Conjuring Caliban's Woman: Moving beyond Cinema's Memory of Man in Praise House (1991)

Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Ayanna Dozier
Keyword(s):  
Short Film ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Poetic Structure ◽  
Normative Order ◽  
Mass Accumulation ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

Abstract Julie Dash's experimental short film, Praise House (1991), situates conjuring as both a narrative and formal device to invent new memories around Black womanhood that exceed our representation within the epistemes of Man. I view Praise House as an example of conjure-cinema with which we can evaluate how Black feminist filmmakers, primarily working in experimental film, manipulate the poetic structure and aesthetics of film to affect audiences rather than rely on representational narrative alone. Following the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, I use Man to refer to the representational body of the Western episteme that defines value through mass accumulation. It is through Wynter's scholarship that we find the ontological emancipation from Man that is Caliban's woman, who represents discourse beyond our normative, colonial mode of feeling/knowing/being. Through an analysis of Praise House that foregrounds film's ability to generate affect via its aesthetics, this article argues that aesthetics can similarly enact the same power of conjure as found in Praise House's narrative, and as such conjures an epistemological rupture to our normative order that is Caliban's woman.

Black Woman's Gaze. Nomusa Makhubu Unearths the Colonial Archive

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Fazan
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Archival Studies ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

The paper proposes an analysis of Nomusa Makhubu’s 2014 artwork Umasifanisane I (Comparison I) within the context of critical black feminist studies (Sara Ahmed, Hortense J. Spillers, Sylvia Wynter) and archival studies (Ariella Azoulay, Tina M. Campt). The author's primary aim is to show how dominating historical narratives can be disrupted with the means of insightful archival research, artistic reappropriation, and montage, which actively alter postcolonial knowledge production. Makhubu’s project demonstrates that although history itself will not solve the problems arising from colonial violence, working with a visual archive and persisting in staying with the trouble may propose new ways of representing black womanhood.

scholarly journals Stolen Life’s Poetic Revolt

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-372
Author(s):  
Louiza Odysseos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

Joining the discussion of revolution and resistance in world politics, this article puts forward the idea of poetic revolt as a necessary companion to these terms, one which centres attention on the ongoing reverberations of transatlantic slavery – what have been called its ‘afterlives’ (Saidiya Hartman, Édouard Glissant). Engaging with contributions to poetics, black studies and black feminist thought, it first develops a theoretical orientation of the ongoingness of slavery as a ‘grammar of captivity’ (Hortense Spillers) that ‘wake work’, a term proposed by Christina Sharpe, aims to disrupt. The article calls for methodological attention to the fugitive and wayward arts and acts of living, that is, what Sylvia Wynter and Fred Moten call the ‘sociopoetic’ practices of enslaved and legally-emancipated populations to illuminate the simultaneity and entanglement of structuring violence and poetic revolt. Second, drawing on Spillers’ scholarship on homiletics – the study of and participation in sermons – in particular United States contexts, it identifies and discusses three aspects of poetic revolt: ‘fabulation’, world-making otherwise and resignification, through which such communities developed a critical and insurgent posture aimed at rupturing this grammar of captivity and at forging critical, futurally-oriented sociabilities. Third, in conclusion, it discusses the links of poetic revolt, in its specificity in Atlantic slavery, to wider systemic critique. Pluralising our thinking on revolution and resistance, poetic revolt, it argues, is best seen as a critical meditation on futurity.

The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies

Signs ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann duCille
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Womanhood

scholarly journals In the Presence of Photons: Portraying Light through Cinematography

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-14
Author(s):  
Nadia Mahmud
Keyword(s):  
Production Process ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Experimental Film

Film is a medium that is impossible to exist without light. Essential to its production process is cinematography, a discipline in filmmaking that is directly responsible with visually presenting the information of a shot through a camera using the manipulation of time, lighting and framing. Frame distance describes the distance between a subject and the camera but more vital is the intent of application of frame distance as it is capable of implying meaning or eliciting a feeling in the viewer. The grammar of frame distance can be utilized to present structures, themes and styles of a film. Experimental, abstract films, although non-conformist to the rules of conventional cinema, may still be confined to the concepts and techniques in cinematography. Frame distances can help to distinguish patterns as well as emphasize details in an experimental film. The abstract, short film “Trapped Light”, explores the possibility of depicting the movement of light through transmissive and reflective materials.

Olive and me in the archive: a Black British woman in an archival space

2021 ◽  
Vol 129 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-137
Author(s):  
Oumou Longley
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Complex I ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Social Consciousness ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Black British ◽  
External Impact ◽  
Therapeutic Space ◽  
Women’S History

This article aims to explore how the archival life of Olive Morris might radically rebuff the devaluation of Black womanhood and identity in Britain. Harnessing a Black feminist framework, I approach Lambeth Archives, where the Olive Morris Collection is found as a therapeutic space. Through an understanding of Olive as complex, I disrupt hegemonic expectations of Black women and propose that within the space of this research, Black womanhood be allowed the freedom of self-definition. In a conglomeration of the documents and voices of the community that remembers Olive, marginalised epistemologies are legitimised. Their sometimes-conflicting accounts generate an unbounded image of Olive as a figure of Black British women’s history that harbours meaning as it is mobilised in social consciousness. Incorporating my own auto-ethnographic reflections, I explore the internal and external impact of Olive and my existence in this archival space.

scholarly journals An Ode to Black British Girls

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (20) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Jeanelle Kevina Hope
Keyword(s):  
Black Feminism ◽  
Chewing Gum ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
African Immigrant ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Black British ◽  
Women’S Sexuality ◽  
Dark Comedy

This article delves into Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum, examining how the cultural text builds upon Black feminist media discourse, and intimately grapples with the nuances of Black women’s sexuality while explicitly challenging misogynoir. This work illustrates how Coel is helping develop a Black British cultural aesthetic that centers Black women’s liberation, specifically from an African immigrant perspective, by using satire, all the beauty, pain, and struggles that come with #blackgirlmagic, eccentric adornments, and ‘awkward’ ostentatious characters that at times play into racist images and tropes of Black womanhood to expose the absurdity of life in an anti-Black, sexist, and xenophobic society. In sum, this article understands Coel’s work in Chewing Gum to be Black girl surrealism – the intersection of Afro-surrealism, British dark comedy, and Black feminism.

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