Zapantera Negra: An Artistic Encounter Between Black Panthers and Zapatistas (New & Updated Edition)

by Marc James Léger (Editor), David Tomas (Editor), Emory Douglas (With)

Overview

A powerful elixir of hope and determination, Zapantera Negra provides a galvanizing presentation of interviews, militant artwork, and original documents from two movements’ struggle for dignity and liberation. When Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party, accepted an invitation from the art collective EDELO and Rigo 23 to meet with autonomous Indigenous and Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico, they explored the role of revolutionary art in times of distress. Zapantera Negra is the result of their encounter. It unites the bold aesthetics, revolutionary dreams, and dignified declarations of two leading movements that redefine emancipatory politics in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

The artists of the Black Panthers and the Zapatistas were born into a centuries-long struggle against racial capitalism and colonialism, state repression and international war and plunder. Not only did these two movements offer the world an enduring image of freedom and dignified rebellion, they did so with rebellious style, putting culture and aesthetics at the forefront of political life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942173557
Publisher:	Common Notions
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Emory Douglas is former Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, from February 1967 until its discontinuation in the early 1980s. Douglas' art and design concepts were always seen on the front and back pages of The Black Panther newspaper, reflecting the politics of the Black Panther Party and the concerns of the community. Joining forces with Black Panther cofounders Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, Douglas was foundational in shaping the Party's visual and cultural power and sustaining one of its most ambitious and successful endeavors.

Marc James Léger is an independent scholar based in Montreal. His essays in art criticism and cultural theory have appeared in Afterimage, Art Journal, C Magazine, Etc, FUSE, Inter, Parachute, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Journal of Canadian Studies, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, RACAR, Third Text, and Creative Industries Journal. Léger has exhibited artwork in Canada, the US, and the UK.

David Tomas is an artist, anthropologist, and writer. His production in the visual arts has its roots in a post-1970s critique of conceptual art's disciplinary infrastructure. He is the author of several books, including Escape Velocity: Alternative Instruction Prototype for Playing the Knowledge Game(2012) and Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman(2013). Tomas is Professor in Visual Arts at the Universityé du Québec à Montréal.

Table of Contents

Preface
Marc James Leger and David Tomas

Introduction
EDELO

ENCOUNTERS
1. Zapantera Negra Dialogues by Emory Douglas, Saul Kak and Mia Eve Rollow
2. Journey to Zapantera Negra by Rigo 23
3. One-Way Ticket: An Interview with Caleb Duarte

PLATFORMS
4. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense Ten-Point Platform and Program
5. Order From the Black Panther National Central Committee: Outline of Responsibilities by Rank and File
6. Position Paper on Revolutionary Art by Emory Douglas
7. Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle
8. Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle
9. The Other Player

REFLECTIONS

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Zapantera Negra helps us understand the power of art, how it can be a process that restores dignity and revives radical consciousness, and the ways it can be utilized on the road to liberation and autonomy. Emory Douglas and other contributors boldly present the insurgent spirit of the Black Panther Party and the EZLN and the visual cultures that reflect people’s struggle for self-determination in the context of the hypercapitalism which impacts so many of our struggles. Open the book. Allow Zapantera Negra to ignite your imagination and inspire new dreams of liberated futures.—Melanie Cervantes, graphic artist and cultural worker, cofounder of Dignidad Rebelde

With a generous spirit of dialogue and inquiry, Zapantera Negra sparkles! It usefully brings together Black Panther Party and Zapatista political-aesthetic sensibilities, and it opens up wonderful questions that blur the lines between art and activism. In a time of resurgent Indigenous and Black freedom struggles in North America, this book offers inspiration for building transformative movements with vitality and vision.—Chris Dixon, activist and author of Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements

In Zapantera Negra, freedom struggles find common expression through culture. Through interviews, conversations with Emory Douglas, and political platforms, this wide-ranging collaboration considers the aesthetic resonance between the Zapatistas and Black Panther Party. Richly illustrated with murals, embroideries, archival images—and even a spaceship—the book explores how ‘living memory’ can alight upon new spaces and generate new realities. This is a beautiful testament to hope and dignity and an urgent reminder that radical futures must be imagined before they can be realized. The struggle against neoliberalism requires such fortitude as well as such imagination—Christina Heatherton, coeditor of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter and author of the forthcoming Making Internationalism: The Color Line, the Class Struggle, and the Mexican Revolution

Zapantera Negra is an incredible endeavor, the depth of which is not often found in social practice: a direct and embodied connection between a key actor in a major social movement in US history (the Black Panthers) and the people of Chiapas, carrying the legacy and expressions of an equally revolutionary struggle in Mexico (the Zapatistas), some thirty years apart. The subtlety and complexity of this project, and its implications for a globally engaged arts-based activism is truly impressive.—Suzanne Lacy, artist and author of Leaving Art and Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art

Zapantera Negra is a rare document from the US and Mexico that intertwines art, dialogues, and processes between artists and cultural spaces that open collaborative intersections of politics and creation far outside the confines of art as commerce and rigid politics. Blending striking images and personal stories of the Black Panther Party and the Zapatistas, the book spans revolutionary tendencies and histories rooted in collective liberation. With hope and determination, Zapantera Negra shows us the power that art has to seed flowers that push through concrete, dissolve static confines, and open liberatory possibilities for living unwritten futures.—scott crow, author of Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective and Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams

Zapantera Negra provides a stunning display of why art is not just helpful but also utterly necessary to humanity’s efforts to achieve justice. This book provides a journey of heart and mind through the relationship of two critically important movements and, extending around it all, the depth and power of national liberation and internationalism. As I read Zapantera Negra, I felt fortunate to be able to witness these cultural creations and conversations, and to hold in my hands a history that goes beyond words and teaches truth through the alchemy of revolutionary art.—Laura Whitehorn, former political prisoner and editor of The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind by the late Safiya Bukhari

Zapantera Negra is a book of encounters—between Zapatismo and the Black Panther Party, art and politics, revolution and everyday life, and the histories and horizons of radical social justice struggles. Léger and Tomas deftly curate this engaging and important work, exploring urgent and enduring questions relating to radical politics, the fabric of daily life, and art as a medium for social justice and social change. Orbiting around a series of provocative and lively dialogues, this book embodies the spirit and politics of encuentro.—Alex Khasnabish, author of Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global and Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility

In a place called EDELO (En Donde Era la ONU), ‘where the United Nations used to be’, somewhere in the Mexican southeast, Zapantera Negra kindled the Black Panther spirit from a caracol in a river that runs through history—a river that runs below ground for years, for entire centuries, and then rages to the surface or trickles up through the earth’s rhizomes and roots. This art is urgent and inventive, an art of uniting peoples, an art of struggle born out of a moment in time, years, even centuries in the making. Que viva la Zapantera Negra!—Jeff Conant, author of A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency

This collaboration reflects the brilliant echoes of 500 years of resistance. From the Seminole swamps to the Southwest plains, Black and Brown hands reach together to build liberation dreams against the nightmares of racism, war, and colonialism. The depictions found in Zapantera Negra—the magic of Black church women and las mujeres campesinos; children wise beyond years and adults following their lead—show communities in struggle challenging Empire from below and to the left. By drawing out Black and Indigenous liberatory politics and the need for spaces to resist, conspire, and inspire, this is a more than a book—it is a call to home.—Kazembe Balagoon, writer, cultural activist, and Project Manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York

Zapantera Negra is a marvelous and illuminating exploration that sheds penetrating light on the borderlands of Mexico and the United States of America. As I read this fascinating book, my mind gravitated instantaneously to my own book on this related topic, reminding me once more of shared Black and Brown histories and landscapes of struggle. These enlightening pages remind us of the commonalities between the Black Panthers and the Zapatistas, and through image and word, point us all to a brighter and more bountiful tomorrow.—Gerald Horne, author of Black and Brown: African-Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920 and Race to Revolution: the U.S. and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow