Jamie A Rogers | Western Washington University (original) (raw)
Publications by Jamie A Rogers
Contemporary Literary Criticism Guide to Gale Literary Criticism Series For criticism on Consult these Gale series, 2023
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The Bloomsbury Handbook on Sofia Coppola. Ed. Suzanne Ferriss, Bloomsbury, expected January 2023, 2023
This chapter argues that an "absent-presence" of racial and ethnic difference in Sofia Coppola's ... more This chapter argues that an "absent-presence" of racial and ethnic difference in Sofia Coppola's feature films underline the existential angst among white bourgeois and upper-classes within rapidly changing worlds that is a signature of her work. The chapter shows that racial figures and metaphors are subtly deployed to signify disease , contagion, and encroachment of modern industrial decay within the superficial trappings of middle-and upper-class capitalism. Such characterizations mobilize a feminist critique of the damaging effects of patriarchal cultures of consumerism and spectacle, but it is a critique that is particular to non-raced, heteronormative characters who have access to at least some degree of leisure. From the absent-presence of race and class structures just off screen in early films like The Virgin Suicides (1999) to the upper class, multi-racial cast of characters in 2020's On the Rocks, race and class politics in Coppola's films remain within a framework of representation that is largely unreflective about its relationship to race and class struggle. As a result, the chapter concludes, the films' interrogations of white capitalist patriarchy end up by positioning white bourgeois heteronormativity as the universal perspective through which to critique the very structures of patriarchy that white bourgeois heteronormativity upholds.
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The Projector, 2021
A southern plantation house half-hidden by trees; an empty pool semi-obscured by the bars of a ga... more A southern plantation house half-hidden by trees; an empty pool semi-obscured by the bars of a gate; children leaning against yellowing stucco walls papered with posters advertising 40-ounce bottles of beer; these are among the images that mobilize affecting geographies of Blackness in RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) and Sophia Nahli Allison’s A Love Song for Latasha (2019). Affecting geography in film, as conceived in this article, refers to the manufacture and circulation of affect through evocation of associative relations between images of space, place, and time. Non-representational, associative strategies in Hale County This Morning, This Evening and A Love Song for Latasha produce an aesthetic of affect that works on and around the edges of racial and gender traumas — traumas that are attached to histories and memories held in the landscapes of South Central, Los Angeles and Hale County, Alabama. The films’ distinctive imagery and soundscapes depart from dominant media representations of these Black spaces, I conclude, disclosing geographies marked and demarcated by anti-Black structural conditions while also refusing to reduce Black life to them.
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Camera Obscura, 2020
This article traces the development of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics within the LA Rebellion, a... more This article traces the development of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics within the LA Rebellion, a film movement made up primarily of Black film students at UCLA from 1970 to the late 1980s. It argues that these aesthetics are integral to the movement’s heterogeneous but radical politics, even as the filmmakers express them through widely different means. The article focuses primarily on three films that span the final decade in which Rebellion filmmakers were active at UCLA: Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979), Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles (1989). Each of these films’ renderings of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics—through attention to African oral and mythical traditions, African and Pan-African-inflected mise-en-scène, rich col-oration and film stock, and play with nonlinear, nonteleological time—register at once the sedimented condition of patriarchal anti-Blackness in the United States and Black feminists’ ongoing projects of freedom that perdure within and despite that condition. In many ways, such representations anticipate contemporary Black feminist grapplings with recent Black studies scholarship that orbit around Afro-pessimist theories of Black ontology and social death. Through their expressions of Afrocentric feminist forms of communal, caring, and creative living, the films represent a form of Black social life that expresses value systems and ways of being that are incompatible with social death, even when they are inevitably moored within its ontological structure.
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Black Camera, 2020
This article conceptualizes “diasporic communion” as emerging from texts as sites in which intima... more This article conceptualizes “diasporic communion” as emerging from texts as sites in which intimate connections among historically scattered people are animated toward resistance through an examination of Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016) and its conversation with Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). The works’ intertextual exchange, I argue, activate transnational and transgenerational connections through layered citation of shared affective histories with the colonial encounter and slavery, and contemporary forms of anti-Black violence. Highlighting the ways in which place functions as a metaphoric marker of diasporic communion in each of the texts, the paper argues that landscape functions to both produce and extend geographic specificity through chains of referentiality. These chains of referentiality draw a complex map of African diasporic relations that do not rely on proximity, either temporal or spatial, in the creation of diasporic community, allowing for an inclusive and fluid theorization of the African diaspora, even while it is attentive to specificity of experience. Such works invite or encourage audiences to link their own diasporic experiences through them, the article concludes, which both cultivates discursive relationships and participates in the creation of living Black archives that are otherwise historically marked by absence.
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A Feel for the Text: Affect Theory and Literary Cultural Practice, 2019
This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late ... more This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Rogers contributes to the development of a genealogy of affect theory that is attentive to these antecedents in Black feminist thought, exposing the under-acknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, and expanding the ways in which affect theory typically is situated in intellectual histories as growing out of late 1990s queer theory, on the one hand, and debates around poststructuralism, on the other. The discussion highlights works by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison, arguing that they not only offer compelling commentary on the function of affect as political labor, but also are themselves powerfully affecting, producing “affective flights” that structure the different realities in which subjects live.
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A Cuban Cinema Companion, eds. Sean O’Reilly, Salvador Murguia, and Amanda Eaton , 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A Cuban Cinema Companion, eds. Sean O’Reilly, Salvador Murguia, and Amanda Eaton , 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A Cuban Cinema Companion, eds. Sean O’Reilly, Salvador Murguia, and Amanda Eaton , 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Talks by Jamie A Rogers
Abstract This paper argues that Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began develo... more Abstract
This paper argues that Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground intersectional racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Focusing on Jordan’s unpublished novel, Okay Now, and unpublished manual on land reform, the paper argues that Jordan’s work offers interrogations of affective relations with built and natural environment that prefigure the contemporary “affective turn” in critical theory. Such an argument serves, in part, as an exposition of the underacknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, as well as an introduction to nascent Black feminist ecocriticism.
Rational
By focusing on Jordan’s work and the U.S. South, this paper unveils the intersection between historical trauma, land and environment, and contemporary psychological damage related to what Saidiya Hartman and others have termed the “afterlife of slavery.” At the same time, it outlines the ways in which anti-Black structures of domination contribute to the continual, conspicuous under-citing of Black feminists’ contributions within the narrative of the genealogy of affect theory (with Jennifer C. Nash’s “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love Politics, and Post-Intersectionality” being one notable exception). This, despite clear evidence of the influence such work has had on affect studies, and shared anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-heteronormative orientation among these feminists and many affect theorists.
Two underlying concerns prompt my investment in the re-drawing of an intellectual history of affect theory that highlights Black feminism: One is that the under-citation of such scholarship in disciplinary discourses presumably not directly related to race and/or gender studies is a product of the relegation of intersectional study to niche fields. And, two, is this under-citation’s relationship to general historiographies that have, in large part, evacuated the Black female subject as a fully constituted, historical, and social human being. By centering the emergence of an articulated theory of affect within a Black feminist tradition, I emphasize the ways in which this persistent presence of absence in histories of intellectual traditions can be understood as a continuum of the absences that haunt historiography, even “40 Years After Combahee,” as the 2017 NWSA Annual Conference is aptly titled.
Works Cited
Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Jordan, June. Okay Now, boxes 49.5-50.4, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, 1975, 1977, 1996.
Jordan, June. More Than Enough, boxes 49.8 and 75.8, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard, 1970, 1971.
Nash, Jennifer C. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians. 11.2 (2011): 1-24.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this paper, I articulate a theory of political self-making developed in certain films and film... more In this paper, I articulate a theory of political self-making developed in certain films and filmmaking practices of the post-Civil Rights era “L.A. Rebellion” film movement. While films identified with this movement offer images and narratives of radical resistance, I argue that many also position Black struggle as exceeding the limits of radicality and militancy. I specifically examine the cinematic language of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978), Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979), and Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), which exposes struggle as the very condition of Black life in the United States, rendering everyday acts as acts of resistance. These films echo what Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began to posit during the same time period: That everyday acts of enduring are acts of great courage, that loving Blackness in a culture based on anti-Black hate is radical, and that conscious cultivation of and caring for alternatives to that hate — self-love, self-care, self-valuation — is part of a dynamic and active political process.
As such, I argue that these films and the community-based, independent filmmaking practices that developed around them offer a radical political philosophy that challenges traditional “event” theories of revolution, emphasizing instead the quotidian and the quiet, the communal and the affective as forms of political life. Each film, for example, utilizes the long take to repeatedly focus on images signifying self-possession and communal self-worth — the lingering close-up of a woman, alone and unafraid, of estranged friends meeting one another’s eyes once again, of one hand gently touching another. Such imagery is especially salient in the U.S. today in the face of both reinvigorated anti-Black violence and Black movements for social justice. As movements such as Black Lives Matter, for example, gain momentum and increase their militancy, I argue that a politics of self-love such as that expressed in these films is all the more necessary for their survival.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Arguing that cinema is a site of struggle, this paper looks to Cuban filmmakers whose engagement ... more Arguing that cinema is a site of struggle, this paper looks to Cuban filmmakers whose engagement with Cuba’s revolutionary project is as committed as it is vexed. Nicolás Guillén Landrián and Sara Gomez are both among Cuba’s few directors of African descent, and Gomez was the first (and, again, one of the only) woman directors of a feature-length film. While both directors supported Cuba’s socialist revolutionary project, they were also critical of its failures to adequately address racialized cultural and institutional practices that continued to haunt the revolution. Gomez’s work, however, was valorized by Cuban and international critics alike for its exploration of the tensions produced by the continuation of machista culture, and for its sensitive attention to Afrocuban folk heritage, and often was mobilized within official party politics. Guillén’s work, on the other hand, was heavily censored, and he himself was repeatedly jailed and institutionalized, accused of anti-revolutionary sentiment in his frank representations of post-1959 racial marginalization. Specifically concentrating on the two filmmakers’ seminal works, Guillén’s Coffea Arábiga (1968) and Gomez’s De cierta manera (1974), this paper examines each film’s experimental form, their receptions, and the different ways in which each filmmaker subsequently was written into the history of Cuba’s revolutionary figures.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
“Self-Invention and the Radical Leap in Revolutionary Grenada” examines representations of memory... more “Self-Invention and the Radical Leap in Revolutionary Grenada” examines representations of memory, suicide, and the queer diaspora in novels by Dionne Brand and Merle Collins and in video installations by Steve McQueen. Through explorations of alternative world-making possibilities, Brand and Collins’ novels about the fall of the Grenadian Revolution point at once to the limits and the potentials of affective, autonomous community building and of radical revolutionary praxis in a fundamentally anti-Black world. Their representations of the sudden and shocking internal collapse of the revolution in 1983, followed quickly by a U.S. invasion of the island, confront the historical continuity of colonialism and slavery within contemporary imperialist geopolitical configurations. McQueen’s video installation, Carib’s Leap/Western Deep (2002), further interrogates the ways in which this historical continuity shapes spaces of intimate, everyday living and public acts of radicality in the present. Structured around various hauntings that are symbolic of the “absent presence” of Black histories, the novels and the videos represent revolution and/or resistance as a catalyst for what Brand has called the process of “unforgetting” traumas that underlie African diasporic subjectivity. At the same time, the works refuse revolutionary paradigms that can easily be named in advance, interrogating multiple forms of resistance, some unsettling, that “leap” into creative self-possession and self-making without shirking from the physical and psychic toll such a leap might take.
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CFPs by Jamie A Rogers
Black Camera, 2024
Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up on the late Afrocuban filmmaker Sara Gómez. A sta... more Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up on the late Afrocuban filmmaker Sara Gómez. A staunch revolutionary and a firm believer in the role of art in shaping a new Cuba, Gómez was committed to making film (and revolution more generally) that at once celebrated and critiqued the revolutionary process; that documented the revolution's unfolding and contributed to its formation. Gómez was one of only three Black filmmakers and the only woman filmmaker-working in the Instituto Cubana del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. This frequently cited biographical note points in many ways to the limits of the Revolution's commitments to race and gender struggle, and it is those limits that form the starting point for much of Gómez's body of work. This Close-Up takes the fiftieth anniversary of her untimely death in 1974, as well as the recent digitization of her documentary work and only feature film, De cierta manera (1977), as the occasion to revisit Gómez's contributions to Cuban, Latin American, and women's filmmaking and to the history of revolution.
Much of the scholarship on Gómez's work circles around her posthumously released De cierta manera. Formally innovative and politically provocative, the film is a testament to Gómez's humor and sensitivity. Her documentary work is no less aesthetically innovative and politically charged. Gómez drew from her training in ethnography and musicology to layer landscapes, soundscapes and human interactions in ways that subtly draw connections between the past and the present, while also pointing to potential futures. Her work is often described as crucial to (Black and women's) Cuban and Latin American film history. Ironically, the corpus of work as a whole did not receive the critical attention it merited during her lifetime. As Susan Lord points out, this is in part because very little of her work was readily available for viewing. The parenthetical quality of the adjectives "Black" and "women's" is, perhaps, an indicator of the contradictory critical responses to her work. While she was praised in Cuba and abroad for her insight and innovation (especially after her death), her work was also criticized for the challenges it posed to key political projects. Several of her films were denied release during her lifetime, and ultimately sat deteriorating for decades in poorly controlled archival conditions.
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Drafts by Jamie A Rogers
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Papers by Jamie A Rogers
Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice, 2019
This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late ... more This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Rogers contributes to the development of a genealogy of affect theory that is attentive to these antecedents in Black feminist thought, exposing the under-acknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, and expanding the ways in which affect theory typically is situated in intellectual histories as growing out of late 1990s queer theory, on the one hand, and debates around poststructuralism, on the other. The discussion highlights works by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison, arguing that they not only offer compelling commentary on the function of affect as political labor, but also are themselves powerfully affecting, producing “affective flights” that structure the different realities in which subjects live.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Black Camera, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this paper, I articulate a theory of political self-making developed in certain films and film... more In this paper, I articulate a theory of political self-making developed in certain films and filmmaking practices of the post-Civil Rights era “L.A. Rebellion” film movement. While films identified with this movement offer images and narratives of radical resistance, I argue that many also position Black struggle as exceeding the limits of radicality and militancy. I specifically examine the cinematic language of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978), Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979), and Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), which exposes struggle as the very condition of Black life in the United States, and renders everyday acts as acts of resistance. These films echo what Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began to posit during the same time period: That everyday acts of enduring are acts of great courage, that loving Blackness in a culture based on anti-Black hate is radical, and that conscious cultivation of and caring for alternatives to that hate ...
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JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2020
Contingent laborers cannot afford to perform the unpaid labor demanded of academics for work such... more Contingent laborers cannot afford to perform the unpaid labor demanded of academics for work such as this.
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Contemporary Literary Criticism Guide to Gale Literary Criticism Series For criticism on Consult these Gale series, 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Bloomsbury Handbook on Sofia Coppola. Ed. Suzanne Ferriss, Bloomsbury, expected January 2023, 2023
This chapter argues that an "absent-presence" of racial and ethnic difference in Sofia Coppola's ... more This chapter argues that an "absent-presence" of racial and ethnic difference in Sofia Coppola's feature films underline the existential angst among white bourgeois and upper-classes within rapidly changing worlds that is a signature of her work. The chapter shows that racial figures and metaphors are subtly deployed to signify disease , contagion, and encroachment of modern industrial decay within the superficial trappings of middle-and upper-class capitalism. Such characterizations mobilize a feminist critique of the damaging effects of patriarchal cultures of consumerism and spectacle, but it is a critique that is particular to non-raced, heteronormative characters who have access to at least some degree of leisure. From the absent-presence of race and class structures just off screen in early films like The Virgin Suicides (1999) to the upper class, multi-racial cast of characters in 2020's On the Rocks, race and class politics in Coppola's films remain within a framework of representation that is largely unreflective about its relationship to race and class struggle. As a result, the chapter concludes, the films' interrogations of white capitalist patriarchy end up by positioning white bourgeois heteronormativity as the universal perspective through which to critique the very structures of patriarchy that white bourgeois heteronormativity upholds.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Projector, 2021
A southern plantation house half-hidden by trees; an empty pool semi-obscured by the bars of a ga... more A southern plantation house half-hidden by trees; an empty pool semi-obscured by the bars of a gate; children leaning against yellowing stucco walls papered with posters advertising 40-ounce bottles of beer; these are among the images that mobilize affecting geographies of Blackness in RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) and Sophia Nahli Allison’s A Love Song for Latasha (2019). Affecting geography in film, as conceived in this article, refers to the manufacture and circulation of affect through evocation of associative relations between images of space, place, and time. Non-representational, associative strategies in Hale County This Morning, This Evening and A Love Song for Latasha produce an aesthetic of affect that works on and around the edges of racial and gender traumas — traumas that are attached to histories and memories held in the landscapes of South Central, Los Angeles and Hale County, Alabama. The films’ distinctive imagery and soundscapes depart from dominant media representations of these Black spaces, I conclude, disclosing geographies marked and demarcated by anti-Black structural conditions while also refusing to reduce Black life to them.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Camera Obscura, 2020
This article traces the development of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics within the LA Rebellion, a... more This article traces the development of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics within the LA Rebellion, a film movement made up primarily of Black film students at UCLA from 1970 to the late 1980s. It argues that these aesthetics are integral to the movement’s heterogeneous but radical politics, even as the filmmakers express them through widely different means. The article focuses primarily on three films that span the final decade in which Rebellion filmmakers were active at UCLA: Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979), Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles (1989). Each of these films’ renderings of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics—through attention to African oral and mythical traditions, African and Pan-African-inflected mise-en-scène, rich col-oration and film stock, and play with nonlinear, nonteleological time—register at once the sedimented condition of patriarchal anti-Blackness in the United States and Black feminists’ ongoing projects of freedom that perdure within and despite that condition. In many ways, such representations anticipate contemporary Black feminist grapplings with recent Black studies scholarship that orbit around Afro-pessimist theories of Black ontology and social death. Through their expressions of Afrocentric feminist forms of communal, caring, and creative living, the films represent a form of Black social life that expresses value systems and ways of being that are incompatible with social death, even when they are inevitably moored within its ontological structure.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Black Camera, 2020
This article conceptualizes “diasporic communion” as emerging from texts as sites in which intima... more This article conceptualizes “diasporic communion” as emerging from texts as sites in which intimate connections among historically scattered people are animated toward resistance through an examination of Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016) and its conversation with Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). The works’ intertextual exchange, I argue, activate transnational and transgenerational connections through layered citation of shared affective histories with the colonial encounter and slavery, and contemporary forms of anti-Black violence. Highlighting the ways in which place functions as a metaphoric marker of diasporic communion in each of the texts, the paper argues that landscape functions to both produce and extend geographic specificity through chains of referentiality. These chains of referentiality draw a complex map of African diasporic relations that do not rely on proximity, either temporal or spatial, in the creation of diasporic community, allowing for an inclusive and fluid theorization of the African diaspora, even while it is attentive to specificity of experience. Such works invite or encourage audiences to link their own diasporic experiences through them, the article concludes, which both cultivates discursive relationships and participates in the creation of living Black archives that are otherwise historically marked by absence.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A Feel for the Text: Affect Theory and Literary Cultural Practice, 2019
This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late ... more This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Rogers contributes to the development of a genealogy of affect theory that is attentive to these antecedents in Black feminist thought, exposing the under-acknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, and expanding the ways in which affect theory typically is situated in intellectual histories as growing out of late 1990s queer theory, on the one hand, and debates around poststructuralism, on the other. The discussion highlights works by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison, arguing that they not only offer compelling commentary on the function of affect as political labor, but also are themselves powerfully affecting, producing “affective flights” that structure the different realities in which subjects live.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A Cuban Cinema Companion, eds. Sean O’Reilly, Salvador Murguia, and Amanda Eaton , 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A Cuban Cinema Companion, eds. Sean O’Reilly, Salvador Murguia, and Amanda Eaton , 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A Cuban Cinema Companion, eds. Sean O’Reilly, Salvador Murguia, and Amanda Eaton , 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Abstract This paper argues that Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began develo... more Abstract
This paper argues that Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground intersectional racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Focusing on Jordan’s unpublished novel, Okay Now, and unpublished manual on land reform, the paper argues that Jordan’s work offers interrogations of affective relations with built and natural environment that prefigure the contemporary “affective turn” in critical theory. Such an argument serves, in part, as an exposition of the underacknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, as well as an introduction to nascent Black feminist ecocriticism.
Rational
By focusing on Jordan’s work and the U.S. South, this paper unveils the intersection between historical trauma, land and environment, and contemporary psychological damage related to what Saidiya Hartman and others have termed the “afterlife of slavery.” At the same time, it outlines the ways in which anti-Black structures of domination contribute to the continual, conspicuous under-citing of Black feminists’ contributions within the narrative of the genealogy of affect theory (with Jennifer C. Nash’s “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love Politics, and Post-Intersectionality” being one notable exception). This, despite clear evidence of the influence such work has had on affect studies, and shared anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-heteronormative orientation among these feminists and many affect theorists.
Two underlying concerns prompt my investment in the re-drawing of an intellectual history of affect theory that highlights Black feminism: One is that the under-citation of such scholarship in disciplinary discourses presumably not directly related to race and/or gender studies is a product of the relegation of intersectional study to niche fields. And, two, is this under-citation’s relationship to general historiographies that have, in large part, evacuated the Black female subject as a fully constituted, historical, and social human being. By centering the emergence of an articulated theory of affect within a Black feminist tradition, I emphasize the ways in which this persistent presence of absence in histories of intellectual traditions can be understood as a continuum of the absences that haunt historiography, even “40 Years After Combahee,” as the 2017 NWSA Annual Conference is aptly titled.
Works Cited
Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Jordan, June. Okay Now, boxes 49.5-50.4, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, 1975, 1977, 1996.
Jordan, June. More Than Enough, boxes 49.8 and 75.8, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard, 1970, 1971.
Nash, Jennifer C. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians. 11.2 (2011): 1-24.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this paper, I articulate a theory of political self-making developed in certain films and film... more In this paper, I articulate a theory of political self-making developed in certain films and filmmaking practices of the post-Civil Rights era “L.A. Rebellion” film movement. While films identified with this movement offer images and narratives of radical resistance, I argue that many also position Black struggle as exceeding the limits of radicality and militancy. I specifically examine the cinematic language of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978), Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979), and Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), which exposes struggle as the very condition of Black life in the United States, rendering everyday acts as acts of resistance. These films echo what Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began to posit during the same time period: That everyday acts of enduring are acts of great courage, that loving Blackness in a culture based on anti-Black hate is radical, and that conscious cultivation of and caring for alternatives to that hate — self-love, self-care, self-valuation — is part of a dynamic and active political process.
As such, I argue that these films and the community-based, independent filmmaking practices that developed around them offer a radical political philosophy that challenges traditional “event” theories of revolution, emphasizing instead the quotidian and the quiet, the communal and the affective as forms of political life. Each film, for example, utilizes the long take to repeatedly focus on images signifying self-possession and communal self-worth — the lingering close-up of a woman, alone and unafraid, of estranged friends meeting one another’s eyes once again, of one hand gently touching another. Such imagery is especially salient in the U.S. today in the face of both reinvigorated anti-Black violence and Black movements for social justice. As movements such as Black Lives Matter, for example, gain momentum and increase their militancy, I argue that a politics of self-love such as that expressed in these films is all the more necessary for their survival.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Arguing that cinema is a site of struggle, this paper looks to Cuban filmmakers whose engagement ... more Arguing that cinema is a site of struggle, this paper looks to Cuban filmmakers whose engagement with Cuba’s revolutionary project is as committed as it is vexed. Nicolás Guillén Landrián and Sara Gomez are both among Cuba’s few directors of African descent, and Gomez was the first (and, again, one of the only) woman directors of a feature-length film. While both directors supported Cuba’s socialist revolutionary project, they were also critical of its failures to adequately address racialized cultural and institutional practices that continued to haunt the revolution. Gomez’s work, however, was valorized by Cuban and international critics alike for its exploration of the tensions produced by the continuation of machista culture, and for its sensitive attention to Afrocuban folk heritage, and often was mobilized within official party politics. Guillén’s work, on the other hand, was heavily censored, and he himself was repeatedly jailed and institutionalized, accused of anti-revolutionary sentiment in his frank representations of post-1959 racial marginalization. Specifically concentrating on the two filmmakers’ seminal works, Guillén’s Coffea Arábiga (1968) and Gomez’s De cierta manera (1974), this paper examines each film’s experimental form, their receptions, and the different ways in which each filmmaker subsequently was written into the history of Cuba’s revolutionary figures.
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“Self-Invention and the Radical Leap in Revolutionary Grenada” examines representations of memory... more “Self-Invention and the Radical Leap in Revolutionary Grenada” examines representations of memory, suicide, and the queer diaspora in novels by Dionne Brand and Merle Collins and in video installations by Steve McQueen. Through explorations of alternative world-making possibilities, Brand and Collins’ novels about the fall of the Grenadian Revolution point at once to the limits and the potentials of affective, autonomous community building and of radical revolutionary praxis in a fundamentally anti-Black world. Their representations of the sudden and shocking internal collapse of the revolution in 1983, followed quickly by a U.S. invasion of the island, confront the historical continuity of colonialism and slavery within contemporary imperialist geopolitical configurations. McQueen’s video installation, Carib’s Leap/Western Deep (2002), further interrogates the ways in which this historical continuity shapes spaces of intimate, everyday living and public acts of radicality in the present. Structured around various hauntings that are symbolic of the “absent presence” of Black histories, the novels and the videos represent revolution and/or resistance as a catalyst for what Brand has called the process of “unforgetting” traumas that underlie African diasporic subjectivity. At the same time, the works refuse revolutionary paradigms that can easily be named in advance, interrogating multiple forms of resistance, some unsettling, that “leap” into creative self-possession and self-making without shirking from the physical and psychic toll such a leap might take.
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Black Camera, 2024
Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up on the late Afrocuban filmmaker Sara Gómez. A sta... more Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up on the late Afrocuban filmmaker Sara Gómez. A staunch revolutionary and a firm believer in the role of art in shaping a new Cuba, Gómez was committed to making film (and revolution more generally) that at once celebrated and critiqued the revolutionary process; that documented the revolution's unfolding and contributed to its formation. Gómez was one of only three Black filmmakers and the only woman filmmaker-working in the Instituto Cubana del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. This frequently cited biographical note points in many ways to the limits of the Revolution's commitments to race and gender struggle, and it is those limits that form the starting point for much of Gómez's body of work. This Close-Up takes the fiftieth anniversary of her untimely death in 1974, as well as the recent digitization of her documentary work and only feature film, De cierta manera (1977), as the occasion to revisit Gómez's contributions to Cuban, Latin American, and women's filmmaking and to the history of revolution.
Much of the scholarship on Gómez's work circles around her posthumously released De cierta manera. Formally innovative and politically provocative, the film is a testament to Gómez's humor and sensitivity. Her documentary work is no less aesthetically innovative and politically charged. Gómez drew from her training in ethnography and musicology to layer landscapes, soundscapes and human interactions in ways that subtly draw connections between the past and the present, while also pointing to potential futures. Her work is often described as crucial to (Black and women's) Cuban and Latin American film history. Ironically, the corpus of work as a whole did not receive the critical attention it merited during her lifetime. As Susan Lord points out, this is in part because very little of her work was readily available for viewing. The parenthetical quality of the adjectives "Black" and "women's" is, perhaps, an indicator of the contradictory critical responses to her work. While she was praised in Cuba and abroad for her insight and innovation (especially after her death), her work was also criticized for the challenges it posed to key political projects. Several of her films were denied release during her lifetime, and ultimately sat deteriorating for decades in poorly controlled archival conditions.
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Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice, 2019
This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late ... more This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Rogers contributes to the development of a genealogy of affect theory that is attentive to these antecedents in Black feminist thought, exposing the under-acknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, and expanding the ways in which affect theory typically is situated in intellectual histories as growing out of late 1990s queer theory, on the one hand, and debates around poststructuralism, on the other. The discussion highlights works by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison, arguing that they not only offer compelling commentary on the function of affect as political labor, but also are themselves powerfully affecting, producing “affective flights” that structure the different realities in which subjects live.
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Black Camera, 2020
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In this paper, I articulate a theory of political self-making developed in certain films and film... more In this paper, I articulate a theory of political self-making developed in certain films and filmmaking practices of the post-Civil Rights era “L.A. Rebellion” film movement. While films identified with this movement offer images and narratives of radical resistance, I argue that many also position Black struggle as exceeding the limits of radicality and militancy. I specifically examine the cinematic language of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978), Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979), and Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), which exposes struggle as the very condition of Black life in the United States, and renders everyday acts as acts of resistance. These films echo what Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began to posit during the same time period: That everyday acts of enduring are acts of great courage, that loving Blackness in a culture based on anti-Black hate is radical, and that conscious cultivation of and caring for alternatives to that hate ...
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JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2020
Contingent laborers cannot afford to perform the unpaid labor demanded of academics for work such... more Contingent laborers cannot afford to perform the unpaid labor demanded of academics for work such as this.
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