The editors wish to thank Alejandra Marquez, Adam Lauver, and Joe Tompkins for their contributions.

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Faith Ringgold, Barbara O, Safie Faye, and Carroll Parrot Blue.

The history of Black women in the cinema is as real and central as its records are hard to find, and their structuring visions and voices segregated, misrecognized, and erased. Systemic marginalization has kept the credit due to Black women off the cinema screen. The same has been the case for Black women’s contributions to screen criticism, history, historiography, and theory, despite foundational scholarship in works by Gloria Gibson, Jacqueline Jones, and Jacqueline Bobo.¹ While feminist screen discourse gained an academic audience and attention to Black cinema rose in the 1990s, Black feminist points of view, including those above, most often remained marginal.² The voice of the field reasoned that while some makers broke ground and some critics published key essays, they were not central but exceptions, not “the rule.”

However, the work of many of Black women mentors, professors teaching Black women’s film and media, activists and media-makers from the 1960s onward demonstrates the living tradition of Black cinematic feminism. For example, Frances Gateward’s class on “Black women filmmakers of the Diaspora” (University of Michigan, 2002), and the work of teacher/activist/media-makers like Cyrille Phipps and Cheryl Dunye as well as scholar/makers like Yvonne Welbon dynamically coalesced the writings and films of Black women. The work of these thinkers and practitioners, and many others, provides an index of the expansive reality and a roadmap of the possible in projecting onscreen Black women’s existence, dreams, and thought-lives. This work has also illumined the politics and practices of living and embodied refusal, resistance to erasure, and has prompted this volume’s efforts to continue the work of recovery. This recovery is particularly important in the case of Black intersectional Lesbian filmmaking and scholarship, an arena multiply marginalized but deeply constitutive of the Black feminist cinematic tradition, as the work in this volume on seminal filmmaker Aarin Burch (especially her Dreams of Passion [1989]) and others illumines. Volumes like Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhaz’s Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making have been extremely important in terms of documenting this largely silenced history as well as theorizing this body of cinematic art.³ For evidence of the episteme-shifting radicalism of Black lesbian interventions into the historical theorization of Black feminist media, one need to look no further than the work of Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense and Queer Times, Black Futures as well as works like Jennifer DeClue’s Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema.⁴ It is in the traditions of documenting and theorizing Black women’s film cultures and practices that this special issue gathers critical writing on African American film and streaming media. With contributions from three generations of media scholars and Black women filmmakers’ themselves, the volume acknowledges the practices, politics, and perceptions of media made by and about Black women.

The project began by revisiting the call made by filmmaker, activist, and scholar Toni Cade Bambara in her 1993 essay “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye,” in which the author celebrates the innovations of independent Black cinema projects such as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess (1973) and the UCLA “rebellion” students. Bambara observes that these projects go well beyond narrative transformation, entailing formal and foundational modifications such as editing, costuming, composition, and point of view to reflect and address Black lives and Black audiences. These shifts are less about implementing some singular impression of authentic blackness than they are about recruiting the medium to articulate Black feminist vision. As Bambara notes of Daughters, this vision is evident on the level of the shot, in which the camera is neither “stalking” nor “looking down on” the Black children within its site.⁵ Additionally, “no one is backgrounded scenery for foregrounded egos. The camera work stresses the communal.”⁶ Bambara’s observation yokes Dash’s–and other Black feminists’—cinematic project to the ethos of Black feminism encapsulated by the Combahee River Collective in their foundational 1977 “Black Feminist Statement”: “Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.”⁷ An esteem for community rather than exceptionalism characterizes the structures of not only Black feminist films and television shows but Black feminist media criticism as well. A key aspect of Black feminist media making has been its interrogation of, play with, and distancing from the demand for indexical representation that has burdened the Black image on-screen. Arguably, we are amidst a Black film criticism renaissance that emphasizes non-indexicality (Michael Gillespie, 2016), resists evaluation (Racquel Gates, 2018), addresses industrial pressures (Kristen Warner), and historicizes (Jacqueline Stewart, [2005], Allyson Nadia Field [2016]).⁸

This special issue situates the Black feminist media making and criticism within a longer history of Black feminist criticism and media practice. In particular, while acknowledging that a particular kind of non-indexicality is fundamental to Black imagery whenever it enters the field of white hegemonic representation, this issue is addressed to correcting the omissions and ahistoricism that have tended to leave out important voices—largely female—that have continually called for and modeled a radical praxis of “empowering the eye and reading the signs.”⁹ While our goals were practical, they were also aesthetic and theoretical–not just to set the record straight but also to showcase the often-collective modalities that have characterized the filmmaking and film reading practices of Black feminists. This volume acknowledges the imprint of Black film feminism in questioning and constituting the terms of Black and African American critical engagement with film. The audience research of Jacqueline Bobo, the urgent assessment of the popular conducted by Wahneema Lubiano, the fierce advocacy and programming work of the late Jacquie Jones, the engagement with representational politics of Valerie Smith, and the work of many others including bell hooks and Bambara have unalterably shaped the project of Black film analysis.¹⁰ This issue aims to both return to these figures’ insights and to cultivate new models of investigation in the spirit of collectivity and collaboration that these scholars demonstrated.

This issue also includes articles that are mindful of the politics of citation and are willing to interrogate the contraction of Black film studies’ scholarly canon, as well as conversations with makers themselves. The approach is not simply an experiment; it is envisioned as a form of redress to correct mistaken and misguided fantasies about the film industry and popular culture that have circulated in the wake of the previous Black film studies high water mark of the 1990s when scholarship was necessarily addressed to independent and (if not versus) mainstream, Hollywood fare. This volume addresses the early twentieth century media landscape that has, through cable programming, “prestige television,” and streaming outlets, created new viewing experiences and context for both new and older cinematic productions.

This volume joins with earlier work that posits the radical difference Black intersectional feminism can make in cinema and media’s historiography, theory, and futures. We have learned as much about Afrofuturism from the cinematic visions of Cauleen Smith, Zeinabu irene Davis, Barbara McCoullough, and The New Negress Film Society, as we have from those far more often cited as cinematic examples such as John Akomfrah. Jacqueline Bobo’s key initial volume, Black Women Film and Video Artists still reads like a bolt of lightning out of the dark, bringing into the visual field the vital work of Black women filmmakers and beginning the key act of theorizing and historicizing their contributions.¹¹ Producing the very first essays on key visionaries like Jacqueline Shearer, Bobo’s book, as well as her earlier theorizing of Black women’s readership of media in Black Women as Cultural Readers, provided an exceedingly important groundwork for this volume. Similarly, Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman did underrecognized work of foundational critique and articulation of a Black feminist film optic in a time and place where this critique was not only ill-received by mainstream cinema studies but very often mischaracterized and misunderstood.¹² In bell hooks’s important contribution to the discourse on the cinematic “gaze,” one stimulated by Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and that Manthia Diawara, with recourse to Christian Metz, challenged in his essay “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” hooks crucially not only highlighted the intersectional lack the theoretical apparatus on spectatorship and identification and insisted on the visibility of Black women’s spectatorial positioning but began theorizing Black women’s viewing positions.¹³ Then there are those whose primary contributions to intellectual history were viewed to be outside of Film Studies: e.g. Toni Cade Bambara’s work theorizing and reading cinema is often overshadowed by her literary accomplishments, though she made signal contributions in both realms. Valerie Smith’s important intersectional explorations of the media of film and video were extremely pathbreaking, not only in their centering of texts often viewed as marginal but in the very fundamental way of putting to work emerging theorizations of intersectionality.¹⁴ Similarly, the historical work of theorizing spectatorship and publics engaged in by Jacqueline Stewart on the one hand, and of remembering and exploring the star dynamics of Black actresses in Charlene Regester’s work, provide two important keystones of the historical work of Black femme cinematic excavation.¹⁵ Likewise, Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence’s Writing Himself into History placed Oscar Micheaux in the center of a press discourse in which women critics played a key role.¹⁶ Phyllis Klotman’s Frame-by-Frame, volumes I and II (1979 and 1997) and Struggles for Representation: (1999) dug deeply into Black documentary practice, revealing women’s outsize contributions to this arena, engendering new work by Pearl Bowser and others.¹⁷ These foundational works, whether they came explicitly under the name “feminist” or merely participated in the work of lifting up Black women’s voices, laid an important groundwork in its desire to center and deliberately listen to Black women’s contributions to cinematic discourse.

Likewise, this volume seeks to develop a sense of those screen works that may fail the traditional definition of cinema but which are nevertheless works of Black women’s screen imagination. Continuing the work Valerie Smith began with including video alongside film, our volume seeks to broaden the definitions of the cinema.¹⁸ What cognate forms of cinematic enterprise exist outside of the realms ascribed with the brush of art and propriety and the politics of Hollywood insiderdom? For example, what of the art and aesthetics of video broadcast through television, YouTube or even TikTok? Thus, we seek to do more than celebrate origins, firsts, and pioneers by reconsidering the discourse of “beginnings” through a lens that deliberately looks for intersections, networks and cross-affiliations. When we think of a history of this sort, we certainly think of Jessie Maple and Kathleen Collins who are credited as the first Black American women to make feature films and of Julie Dash, who is the first Black American woman to get a feature film distribution deal with a “major” distributor (Kino International). But we also think Safi Faye and Sarah Maldoror, diasporic filmmakers from the African continent whose features predated Collins’ and Maple’s by almost a decade. Also deserving of greater attention are documentary filmmakers like Madeline Anderson, whose poetic documentary eye and juxtapositional logics certainly belie the notion that “talking head” documentaries are aesthetically bereft or the commonsense notion that TV movies don’t count as cinema. Beyond this the discourse of firsts in cinema is dominated by the discourse of American capitalism: for example, it is important also to ask what defined the “feature” in the silent film era, because a number of the women filmmakers of this period may well deserve to be considered “firsts” alongside Maple, Faye, Collins, and Maldoror. More important is the work of listening to the connections and reverberations across these makers and often across media that characterized the work of Black feminist makers. Sometimes these migrate across media, conjoining poetry and filmmaking, literature and television production. In other words, the interrogation of Black feminist media practices on and around the screen impels a search beyond the screen proper and to other intertextual, paratextual forms and meaning making techniques. It calls for reading strategies that “sample” (as in hip-hop) from a wide swath of Black women’s thought rather than just that which can be seen through the camera’s lens. It also calls on us to ask the question of what meaningful cinematic interventions these filmmakers made–aesthetically, politically, and in terms of breaking through the logics of the visions that prevailed in their time? Finally, it prompts the question: what kind of cinematic tool is not merely the harnessing but the open embrace of the Collective, a concept defined best through the Combahee River Collective’s prevailing interrogations of the concept? This volume is premised on the notion that certain things are possible only through collective rather than solitary forms of creation. What kinds of filmmaking are possible through the kinds of collective sharing and imaginings that Black women have historically developed and consistently and sometimes painstakingly but with great personal gain kept sacred?

It is hoped that this volume will serve as a future-archive of sorts, revisiting and reviving for students and current practitioners critical practices and analytic discoveries that inform the current critical genealogies of Black film studies. We understand the publication of this particular special issue in one of the oldest journals for film scholarship to perform not only the kind of revelation our mentors did, but a reparative act of collecting and inspiration as well. We hope the volume will be a teaching tool and will stand as a challenge and provocation to those who still don’t consider Black women filmmakers or film scholars of import – and who, in so doing, misrepresent film history and central scholarship in the field. We hope it will give heart, help, and energy – as well as resources, wisdom, and citable material – to those young thinkers who are seeking to read and teach and use material about the generations of Black women’s intellectual history and theory of the cinema. We believe that even though the work is hard now, it will make our jobs as feminist Black film scholars easier as well.

Scholars and artists of multiple ranks and various proximities to the field of Media Studies have joined with reflections, collaborations, and new work. As editors, we reached out to those who we have taught and to those from whom we have learned to ask how they might be involved; worked on pieces with them or interviewed them; edited new work or helped to put them in dialogue with other scholars. This special issue was long in the making and the product of overcoming the challenges of COVID, academic strangleholds, the economy, and domestic life and labor, including and especially childcare and eldercare that have disproportionately affected women and, even more, Black women. We hope that it reflects the richness and passion it took to bring it into being and the spirit of the many folks who have come together under its banner to donate time, thinking, new and old works, wisdom and advice. We have essays by junior scholars, graduate students and new professors; articles drawn from a transcript of a roundtable by senior filmmakers and television producers; the incredible editorial labor of the journal, which kept a place for this volume at whatever word-count and date it should arrive, and shared commitment the work of keeping afloat those words: Black, Film, Feminism. Numbers of potential contributors didn’t feel their work or scholarship was necessarily feminist. This is an issue we take up in this Introduction further and as a part of generationality – a phenomenon that has shaped our presence, the presence of those who’ve worked for this piece, and what has been submitted or offered or put to language by whom; and perhaps also why so many of us both need and remain committed to completing this project.

In the transcription of the “Black Women Filmmaker Roundtable,” held on October 17, 2022, Juanita Anderson, Tracy Heather Strain, and Zeinabu irene Davis each raise concerns about the invisibility of Black women filmmaking and filmmaker labor. They describe variously the ways in which Black women have labored to create infrastructure for Black film work to be completed and screened, for the Black community as well as specifically for Black women. Each asked that their collective conversation and this volume be directed at such invisibility, show the many connections and commitments and sacrifices Black directors and producers and (again, especially) Black women make over and over to enable Black moving images to come into being and circulate in public. At the same time, they worried about leaving out people, even places and events; in which ways we might best assemble a history, were there enough time to try. We all wished to represent the vital networks of people and institutions that had become fundamental to Black women’s media-making opportunities, communities, and art. In their experimental, multi-modal index and contribution, “Black Women’s Music Videos,” the “Black Time” graduate student collective endeavors to theorize and create one such (art and labor) history – a new, critically as well as politically informed analysis, historiography, and set of reading and listening counter-practices for an understudied Black women’s moving media form. They offer hyperlinks and a critical bibliography as well as a careful discussion of Black women’s time, embodiment, and representation in the visual and global economy of the sound-film-short or music video. Writing together, they also address praxis – what can and may not be possible to produce in the context of U.S. academic institutional and part-time laborers work and education.

Two additional interviews, “Feeling First,” with Aarin Burch, and an email interview with director Tracy Strain by undergraduate student Kayla Brockington, address directly how filmmakers have worked to balance their artistic desires and imperatives while knowingly creating this history and its record. These and the other conversations and interviews herein, alongside the critical essays, testify to the many forms of struggle required for historical and ongoing produce Black women’s film and media work – and the collective will to preserve the stories from loss or erasure.

Jacqueline Bobo’s new essay, “Black Women Filmmakers: Professional Journey, Personal Reflections,” discusses the traces and traditions of Black film feminist activism from the mid-twentieth century to now, beginning with the 1981 documentary Fundi. It begins by contextualizing that film’s highlight–Ella Baker’s 1964 DNC address–before turning to a critical autobiography of encountering and teaching the film. Fundi (1981) is placed in the context of intergenerational Black women’s organizing, recruiting Dr. Angela Davis’s and June Jordan’s roles as artist, activist, academic, and colleague (and media subject) to implicitly illustrate the continuing labor of Black women to keep Baker and the movement at the front of our minds. The essay’s overarching concern–“The [cinematic] reclamation of Black women’s organized efforts toward justice”–is mobilized to inspire a consideration of more recent documentaries and fiction films as well as film marketing and the scholarship of the late Black women film scholars Jacqueline Jones and Jacqueline Shearer as part of an enduring Black feminist film tradition. Bobo also contributes her powerful 2005 film as a part of her essay, available here online.

Charlene Regester’s essay “Black Women Provide Divergent Representations of Blackness in Buster Keaton’s Silent Pictures” takes a somewhat unconventional approach to the topic of Black film feminism by reading the work of early cinema star Buster Keaton through an analysis of his Black women co-stars. Eschewing a good-bad evaluation of the women’s roles, the article examines Black women’s representation in these films holistically. The author readily and immediately acknowledges that stereotypes and blackface feature in Keaton’s films and examines Black women’s performances for evidence of agency and a disruption of misogynist white supremacist hegemony. As she writes, “This essay then explores selected Keaton pictures which feature Black women who become a prism through which we can view diverse representations of blackness or at least observe Black characters who attempt to achieve some degree of agency and who (sometimes) function in the same manner as white characters in these comic settings.” The argument resonates with and is informed by an appreciation of the carnivalesque inversion of the white-Black hierarchy, the “love and theft” (to quote Eric Lott) that underwrites blackface, and Black women’s performance of dissembling.¹⁹ Citing Racquel Gates’s powerful argument in Double Negative that pushes back against the reductionist appreciation of so-called negative images, the author proceeds to explore “how Black women as signifiers of blackness and womanhood functioned in Keaton’s pictures.” Indeed, a central tenet of this article is to challenge the notion of the irredeemably racist (and sexist) representation in order to provide a fuller accounting of the complexities of Black female representation within the predominantly white and male cinematic imaginary.

Hayley O’Malley’s new essay “‘A Woman with Film Reels for Eyes’: The Many Genres and Speculative Possibilities of Black Women’s Film Criticism” mines the archive for Black women’s speculative cinemas. She considers the unrealized works and proposals of Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and others as revealing the preponderance of cinematic and televisual thinking amongst some of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century. Her work points to the value of seeking archives away from the familiar sources—like Hollywood studio files—and in the usual suspects, uncovering the way cinema is braided into the intellectual work of some of the century’s best and clearest thinkers. She also reveals the value of formal experimentation and working across registers for Black women’s intellectual legacies.

Filmmaker Shola Lynch is one of the most powerful documentary directors of the early twentieth century, and this volume holds the first academic, longform interview with her. While bearing in mind Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” Lynch’s careful archival work, sorting through the undercommons of outtakes and in forgotten and overlooked archives, showcases the possibility of retrieval and redress through alternative archives rather than strict fabulation. Lynch’s conceptualization of the “historical imagination,” joins her rigorous research with a presentation of historical figures’ complex affectual histories. Nevertheless, Lynch’s mode of filmmaking arguably bears out Hartman’s proposed “recombinant narrative” of history, which “‘loops the strands’ of incommensurate accounts” and demands that history’s most grievous events and institutions be shuffled in—irrevocably—with our NOW.²⁰ Indeed, in witnessing the violence of, for example, Shirley Chisholm being denied the nomination by the delegates, or when Angela Davis is encountering the prison industrial complex from the inside, we begin to see and feel the reality of Black women’s interiority alongside history’s recurrent, pessimistic narrative of Black dehumanization and to see the history of their marginalization as our present.

The public forum at the important New Negress Film society features an illuminating conversation amongst scholars Terri Francis, Samantha Sheppard, and Salamishah Tillet on their respective journeys in the study of Black women in film. The organic and intentional transmission of wisdom between generations of Black women is on full display as they discuss their first encounters with the work of filmmakers Cauleen Smith and others. As moderator Melissa Lyde notes, “it’s always special to be in a room full of Black women,” and the significance of that gathering manifests in this discussion that digs deeply into the value of serious questions and critique of Black women’s filmmaking.

There is no way to explain how deeply COVID and its disproportionate effects on Black women, and particularly Black female artists, caregivers, and professors, interrupted, delayed, and reconfigured this volume. Some women’s intended pieces went unwritten, remained incomplete, or required publication elsewhere to meet previously planned, faster timelines that affected contributors’ careers. Those elsewhere pieces can’t be provided here but nonetheless played a role in shaping this volume. As their own collection that could be gathered across as titles, half works, names, and published pdfs by reviewing emails, notes of phone conversations, and editorial lists, these pieces would present another counter-history to the dominant (and lacking) one; to counter that allegedly impoverished history and lack of collecting that this special issue is offered refute.

And with increased barriers in the wake of conservative retrenchment and the pandemic engendered, targeted, collective organizing and commitments remain reparative as well. Not all of the resulting reconfigurations were counterproductive; and they represent an example of Black women rebounding against adversities. The various interviews and historiographic work published here in particular remind us Black women have always been resilient and already-present and thriving. Though not just the topics but the format for the “Roundtable” that would have been a public and streamed event changed; meditations on past and futures, and a free conversation that might not have occurred points readers and the Black film feminisms work here in new directions. In the transcript for that event – as is true across the volume as a whole – losses and grief, cuts in resources, added responsibilities, and new urgency slowed and reconfigured production — and this final Black Film Feminisms journal issue project. Taken together, the essays and interviews in this collection testify to the enduringly close connection between Black women and film–as subjects, critics, and makers. This volume’s contributors are the makers and curators of Black women’s media pasts and presents and we hope that the discussion contained within these pages stand as an inspiration and powerful reminder to illumine Black women’s media futures.

Notes

1. Gloria J. Gibson-Hudson, “The Ties That Bind: Cinematic Representations by Black Women Filmmakers” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 15 (2): 1994, 25–44. Black Film Review (Washington, DC: Domino Impressions, Jones edited issues 5:1 and following. Leasa Farrar-Frazier continued editing after Jones). Jacqueline Bobo, Black Feminist Cultural Criticism Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2001. Jacqueline Bobo, “Black Women as Cultural Readers” in Pribram, E. Deidre, ed. 1988. Female Spectactors [Sic]: Looking at Film and Television, London: Verso, 90-109. Jacqueline Bobo, ed. Black Women Film and Video Artists New York: Routledge, 1998. ⮭
2. bell hooks’s response to this absurd situation, in which Black male film critics rebuked feminist scholars for racism in their interventions, came in her 1992 formulation of “The Oppositional Gaze,” imagining a Black woman finally behind and before the camera, and at the center of the cinematic world. ⮭
3. Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz, eds. Sisters in the Life: A History of out African American Lesbian Media-Making Durham: North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2018. ⮭
4. Kara Keeling The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures New York: New York University Press, 2019. Jennifer DeClue, Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. ⮭
5. Toni Cade Bambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust and the Black Independent Cinema Movement.” In Black American Cinema, 1st ed., New York: Routledge, 1993, 120. ⮭
6. Ibid, 120. ⮭
7. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2017, 18. ⮭
8. Michael Boyce Gillespie Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Racquel J. Gates, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Kristen J. Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting. New York: Routledge, 2015. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. ⮭
9. Bambara, 1993. ⮭
10. Wahneema H. Lubiano, The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. See “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others”. See also “But compared to what?: reading realism, representation, and essentialism in School daze, Do the right thing, and the Spike Lee discourse” in Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1997, 97-122. hooks, bell. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies New York, NY: Routledge, 1996. Valerie Smith, Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. ⮭
11. Jacqueline Bobo, ed. Black Women Film and Video Artists New York: Routledge, 1998. ⮭
12. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman New York: Dial Press, 1979. ⮭
13. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Screen, 16, 6-18, 1975. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Diawara. New York: Routledge, 1993, 211-220. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze” in Black Looks: Race and Representation. United Kingdom: Routledge, 1992, 115-131. ⮭
14. Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings New York: Routledge, 1998. ⮭
15. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Charlene B. Regester, African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960 Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2010. ⮭
16. Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2000. ⮭
17. Phyllis Rauch Klotman. Frame by Frame: A Black Filmography Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Phyllis Rauch Klotman and Gloria J Gibson. Frame by Frame II: A Filmography of the African American Image, 1978-1994 Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Phyllis Rauch Klotman and Janet K. Cutler, eds. Struggles for Representation : African American Documentary Film and Video Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. ⮭
18. Smith, 1997. ⮭
19. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ⮭
20. Saidiya, Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12 (2): 2008, 1–14. ⮭

Courtney R. Baker is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death (Illinois, 2015) and numerous articles on film that have appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, and liquid blackness.

Ellen C. Scott is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. Her work explores the role of Black thought, labor, and writing across film history. Her first book Cinema Civil Rights (Rutgers University Press, 2015) exposes the Classical Hollywood-era studio system’s careful repression of civil rights but also the stuttered appearance of these issues through latent, symptomatic signifiers. After tracing these films from their first conception through restrictions imposed on them by industry and state censors, the study ends by assessing how Black political figures and journalists turned Hollywood’s repressed racial imagery into fodder for their own resistant spectatorship and full-blown civil rights demands. An Academy scholar, she is currently working on two book projects, one exploring Black women’s critical writing on the cinema from the birth of cinema through to the early 1980s when Kathleen Collins and Jessie Maple became the first Black women to make feature films. Her second project examines the intersections between the history of slavery and American film history.

Liz/Elizabeth Reich is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism and the Transformation of American Cinema; coedited collection, Justice in Time: Critical Afrofuturism and the Struggle for Black Freedom, is under contract at University of Minnesota Press. Her book-in-progress is “Reparative Ecologies: Time and the Globe” and she is coeditor of special issues, “New Approaches to Cinematic Identification,” in Film Criticism and “Reliquary for the Digital in Nine Key Terms,” in ASAP/J.