In this edited volume, Kasi Lemmons, the first African-American woman auteur to solidly and steadily produce a full body of work in cinema―an oeuvre of quality, of note, of international recognition―will get the full film-studies treatment. This collection offers the first scholarly examination of Lemmons’ films through various frameworks of film theory, illuminating her highly personal, unique, and rare vision. In Lemmons’ worldview, the spiritual and the supernatural manifest in the natural, corporeal world. She subtly infuses her work with such images and narratives, owning her formalism, her modernist aesthetic, her cinematic preoccupations and her ontological leanings on race. Lemmons holds the varied experiences of African-American life before her lens―the ambitious bourgeoise, the spiritually lost, the ill and discarded, and the historically erased―and commits to capturing the nuances and differentiations, rather than perpetuating essentialized portrayals. This collection delves into Lemmons’ iconoclastic drive and post-soul aesthetic as emanations of her attitudes toward personal agency, social agency, and social justice.
Author(s): Dianah Wynter
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 136
City: Cham
Preface
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction
Works Cited
Chapter 2: “Some Illnesses Are Hard to Put a Finger on:” Race, Memory & Revision in Eve’s Bayou
Slavery’s Time
Reconstructing the Past
Mapping the Illness
Bayou’s Space
Works Cited
Chapter 3: The Caveman’s Valentine: Fight the Towers that Be
Who and Why?
Where and When?
Works cited
Chapter 4: Talk to Me: A Post-Soul Allegory
Works Cited
Chapter 5: Black Nativities: Transgressing Tradition
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Framing the Feminine: Harriet, Constructing Black Female Subjectivity and Agency
Framing the Feminine: The Analysis
Critical Frame: Employing Mulvey and hooks
The Gaze and Black Female Radical Subjectivity
Composition: Minty’s Authenticity and Revisioning
Looking Relations: Contestation and Interrogation
Her Gaze: Active Resistance
Her Faith: Active Resistance
Stepping Into Freedom: Constructing Black Female Subjectivity
Framing Her Gaze: Gideon or The Rushing River
Deep Space Composition: Stepping into Her Freedom Alone
Her Authenticity and Arrivals
In Her Own Voice
Her Freedom: Self in the Self
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 7: Conclusion: Lemmons and the Art of Post-Soul Resistance
Works Cited
Index
