Introduction
We bring forth this critical collection and speculative bibliography on Black women’s music videos as part of a broader effort to mitigate the general absence of collections on Black women’s film art. Though we wish this document could fill in for these erasures, we are wary that The Archive can become, as Saidiya Hartman writes, “a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body.”1 Instead of condemning the following artists to History, our assemblage provides a basis for a counter-archive and points to the myths of completion and equity that structure The Archive.
This critical bibliography is a compilation list of music videos by and/or featuring Black women, analytical or historical annotations, sources, and links to further reading. It offers something accessible and usable as a survey of Black women’s work centering Black women’s films, sounds, and performances. As a form that brings together two time-based media, the music video offers various presentations of Black Time. Here we understand the concept of Black Time to mean a heterogenous time-space already now and still-yet imagined, a condition alternative to current hegemonies of “racial capitalism” and global imperialism: when and where Black peoples can fully, freely, and expressively live.
Many of the music videos we have chosen for this collection show Black women’s embodiments and experiences of Blackness and Black Time. As such, we are able to focus on ways in which their agency produces particular forms of Black Time in the music video, as well as how the boundaries of the music video form itself are challenged in Black women’s work.
Work
First we chose music videos we enjoy or know. It was also important to us that we represent music and videos from outside of the U.S. because it is all too common for institutionally produced scholarship from the U.S. to remain insular in its selection of texts and creators. Our initial list was organized by nation, with the logic that different nations would produce different visual and sonic rhetorics. But it is less true with music videos than film that they operate within national studio systems. A chronological representation instead would provide those navigating this archival time-space opportunities to trace lineages and evolutions of the music video form. We cannot anticipate all the connections that might exist within this archive but hope that the methodologies we’ve chosen, given constraints of the format and our work time together shares and inspires engagement, enjoyment, and meaning-making across times and spaces
Form and Content: Against Closure
We have also hoped to produce here a counter-history of the media form we call “music video,” and a version of a counter-archive or activist-collecting. The works – as well as the distribution and randomization of types of commentary and citation connected to them – interrogate the nature, historicizing, and codification or premature “closure” of the form: music video. They also do not distinguish categorically, though perhaps they should, between music videos directed by women or which feature women artists we know had significant influence in their making and the formal elements, ideas, or political projects their music videos might circulate. The list extends back into the 20th century—so as not to negate earlier Black women’s sonics in film—and includes videos that have been shaped by the design and agency of the women who worked both in front of and behind the camera. The range is great for a 20-piece collection. We have included influential videos known for their presentation of Black women’s butts: Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” and Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious” engage directly with their audiences via on-screen bodies and an economics of sexual and racial consumption. Many of us enjoy these music videos while knowing too that they challenge a willing audience with pleasure, and the mixed histories of ownership and refusal, demand and supply, and long-standing prohibitions against looking, touching, and testifying that cannot be fully disarticulated from Black women’s sexual agency and performance.
Anachronistically, we chart Bessie Smith, who placed Black women’s blues right near the advent of sound film and, later, Lena Horne singing censored civil rights song “Now” as the soundtrack and sonic structure for Santiago Alvarez’s state-sponsored 1965 Cuban short, Now. Inclusion of this film provides a transnational and Third Worldist framework for understanding Black women’s (and especially Black American women’s) artistic and art-political projects as well as identities and networks; and their commitment to global struggle against racist imperialism. Bessie Smith herself reminds us to consider the apparatus and its functions before and as we commit it to the foreclosures of marketable “form.”
Reconsidering the music video as a “form” as in the example of Now above would be a massive undertaking; but the collection provides direction for exploring that possibility. It also demonstrates how Black women’s music videos should – and certainly could – productively perform this formal reworking. Shouldn’t Black women’s sonic-visual time be distinct? And wouldn’t there have to be a distinct invested form for holding or conveying – even fully accessing – women’s Black time?
In many of the videos, and particularly on many of the women featured in them, sounds’ and songs’ vibrations stick to spaces and bodies. At intersections and divergences of their visual frames, the bodies move in different times and spaces, alternative to the ones of progress and capitalism. Black female bodies here are particularly politicized, serving, producing, and often repudiating the broader economic frameworks of their productions; as music videos, and as Black women both. Singing, framing, and staging movement, the women’s bodies in these short, circulated and already referential hybrid entertainment forms, drag history into visuality, even if a viewer may not choose or know to apprehend. Sometimes this “drag” is significant as such; other times as a measure of their constant work; and often, the dragging is a slowness, belated, as queer theorists in particular have suggested.2
But such a Black women’s sound-body art comes early, multi-modally, and already spatially-dispersed too. And so we turn to themes of Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism, and beyond to chose our texts as well. We include films that embody Arthur Jafa’s work on “Black Visual Intonation” and play with affective rather than semantic communicability; videos that hum with imagery of the middle passage as a reflection of the musical break. And those that collapse past present and future temporalities upon one another toward a Black feminist ontology that is not a minor term in a dialectic, a but whole unto itself.
Origins and Structure
Our collaborative project emerged from our engagement with a constellation of texts, images, films, and theoretical conversations about Blackness, with a focus on epistemologies, ontologies, embodiment and expressive work on Blackness and time; and against the architectural biases of a white archival ecosystem. As a mode of thinking and working, we hoped to generate a bibliography that might disrupt the very archive from which it was sourced. Our product is a curated series of entries and annotations that might serve as a resource, example, and selective index containing the seeds of further exploration.
But the gaps in our inherently partial bibliography are more than accidental: they are fundamental to the operation of a formal economy that is reliant on images of Black women but which limits Black women’s directorial and critical contributions. Kara Keeling situates such an economy at the nexus of the political and cultural, where global financialization was spawned by imperialist legacies of the enlightenment and a history of racial capitalism. This control society relies heavily on affective labor to help economics dominate our imagination and possible futures. Its culture industry, therefore, supports the over-proliferation of music videos as a mass media form, yet the body of criticism regarding the way capital shapes the aesthetics and bloated volume of this form remains very limited.
By acknowledging and structuring the absences in our archive, we heed Keeling’s call for “interdisciplinary scholarship calibrated to address and address the changes wrought by financialization.”3 The archive’s silences raise questions about where we encounter the music video as a form—notably, on YouTube, and within the United States—and point to our own participation in this economy of brevity as graduate students who negotiate our desire to produce meaningful criticism with the pressures of teaching, course work, and other temporal-material constraints of the university system. Here is one explanation for why, although Nigeria is a leading producer of moving images, it is under-represented on our list.
Were we able to host a digital pathway through this bibliography and the music videos, the videos would serve as large nodes with smaller pieces of text, bits of sound or video, lists of references, all linked in various ways to the large nodes; and some pieces and linked also to each other. Multiple connections to critical sources and conversations both within and outside this piece would provide suggestions or directions for further encounters and research.
At one point, we also wished that the bibliography might connect to pieces across the special journal issue itself, and thereby serve as accompaniment and perhaps commentary or juxtaposition to what has been more properly identified as canonical or should-be-canonical works of Black women’s filmmaking and scholarship.
As a group, we considered thoughts in these two paragraphs above, in context of a broader conversation about digital archives, Black temporalities, and how Black futurisms and futures – particularly in time-based media – matter, endure, transform, and reach readers, listeners, and viewers. We also imagined what media forms and what kinds of intellectual and political actions and modes of embodiment might create more lasting and changeable archives and socio-political transformation.
As a group of film studies students from different disciplinary backgrounds, cultures, and countries—and as viewers of music videos in a Black Time class reading/looking for feminist and queer criticism and creative work—we are aware that our collection is still small compared to the quantity and breadth of music videos produced by or in careful consultation with Black women (in this case the musical artists). Our collection is small because we are also operating within the same economy as many of the artists we describe.
We chose Black women’s presence in music videos, as well as the videos produced to convey what we call Black music and Black women’s performances as unique forms for our investigations; as under-explored media in which Black women affect and often produce multiple aspects of these increasingly layered, often well-circulated art-adverts-communication-sound-films.
We are a grad seminar, negotiating our desire to produce meaningful criticism alongside pressures of teaching, course work, and other material constraints. For us too, then, this collection must be an act of critical fabulation, an Afrofuturist creative production for the future seeking possible pasts and constructing irruptive otherwise presents.
Critical Bibliographies of Music Videos
AFRICA |
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Nigeria |
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2021 |
Tiwa Savage, Tales By Moonlight (feat. Amaarae) Tiwa Savage’s video opens in a hazy Nigerian strip club as a shirtless bartender and scantily clad female dancers drift in and out of focus. The camera—sometimes slow, sometimes fast—pans up and down the mesmerized male patrons and the women’s hypersexualized bodies. Despite this ostensibly heteronormative dynamic, the aesthetic itself is inherently queer: gold, piercings and rings, opulent costumes, ceiling chains, neon signs, and kaleidoscopic lights. This queerness further intensifies in the textural array of sculpted, glistening muscles, sequins, silk, tulle, and leather. Then suddenly the setting changes. Tiwa—now wearing a haute couture black dress—stands in the middle of an empty road while, separately, two women sing and dance on top of a custom car. The video then proceeds to cut back and forth between the two scenes, as well as a third scene of those same women driving exuberantly down a highway. This editing produces a kind of temporal disunity that opens up a new, alternative space for the performance of Black femininity, one that is dislocated from—and yet still channeling the erotic insularity of—the strip club. Bibliography: Bobo, Jacqueline, ed. Black Women Film and Video Artists. New York: Routledge, 1998. Hobson, Janell. “Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 45–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004636. |
Democratic Republic of the Congo |
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2019 |
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| Zambia | |
2018 |
Sampa The Great, Energy (feat. Nadeem Din-Gabisi) Sampa the Great’s music video Energy breaks with the notion of temporal linearity, and transports the spectator to an undefined time. Energy refers to slavery, the Middle Passage, and the questions about origin. Through the camera framing, and the distribution of the bodies and their movements, the viewer witnesses the experience of slave ships. We also see how the bodies share the same sensations, especially through touch. Through the gaze, the director invites us to witness the dissolution of time limits, bringing the memories of slavery to the viewer’s present. Bibliography: In the Wake, Christina Sharpe Kenya |
2013 |
Wangechi Mutu’s Nguva was made as part of her Nguva na Nyoka exhibition at Victoria Miro gallery in London– an exhibition devoted to imagining alternative figurations of Black femininity as hybrids of aquatic life-forms, ranging from stingray to seashells. The intermingling with nonhuman life-forms suggest an ‘in-between’ state of becoming, that is all the more prominent in Nguva. In this video, Mutu returns to us again and again a haunting figure, somewhere between liquid and solid, who by her sheer presence makes the visual field oneiric. her screeching voice blends with the instrumental noises in the soundtrack, becoming one with them. Mutu’s unique use of filmic devices such as iris, elliptical dissolves, superimposition, and reverse motion renders the figure as a shapeshifting entity. The shots of the ocean and the liquid figure of the fantastic entity associate these sequences with the memory of the Middle Passage, and provokes a counter-memory where people lost in the ocean return as spectral hybrid figures, however their contorting bodies and screeching voices no longer conveys to us any transparent message, because they speak to us in the language of the ship, “the sounds of memory, the keens and howls and dirges unloosened on the deck” (Hartman 2008). Bibliography: Masaye. “Wangechi Mutu’s Mystical Sirens & Serpents In London.” okayafrica. 2012. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. |
Benin |
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1994 |
Motion and movement are not necessarily linked to the logic of capitalism and progress. Kidjo’s musical video, Agolo, presents bodies and CGI objects in motion. Visually, there is an insistence on the image of the circle and spiral. A metaphor of the continuity and nexus between spheres that common sense perceives as opposite: the human vs. the virtual and technological sphere, the material vs. the spiritual sphere. These blurry boundaries can be condensed in the humanoid body covered in golden clothes. |
LATIN AMERICA |
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Peru |
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2008 |
NOVALIMA’s song mixes the festejo and electronica genres. The video is set in the province of El Carmen, in the south of Peru. The Black body, no matter the space they inhabit, is going to be perceived as a “glitch” or an error, an “Other” in the “harmonious” construction of Western civilization. The bodies unfold, for instance, one body is walking while the same one is retracing its steps. Finally, women in this video are nearly nonexistent, only present as a phantasmatic voice or a body that dances. But it is this same female voice, the one who invites revolution by saying “Saca tu machete Cipriano, afila tu lampa José [Take out your machete Cipriano, sharpen your shovel José]”. Then, since dance and music are sites of resistance for Black communities, it raises the question on how looking for other epistemologies could reshape the present and the future. |
1978 |
Victoria Santa Cruz, Me gritaron ¡Negra! Me gritaron ¡Negra! takes the form of a song or spoken word poem featuring a call-and-response in which a chorus repeatedly chants ¡Negra! while Santa Cruz reflects on her own coming-of-age. She sings: “[M]e gritaron ¡Negra! … Y me sentí negra.” (“They called me black … and I felt black.”) These lyrics underscore the power of appellation in the shaping of subjective identity and the ways in which recursive rhetoric has both produced and reinforced the political, historical, and cultural positioning and otherization of black bodies in diasporic spaces. Bibliography (NOVALIMA and Victoria Santa Cruz): Gomez, Luis. Música criolla: Cultural Practices and National Issues in Modern Peru The case of Lima (1920–1960). 2010. Stony Brook University, PhD Dissertation. https://www.proquest.com/docview/862489810 Meza Chávez, Eric Sebastian. “Rohner, Fred (2017). Jarana. Origen de la música criolla en Lima. Munilibro, 16.” ISHRA, Revista del Instituto Seminario de Historia Rural Andina no. 4, 2020, pp. 101-102. https://revistasinvestigacion.unmsm.edu.pe/index.php/ishra/article/view/17630 |
Brazil |
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2023 |
Elza Soares, No Tempo da Intolerância |
2018 |
Liniker e os Caramelows, Calmô https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JiMPNBklSM The camera, which follows the protagonists as they travel through the jungle by motorcycle, is not intrusive either with the bodies of the young women or with nature itself. The video could be read as a commentary around the Western logic of progress. Instead of aspiring to the model of the metropolis and the necessity of developing complex technologies under the incentive of capitalist development, it is possible to think of ourselves in community and in relationship with nature. This, an alternative epistemology that singer Liniker incarnates herself, as a trans woman who lives in a homophobic and racist society such as Brazil. Puerto Rico |
2020 |
La Sista, AWIPIPIO (ft. Barry, Ñengo Flow & Joyce Santana) https://youtu.be/yINmWmQ4aOY?si=hFEvXxjQ1LIOWcj6 Song situated in an alternative present or future, where the Black bodies inhabit a space in ruins -product of the logic of progress, a reminiscence of the traumatic experience of Hurricane Maria in 2017, or a reference to the misconception that reggaeton is a “decadent” genre with repetitive rhythms and simple rhymes-. However, it is through music that the space in ruins transforms into a space of resistance. Through the vibrations, music sticks to the space and adheres into the Black bodies that inhabited this place, and transforms both body and architecture in political spaces and spaces of resistance. Finally, the act of singing and dancing is a communal experience, where bodies are not considered as one anymore, but they unfold. This unfolding, blurring of boundaries, and union of bodies occurs thanks to the vibrations and the experience of ecstasy and liberation that dance and music bring. All these topics, possible if we consider the political and critical stand of La Sista in reggaeton’s scene. Bibliography: Colón-León, Vimari. “Bomba: The Sound of Puerto Rico’s African Heritage.” General music today, 2021, Vol.34 (3), pp. 13-19. Allende-Goitia, Noel. Las músicas otras : Puerto Rico, el atlántico afrodiaspórico y otros ensayos de estudios culturales de la música. San Juan: Ediciones Clara Luz, 2014. Rivera-Rideau, Petra R. Remixing reggaetón : the cultural politics of race in Puerto Rico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. MoluscoTV. “‘Me cerraron puertas por Gorda, Negra y Fea’ La Sista destapa el género Urbano.” YouTube. January 30, 2023. Interview, 1:10:46. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZfsm7bmVaA De Jong, Nanette. The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean music. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. |
UNITED STATES |
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2022 |
Moor Mother, Temporal Control of Light Echoes Ghazal Majidi’s uncanny animation upends messianic time. A digitally rendered Moor Mother splays on a crucifix of thorns; sits in a romanesque church of floating, flickering, white-brown-gold bodies. “This place is a gathering of bones” intones the disembodied voice, as though time has always already ended. |
2020 |
Cardi B. (ft. Megan Thee Stallion), WAP Some might say this video temporarily broke the internet. It certainly sparked outrage in certain right wing talking heads and assorted religious leaders. Shamelessly showcasing their raw sexuality, penchant for style and ample assets, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion offer a visually pleasing spectacle in the form of this video. Heavy-laden with CGI, this video is bursting with color, prints, gorgeous architecture, endless hallways, exotic felines and reptiles, water fountain bosoms and impossible camera angles. Viewers are transported to a different world-one that is decidedly more exciting than the realm we are currently inhabiting. This video displays Black women who are very obviously unashamed of what their bodies are capable of doing and are encouraging other women to be proud of this as well. This is subversive for the simple fact that for years women and people with vaginas have been passively and actively given the message that vaginas are dirty, disgusting, and something to be deeply ashamed of and hidden away. As evident by the flowing water that is prevalent throughout this video, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are in no way ashamed of what their vaginas can do. This is phenomenal. |
2019 |
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2017 |
There is a usage of the cut in this music video, where the main musical track is suspended and is replaced by jazz. The speed notes of jazz go hand in hand with the violence of the scene presented to the spectator. The sexual assault of the female protagonist is represented as two dancing bodies with choreographed and measured movements, choreography that reminds the spectator the performativity and expectations that gendered and racialized bodies have in society. |
2016 |
Princess Nokia, Brujas (dir. Asli Baykal) Baykal and Princess Nokia let imagery of white-clad women in the sea wash together Black Native American, Cuban, New Yorker, and Yoruba identities. They show that any articulation of Blackness is already queer and transnational. Sweet Honey In The Rock, Breaths (dir. Julie Dash) The music video, directed by Julie Dash, opens with a series of naturalistic images (birds, feathers, incense, woodwork, wheat) and goes on to show a wide variety of textiles (layers, weaving, patterns, craftwork). These aesthetics are very much grounded in creative labor, ancestry, and the closeness of the human body to the earth. Names of the deceased, read between verses, gesture to the relationship between life and death—typically characterized as binary—here marked not by opposition but by continuity and proximity. “The dead are not under the earth,” they sing, “‘Tis the ancestors’ breath in the voice of the waters.” In this way the death of the body is not a loss or separation from the living, but rather a reconfiguration, a recycling of materials into new and immediate forms. This elision of life and death, past and present, here and there, presents a worldview that is spatially and temporally resilient to the many forms of violence historically enacted against black communities. |
2013 |
Janelle Monáe, Q.U.E.E.N (ft. Erykah Badu) “It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel.” Such is the dialogue that welcomes viewers into Janelle Monae’s futuristic music video for Q.U.E.E.N. This song (featuring Erykah Badu) and the video that accompanies it present an alternate time space where Janelle Monae is, initially, frozen, in an all-white museum. The significance of Janelle Monae’s being in an all-white archival space while rapping and singing about a struggle for freedom should not be lost on viewers. Monae pushes back against multiple systems of oppression all while presenting a stylish and rhythm infused vision of Black femme intersectionality. Q.U.E.E.N. is not only visually pleasing but also beckons viewers to seek out and examine freedom. |
2009 |
“Time to save the world, but where in the world is all the time?” Erykah Badu croons in the second verse of Didn’t Cha Know, a question that invites deeper probing into a song that may, at first glance, be a meditation on personal mistakes and love lost, a theme not unfamiliar to R&B. Read in tandem with the music video, however - in which Badu, clad in a pan-African influenced space suit and striding across a barren landscape suggestive to an alien planet - as well as the closing monologue (which falls in the similar genre as the outro of Janelle Monáe’s Q.U.E.E.N., upon which she features), inviting the listener to “take a ride of life with me…free your mind and find your way,” offers a revelatory understanding of the song as rich with contemplation on the liberation that exploring further into the unstable and uncharted recesses of Black time can provide; not just for Blackness as a whole but the Black woman in particular, so often called upon to “save the world” at the cost of her own liberation and identity. |
2001 |
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1975 |
Before Daughters of the Dust–her breakthrough feature film–Julie Dash had directed Four Women, a seven-and-a-half-minute-long short that combined Linda Martina Young’s performance with Nina Simone’s magnificent singing voice. It came about as a student film when Dash was attending graduate school at UCLA. Among other things, the film stylistically defamiliarizes Blackness by complicating the devices of visual identification. In the first brief segment, the soundtrack swarms with voices from the past. Sounds of drum-beats, whiplashes, and ocean-waves blend with screaming, sobbing, and howling in female voices, suggesting the sonics of the Middle Passage. On screen, a shrouded female figure (Young) writhes and rolls on a half-lit floor. This figure, at first indistinguishable as a silhouette, covered head to toe with a thin veil, gains a ‘visible’, ‘identifiable’ body, once Nina Simone starts singing. Mimicking Nina Simone’s performance, Lina Martina Young dances as four Black women of different backgrounds, indexing the diversity of experiences that in turn complicates the idea of Blackness. Although the song and choreography clearly separate the characters, by giving them individual attributes (names and costumes), the continuity of Young’s body and Simone’s voice prevents a clear separation. At the same time, the manner in which the dance is staged, against a dark background with splashes of rich red and yellow, the body itself manifests as a flickering, wavering, flame-like entity, not a fleshed-out, clear-cut classical figure as such. Dash’s rapid editing also cuts it into fragments, freezes it in the middle of a movement before dissolving to another gesture, or even to an undulating piece of fabric. Preventing any sort of comprehensive individuation and delineation, the film gestures at ‘otherwise possibilities’ (Crawley 2016) of Black femininity that resists hegemonic taxonomies of body, identity and gender. Bibliography: Amine, Laila. “Julie Dash’s Aesthetic Vision.” Black Camera 19, no. 2 (2004): 3–4. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27761638. Crawley, Ashon T.. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York, USA: Fordham University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823274574 |
1974 |
When considering space-centric music and music videos exploring the concept of Black as posthuman and possibly even extraterrestrial, Sun Ra and Parliament (particularly, the Mothership Connection) may be the first to come to mind. However, there were also female-led and visualized contributions to this era that should be acknowledged as utilizing both the aesthetic and the exploratory, disruptive perspective; most notably, LaBelle, a pioneering girl group whose line-up included Godmother of Soul Patti LaBelle and later Supreme Cindy Birdsong. Space Children, though offering the familiar groove and funk of their previous hits and sandwiched upon release with the more iconic Lady Marmalade, was a departure in its blatant theme of liberation, departure and life beyond the containment of earth for its receptive and predominantly Black audience. “Space children, universal lovers…check it out, greater stars in galaxies, check it out - and they’re waiting for you,” beckoned the lyrics, as LaBelle themselves performed in studded space suits and gestured upward toward the heavens. |
1959 |
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1944 |
When the US fought Fascism abroad, reconsidering domestic racial relations became a moral matter of disavowing Nazism and a practical matter of recruiting Black soldiers. As America arrived at the turning point, Black elites and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People backed the racial uplift ideology as the path to racial integration. Publications such as Ebony and Crisis painted the picture of a respectable Black middle class, which included the portrayal of their support of the war effort. Lena Horne, who had graced the cover of both magazines, embodied this social development with her stardom. Horne’s star image as a racially ambiguous songstress was different from the stereotypical screen depiction of Black femininity, and while she was deliberately raced by the media, her light skin and small features were subjected to the fantasy of racial integration. The video clip featured here is from the 1944 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical Broadway Rhythm. Though Lena Horne had at this point played leading roles in Cabin in the Sky (1943) and Stormy Weather (1943), she played a minor role in Broadway Rhythm because it was not a Black-cast picture like the two aforementioned films. What signified the plasticity of NAACP and the Office of War Information’s depiction of racial harmony the most was that film sets remained segregated, and so Horne’s performance was disconnected from these films. For this reason, this collection singles out Horne’s one of two songs in the film as a music video. The musical number Brazilian Boogie is performed by a Black-cast, and here, Horne’s racial ambiguity is exploited again to portray a Latin American setting. The mise-en-scéne is full of stereotypical “tribal” and “tropical” costumes and set design. Though Horne and other Black entertainers’ success in White-led entertainment industry were meant to show that upward mobility is possible within the existing status quo, her continual typecast as a (raced) songstress clashed with that image and her own real life political activism. |
1929 |
The only remaining footage of classic blues singer Bessie Smith situates Black women and their music in the early years of sound film. Smith reclines at the bar of a prohibition era speakeasy, a space that indexes the fugitivity of her being. |
Notes
- Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. ⮭
- Freeman, Elizabeth. Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Duke University Press, 2010. ⮭
- Keeling, Kara. “Queer times, Black futures.” In Queer Times, Black Futures. New York University Press, 2019: 20. ⮭
Further Readings
Amine, Laila. “Julie Dash’s Aesthetic Vision.” Black Camera 19, no. 2 (2004): 3–4. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27761638.http://www.jstor.org/stable/27761638
Bobo, Jacqueline, ed. Black Women Film and Video Artists. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Burton, Rachal. “Filming Social Death and the Fixed Position of Blackness: On L.A. Rebellion Director Julie Dash’s Four Women.” Black Camera 14, no. 2 (2023): 49-70. https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.05.https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.05
Dash, Julie. “Making Movies That Matter: A Conversation with Julie Dash.” Black Camera 22, no. 1 (2007): 4–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27761685.http://www.jstor.org/stable/27761685
Dee Das, Joanna, ‘Race and Representation During World War II’, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (New York, 2017; online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 Apr. 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190264871.003.0005https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190264871.003.0005
Feldstein, Ruth. “Screening Antiapartheid: Miriam Makeba, ‘Come Back, Africa,’ and the Transnational Circulation of Black Culture and Politics.” Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 12–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23719285.http://www.jstor.org/stable/23719285
Gomez, Luis. Música criolla: Cultural Practices and National Issues in Modern Peru The Case of Lima (1920–1960). 2010. Stony Brook University, PhD Dissertation. https://www.proquest.com/docview/862489810https://www.proquest.com/docview/862489810
Hartman, Andrea Wilbon. “The Evolution of Erykah Badu: From Musician to Third Wave Feminist?” Race, Gender & Class 18, no. 3/4 (2011): 238–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43496846.http://www.jstor.org/stable/43496846
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.
Hobson, Janell. “Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1/2 (2002): 45–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004636.http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004636
Ivins, Laura. “Images of Nostalgia in Julie Dash’s Music Video.” Establishing Shot. March 22, 2021. https://blogs.iu.edu/establishingshot/2021/03/22/images-of-nostalgia-in-julie-dashs-music-videos/https://blogs.iu.edu/establishingshot/2021/03/22/images-of-nostalgia-in-julie-dashs-music-videos/
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