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Designing Sustainability: Making Radical Changes in a Material [Review Article]

1053 in rich detail. They are especially attentive to the often vexed biographies of stars such as Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Dorothy Dandridge, whose images were so crucial to selling African American experiences to white audiences, but whose careers were often circumscribed both by racism in the studios they worked for and by the popular racial fantasies they worked against. Most salutatory is the attention Kisch and Doggett give to early black cinema. Before Hollywood studios established decisive control over the film industry, African American film entrepreneurs opened studios, financed productions, and established distribution networks to cater to the hundreds of thousands of African Americans moving to cities, north and south. More than “reactions” to the white racism of The Birth of a Nation, the films of Oscar Micheaux and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company captured the modern aspirations of African Americans themselves in a variety of genres, from narratives of racial uplift to pulpy melodramas. Yet the authors do not account for the contingencies of film production and consumption in their overarching narrative. Although Kisch and Doggett organize the posters according to a dizzying array of people, genres, and themes, their descriptions tend to plot both films and film posters against a spectrum of progress that moves from abject caricature to sterling authenticity. The posters themselves suggest a more complex constellation of commerce, politics, and social relationships—to say nothing of prevailing design trends—influencing the look and meaning of black poster art. The authors provide ample context about the films, but they are remarkably silent on the posters themselves. As editor Tony Nourmand accurately states in his preface, most film posters are unsigned by their artists, making authorship difficult to track down. Of course, the lack of a signature itself suggests one way to read these posters: as an anonymous form of labor that sheds its own light on the changing conditions of black film production. What meaning can be assigned to Los Angeles-based Lincoln Motion Picture Co.’s hiring of the Quigly Lithograph Co. in Kansas City to design its posters? Even in cases where the poster is signed (full captions are listed in the back pages), Kisch and Duke do not explain how the poster artist might have shaped the meaning of the film they were commissioned to advertise. Although they dedicate a separate section to the “Polish School,” whose members created striking designs for the release of black films behind the Iron Curtain, they oddly did not give the same focus to American designers. For instance, readers might be curious to know what George Akimoto, who had been interned by the U.S. government during World War II, brought to his design for Black Caesar (1973); how African American entrepreneur Art Sims, whose 11:24 firm designed many iconic posters for Spike Lee’s films, conceived the relation between commerce and racial progress; and how a corporate design firm like Gravillis distilled the racial politics of Fruitville Station (2013) into a national multimedia campaign. Nevertheless, Separate Cinema holds extraordinary value for the fields of African American history and design studies. The posters add new dimensions to recent historical work that has taken cultural commerce and commercial art as a site for black community building, contributing particularly to the paths set out by Adam Green, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, and Cara Caddoo.1 The work also opens an area for design scholarship that accounts not only for the representation of racialized subjects in a supremely popular form, but also for the work of commercial artists in reproducing and even transforming ideologies of race and racism.