Black “Crime,” Public Hysteria, and the Cinema of Containment: Black Cinema Aesthetics from Willie Dynamite to The Interrupters and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the “subtext of ongoing Black captivity” is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.

The Black Aquatic

This essay argues that thinking through black diasporic life as birthed through a unique and ongoing relationship with bodies of water (sea, oceans, rivers, creeks) can and does aid in analyses of contemporary art and its engagement with black subjectivity. I am concerned with how bodies of water are foundationally formative of blackness. And secondarily I pursue how this foundational aspect of blackness is both an act of representation worth engaging contemporary art and also a limit on what some representations of contemporary art can do to undo the brutal history of the aquatic birth of blackness and its perpetuation.

The Power of Silence

This article examines the sonic dimension of police operations and occupations by tracing how the everyday life changed sonically in favelas in Rio de Janeiro during their occupation by Pacifying Police Units. I tune into the silencing practices of these security policies and conclude that a moral silencing of a racialized and gendered class of people takes place. A focus on silence helps us to understand sound as a technology of power, which enables the Brazilian state to operate along a gendered sonic color line. The cases I discuss are two instances of silencing that are a product of the operations and occupations: first, the silencing of the soundscape of the favela during police operations, and second, the silencing of funk parties. These ethnographic instances elucidate how racialized processes of negation of black subjectivity and black cultural expressions take place in the Olympic city.

American Negritude

This chapter contextualizes Malcolm X’s interventions about black feelings in the contemporary psychological literatures that framed and circulated about blackness to understand how new black psychology informed Malcolm’s emotional and rhetorical repertoire. Then, in excavating Malcolm’s performances of black rage as an easily identifiable feeling and an intended goal of his rhetorical corpus, Corrigan argues that Malcolm’s psychological strategy articulated what she calls “American Negritude.” Marrying black psychology to the work of African and Caribbean intellectuals theorizing postcolonial black subjectivity, Malcolm’s rhetorical skills hinged on his ability to resituate black political and social consciousness around black pride and disidentification from whites. Malcolm’s American Negritude, particularly as it embraced rage, was at odds with the affective orientation and the racial liberalism of the integrationists and created both tension and opportunity for a global blackness. Still, while Malcolm reconceptualized feeling and being black, his enactment of black rage was often confused with hatred, which fueled white opposition to Malcolm and the NOI and fed white fragility in the early 1960s. Malcolm’s critique of black loyalty to white civil religion hinged on his relentless exposure of faulty black identifications, which he saw as a form of modern slavery.

Performing Black Subjectivity

This article analyzes Black feminist performance through two recently released live performance films. Set a generation apart, Amazing Grace (recorded 1972, released 2018), featuring Aretha Franklin, and Homecoming (2019), featuring Beyoncé, are artful and personal—both inspired by Black culture and the artists' personal histories, and offer virtuoso performances. The article operates in three modes: scholarly, personal, and remembered. The scholarship draws on the work of Hortense Spillers, bell hooks, Daphne Brooks, and others, while the personal and remembered portions consider significant sites of feminist formation that have shaped the author's perceptions and analyses of Black feminist performance in the present. These, along with close readings of the films, tap into Black women's ways of knowing and performing subjectivity.

The Neo-Gothic Imaginary and the Rhetoric of Loss in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

The aim of my paper will be to discuss the African-American reworking of the Gothic tradition in Colson Whitehead’s neo-slave narrative. I want to argue that the figure of the protagonist Cora may be seen as the embodiment of losses that span over generations of black women. Cora’s melancholia is a strategy of dealing with the horrors of slavery and a sign of a black woman’s failed entry into the Symbolic. While the novel’s narrative technique is a symbol of the ever-present past that haunts black subjectivity, the underground railroad may be read as a metaphor for the repressed content of American national unconscious.

James Baldwin and the Anti-Black Force of Law

There has been a recent resurgence in attention to James Baldwin as academics, public intellectuals, filmmakers, and curators engage with his work through the lens of the Movement for Black Lives. Continuing this turn, I read Baldwin as a theorist of the law and, ultimately, an abolitionist. By reading “The Fire Next Time” (1963) and “No Name in the Street” (1972), I argue that policing in the United States is inherently organized by a(n) (il)logic of anti-Blackness that necessitates racist violence as a structural component of its practice. This pessimistic diagnosis is extended through Baldwin’s theorizing on the Black Panthers to illustrate that while policing in the United States can never not be excessive in its racist violence, the Black subjectivity that would seemingly be obliterated by this excessive force of law ultimately exceeds the reach of the policeman’s club or bullet, without losing sight of the bodies left in those weapons’ wake.

FIX IT BLACK JESUS: The Iconography of Christ in Good Times

“[I]f images from the past spring to legibility in the present, it is because they speak to its concerns”—Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Cohen 1993 p. 11). Good Times is primarily remembered for the situation comedy that it became, rather than how the series began. As a part of what Means Coleman classifies as “The Lear Era: Social Relevancy and Ridiculed Black Subjectivity,” the series was the first sitcom in TV history to feature a loving, working-class, Black nuclear family—the Evanses—with a focus on recounting their racial and socioeconomic challenges and gains. While the representational treatment of the Evanses as a whole and full family by network television (CBS) was groundbreaking, Good Times, perhaps, still reinforced implicit schemas regarding Blackness as the Evanses were poor and lived in Chicago’s rough-and-tumble Cabrini Green Housing Projects. Further, as the series progressed, narrative attention focused on the character J.J., a ‘Jim Crow’ stereotype (i.e., eye-bulging, wide-smiling, hustler) whose emergence as the centerpiece of the series eventually prompted co-star, John Amos, to leave the once stereotype-busting show out of protest. Although Good Times ultimately fell into the stereotype trap, the first two seasons of the series worked effectively in representing Blackness as complex and worthy. This article focuses on “Thank You Black Jesus”, a season-one episode that centers on J.J.’s painting of Black Jesus, an artistic interpretation that is in line with the Bible’s description of Jesus. “Thank You Black Jesus” begs several important questions surrounding religious and secular symbols, the interpellation and hailing of Blackness, and faith or suspending one’s disbelief. In this article, we conduct a critical, cultural analysis to explore the meanings that are associated with symbols, Blackness, and faith. We also consider the staying power of the “Black Jesus” episode in contemporary popular culture, as witnessed in the form of memes, intertextual references to the episode in other media texts, and as elucidated by continued debates surrounding the race of Jesus and the ways to pursue an iconography of inclusiveness.