This essay explores the longhistory of the critical and artistic reception-and disavowal- of the nineteenth century concept of double consciousness, from the works of W.E. B. Du Bois and Saidiya Hartman to Henry Louis Gates Jr.s' television show Finding Your Roots (2012-present) and the science fiction and horror films of Ryan Coogler and Jordan Peele. On one hand, the concept of double consciousness has been viewed as conveying a commitment to the political ideal of reciprocal recognition that envisions a nation-state wherein White and Black Americans work together to bring about racial reconciliation. On the other hand, the democratic promise of double consciousness has been rejected in order to imagine instead a stateless future alternative to the histories of colonialism and slavery constitutive of the nation-state. In the final analysis, my point of contention is that the conflicting orientations to double consciousness within these wide-ranging generic mediums foreground the antinomies between the past of slavery and the future of democracy that continue to animate the critical and artistic task of envisioning a Black (democratic) future.
This paper examines how American Fiction (dir. Cord Jefferson, 2023, United States) represents Blackness in a way that cultivates critical thinking. The film satirizes the cultural landscape in which Black representation is often shallow and based on stereotypes that feed into the White consumers' imagination. However, rather than being prescriptive about what constitutes "good"Black representation, the film presents multiple perspectives by delving into the ironies and contradictions within the Black artistic community and the broader societal reception of Black representations. It portrays the difficulties Black artists face when navigating the tension between authentic representation and commercial success, calling into question who has the authority to determine what constitutes "good" Black representation. The film encourages critical thinking about the value of representing Blackness both in contexts of affluence and competence, as well as in contexts of oppression and struggle. The film intentionally leaves debates unresolved, encouraging the audience to critically consider multiple viewpoints. It is argued that truly productive representation demands the viewer to question the representation, rather than to passively accept or reject it. Through analysis of ideas in American Fiction, the present article argues that engaging the audiences' critical thinking by using varied representations and multiple perspectives is a productive way to represent Blackness in film.
Abstract: This article navigates the journeys, voyages, and odysseys of Black women’s creative power, as the Louvre becomes their point of inquiry. The article explores their practices of looking; how they reimagine ways of seeing, and reinvent a world that centers their experiences. The Louvre becomes a metaphor, a space that allows world-making and self-making based on their terms. The Louvre is also a space of resistance and confrontation, as Black women evade the gatekeepers, by dismantling the structures that exclude and efface representations of the Other. The article also examines the ways that Black women reformulate practices of curating inside and outside the museum, creating exhibitions and cultural spaces which are less foreign, more human, and more welcoming. Faith Ringgold, Toni Morrison, Beyoncé, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and, more recently, Alice Diop, have journeyed there in their work, in their imaginary. Other women have excavated the museum from a distance such as Robin Coste Lewis, in her poetry. The article follows their paths, crossings and peregrinations as they interrogate art, language, race, gender, class, the body, belonging, and the foreigner.
This article discusses Boots Rileys' Sorry to Bother You (2018) as apolitical dystopia in which its main character Cassius Green is torn between voluntary slavery and the mimetic desire to be a slave trader. The film is a reboot of Frantz Fanons' Black Skin, White Masks (1952), replacing white masks with white voices to expose the racial hierarchy perpetuated in neoliberal ideologies. In the film, Cassius adopting the white voice can be seen as Sartrean "bad faith," a form of self-deception which defines him simultaneously as what he is not (white) in order not to be what he is (black). Furthermore, the film is discussed as an example of "strategic essentialism" by which the oppressed community can engage in resistance against the dominant system by embracing its subaltern nature as an essential feature. By embodying the notion of strategic essentialism, Sorry to Bother You renders its satirical vision as exceptionally poignant, thus propelling its social critique.
Nope (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022) explores the situation ofBlackAmericans within Hollywood. As the fictional descendants of Eadweard Muybridges' actor from The Horse in Motion (1878) encounter an alien, they decide to risk everything to capture it on film. Their ability to make this film comes to allegorize Black Americans escaping their historical marginalization in the industry and becoming central Hollywood figures. For that reason, one may view Nope as the first Black American "movie about making movies" (David Roche). This paper aims at examining how, as a metafilm, Nope defines the situation of Black Americans in Hollywood as a double bind. On the one hand, the film advocates for Black film workers to struggle against their marginalization within the film industry, but on the other hand, it portrays Hollywood as a nefarious industry spreading hyper-reality, so that Black Americans risk becoming corrupted by the very industry they seek to be apart of.
In this article, I explore the concept of racial conflation as developed by Alisa Bierria, examining its influence in a binational corpus of American and Qu & eacute;b & eacute;cois/Canadian mainstream films and television series to underscore the problematic representations of Black people on screen. I begin by outlining Bierrias' definition of racial conflation, highlighting its three features: (1) the bidirectional relationship between "Blackness" and "criminality," where criminal actions are racially interpreted as "acting Black," thereby reinforcing pervasive stereotypes; (2) interdependent intensity, where the perceptions of "Blackness" and "criminality" mutually influence each other; and (3) intransigence, i.e., the persistent association between "Blackness" and "criminality" despite potentially mitigatingsocial identities. I then highlight examples of two approaches to racial conflation in a selection of contemporary works-including horror, satire, and sitcoms such as Get Out orLakay Nou-oneIcall complicit, which reinforces the conflation, and the otherI call critical, which opposes it. By bridging these two geo/cultural contexts, I seek to make clearer a transnational racial logic that persists despite differing production environments. These examples underscore how mainstream on-screen representations of Black people too often oscillate between overcoming and perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
