Chapter in Summer of Soul (Docalogue series), edited by Jaimie Baron and Kristin Fuchs, Routledge, 2024.
The fifth title in the Docalogue series, this book examines Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s 2021 documentary, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
As an archive-based film, Summer of Soul is in many ways a perfect illustration of the significance of Walter Benjamin’s claim that “In order for a part of the past to be touched by the present instant [Aktualität] there must be no continuity between them.” Summer of Soul is subtitled “When the revolution could not be televised,” a line borrowed from Gil Scott-Heron, for whom it was a critique of the banality of white TV. The irony is, of course, that the Harlem Cultural Festival was televised in 1969, although its broadcast was limited to two one-hour segments at reputedly obscure hours with little to no publicity.
Summer of Soul is described in the film itself as made up of footage unseen until “now.” This essay presses a little harder on this now-time to see how this powerful concert film articulates revolutionary time through archival retrieval, digitization, and editing.
