written by Baraka and was co-directed by Larry Neal, while most of the film editing and photography was done by pioneer Black filmmaker and photographer, James Hinton. The film features various members of the community, most notably Baraka’s wife, poet, organiser, and activist, Amina. This paper argues that a closer look at The New Ark reveals, behind the seemingly patriarchal narrative, a story of Newark’s Black Kawaida nationalist women working hard to break that narrative from within. Within this alternative storyline, Amina Baraka and other women in her community navigate and express a synergy between radicalism and womanhood. In this sense, Baraka’s camera functions merely as a sheer rather than an opaque layer to the women’s struggles and resistance. Unlike their memory in many public imaginations of the Black Arts Movement and Black Power, fighting from the shadows, Newark’s Kawaida Black nationalist women were never dormant. Building on the work of Joy James and Ashely D. Farmer, and through a visual and contextual analysis of The New Ark as well as drawing from the written testimonies of Newark’s Kawaida women, this paper offers a unique take on how Black women were “shadowboxing” through their engagement both on– and behind the screen of The New Ark. Above all, the women were articulating a quest for radical womanhood.