scholarly journals Researching Black women and film history

2021 ◽  
pp. 228-236
Author(s):  
Agata Frymus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Film History ◽  
African American History ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Black Film ◽  
Horizon 2020 ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Working Class Women

My project (Horizon 2020, 2018–20) traces Black female moviegoing in Harlem during the silent film era. The main challenge in uncovering the women’s stories is that historical paradigm has always prioritised the voices of the white, middle-class elite. In the field of Black film history, criticism expressed by male journalists—such as Lester A. Walton of New York Age—has understandably received the most attention (Everett; Field, Uplift). Black, working-class women are notoriously missing from the archive. How do we navigate historical records, with their own limits and absences? This paper argues for a broader engagement with historic artefacts—memoirs, correspondence and recollections—as necessary to re-centre film historiography towards the marginalised. It points to the ways in which we can learn from the scholars and methods of African American history to “fill in the gaps” in the study of historical spectatorship.

scholarly journals Black Public Art: On the Socially Engaged Work of Black Women Artist-Activists

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 604-614
Author(s):  
Mary Pena
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Waiting Room ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
White Middle Class

Abstract Inaugurated at the Brooklyn Museum of New York in 2017, the path-breaking exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85,” centers the creative expressions and lived experiences of black women artists within a primarily white, middle-class, heteronormative mainstream feminist movement. Engaging visual mediums, artist-activists rendered a black feminist politics through cultural and aesthetic productions. In so doing, artists recast extant representations of black social life, demanded inclusion within cultural institutions, and created black-oriented spaces for artistic engagement. In the contemporary global political climate of anti-blackness, artists craft socially engaged practices that creatively intervene in public space and the cultural institutional landscape. Through a critical analysis of Carrie Mae Weems’ Operation: Activate, Simone Leigh’s The Waiting Room, and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint is Family, this essay concerns recent interventions that mobilize an expansive approach to art combined with activism. The myriad practices of Weems, Leigh, and Frazier recompose sites of political engagement and empowerment that enact a broader praxis of reimagining social worlds. These projects belie the representational fixity on which art economies hinge, gesturing to material formations that elicit tactile modes of relation, and challenge the bounds of subjects and objects in the world.

The Militant Negro Domestic, 1945–1965

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley D. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Gender Specific

Chapter 1 begins in the late 1940s, and documents how postwar black women radicals collectively constructed the political identity of the “Militant Black Domestic.” Using their political tracts, satire, and pamphlets, this chapter shows how black women used this trope to reimagine black working-class women as grassroots political actors who critiqued American imperialism, promoted black self-determination, forged international radical alliances, and advocated for women’s equality. The chapter also reveals how, through their writings about the Militant Black Domestic, black women radicals sustained and further developed early twentieth-century black nationalist expressions, laying the groundwork for future gender-specific expressions of Black Power.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document