Black Representation

Diese Arbeit widmet sich dem Black Independent Cinema, unter dessen Sparte das New Black Cinema mit Fokus auf Spike Lee verhandelt wird. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass die Thematisierung von alltäglichem und systematischem Rassismus sowie die Dekonstruktion von Stereotypen über Schwarze zur Emanzipation der black community und zur Aufklärung von white people massgebend ist, soll eruiert werden, wie das Thema Rassismus im zeitgenössischen Black Independent Cinema filmisch repräsentiert wird. Wie stellt Spike Lee die Schwierigkeiten von Schwarzen narrativ und ästhetisch dar und wie geht er produktionstechnisch dabei vor?

Representation Matters is an utterance that is often evoked to uncover the ways globalized anti-blackness constructs forms of exclusion within media and culture. The phrase acts as a kind of perceptible measure for the assumed racial progress of civil society, as the presence of black bodies in powerful positions attempts to serve as verification that the horrors of slavery and genocide are simply the unfortunate effects of past mistakes rather than an enduring legacy of gratuitous violence. My thesis plans on analyzing how the visibility of racialized and gendered bodies, especially those made visible for entertainment, are intertwined within the ontometaphysically violent process of obliterating the Other, particularly the black nonbeing. My analysis hopes to unveil representation as a fraudulent measure for progress and examine representation as an epistemological tool that employs rhetorical arguments designed to fortify the anti-black logic that maintains civil society.My thesis will focus on how black representation within American popular culture is implicated within the politics of the archive, a collection of historical records, iconography, and documents which provides an assumed public memory and intimate insight on the inner workings of a place, institution, or group of people within an event. In addition, I reflect on critical fabulation as an in(ter)vention of the archive and representation. The practice of reimagining the black social life challenges the Western Canon of the archive which relegates the genealogy of black feminist epistemology into zones of death. My thesis will compare these narratives to demonstrate the ontological violence of the archive then use the process of critical fabulation to explain the radical potential of telling stories of black life in events of social death.

Esta pesquisa propõe-se a contextualizar o gênero biográfico na história da literatura infantil, alinhando tais perspectivas ao cenário editorial brasileiro e discutindo questões relacionadas à representatividade do personagem negro nessas obras, especificamente à representatividade de Nelson Mandela. Para tanto, partimos de um levantamento de mercado do qual selecionamos e propomos a análise de quatro biografias de Nelson Mandela, produzidas entre 2003 e 2018, com base nos seguintes critérios: i) casa editorial; ii) projeto gráfico e ilustrações; e iii) voz enunciativa.  Nossa hipótese é de que as obras biográficas, quando direcionadas ao público infantil, tendem a ter uma perspectiva educativa. Ademais, busca-se compreender em que medida os aspectos gráficos e editoriais dos livros podem influenciar nos sentidos produzidos. Como fundamentação teórica são empregados os estudos de Pierre Bourdieu (1997; 2005; 2006; 2007; 2018), Marisa Lajolo e Regina Zilberman (2007), François Dosse (2015) e Stuart Hall (2016), além de obras complementares. Observa-se, por meio deste estudo, que o mercado editorial de livros infantis tem se apropriado da narrativa biográfica, de modo que a tendência aponta para o crescimento do gênero na modalidade. Na perspectiva da análise, percebemos que o protagonismo dos sujeitos negros é proporcionalmente menor ao concedido a personagens brancos, o que reforça a homogeneidade das representações literárias, embora haja movimentos e legislações que buscam dar espaço às produções africanas e afrodescendentes na literatura infantil. Por fim, nota-se que a representação tanto de Nelson Mandela quanto da própria África do Sul tende a ser baseada em percepções colonialistas quando elaboradas a partir da perspectiva do negrismo e, ainda, que de modo geral as obras biográficas acerca do personagem inclinam-se a selecionar certos aspectos da sua trajetória para tecer um relato de vida que possa ser utilizado como instrumento para a formação moral das crianças.

Part of Cornell Department of Architecture graduate student seminar Gastro•porn, a class-curated digital exhibition launched in May 2015. The full exhibition available online as funded and hosted by Cornell's College of Art, Architecture, and Planning (see the attached links to the entire exhibition as well as my essay where, in the latter, you will find links to the videos referenced in the article text available for download here).

The prevalent use of stereotypes for Black people in the comics medium has left little room for character and situational diversity. Many attempts to correct this have been made, and yet the problem still persists, with new obstacles being created along the way. This thesis focuses on improving representation of Black people in comics through the increase of Black characters in the created worlds of comics. It also identifies and analyzes the effects of ethnic recasting, cultural dilution, biracialism, and racial ambiguity on the progress in this area. The implementation of these concepts serves as a hindrance to Black representation. Therefore, only through an increase in the number of recognizably Black characters and stories with predominately Black casts will Black stereotypes fade and no longer be the prevailing representation of Black people in comics.

In the international expositions of Atlanta and Tennessee in 1895 and 1897 respectively, African Amercians were widely represented with the consense of the white supremacy. This work analyses the Negro Buildings and Expositions and the context of black and white recapitulation and positioning towards the expositions.

This paper aims to discuss race relations and power-building in Brazil. It is well known that the Iberian colonizers developed special ways of imposing their supremacy, dissimulating the skin color standards to provoke some type of beliefs about shade stratification among African descendents, indigenous and mixed-race people. For the first time in South America there are deconstructive projects of that colonial paradigm still alive and strongly embedded in the media landscape. However, new identity politics and attitudes have been emerging amidst this old social cognition. This paper will discuss some speculative thoughts and power-building scenarios on new representations and struggles derived from these lived forms that are emerging in the new racial formations in Latin America. The question is: what will nation-building in the midst of this changing imagery be like? This paper proposes that a civic pedagogy is the only answer to rendering this phenomenon visible.

Antes de iniciar os caminhos desse texto é importante limpar alguns conceitos para que os apontamentos e considerações tenham o mínimo de ruído possível, sobretudo no que se refere às ideias sobre "trauma colonial" e "grande trauma colonial" que surgirão associadas exclusivamente às dimensões de imagem e representação-ou seja: por trauma e grande trauma colonial me refiro à paradigmática ruptura que os sistemas brancos de dominação perpetuam entre as imagens negras antes e depois do processo escravagista. Assim, partir do momento em que não há como olhar para trás em busca de uma terra concreta que permita a íntegra reconstrução-diáspora-, o processo de "voltar a ser" pelas imagens é um paradoxal movimento de mover-se adiante. Caminhemos então.

Este artigo apresenta uma investigação das construções de masculinidades negras nas séries Atlanta (FX, 2016-atual) e Snowfall (FX, 2017-atual), em conexão com aspectos contextuais associados à construção de marca do canal FX. A FX começou a construir ativamente sua marca no início dos anos 2000, direcionando seus esforços para conquistar a audiência branca masculina. Mais recentemente, a empresa tem redirecionado este endereçamento, buscando ampliar seu público alvo. É nesse contexto que surgem as séries analisadas, ambas com personagens negros em posição de protagonismo. Partimos de dois tipos básicos de subjetividades feridas das masculinidades negras, propostos por bell hooks (2004) o ghetto gangsta-boy e o negro paradigmático para analisar os personagens Earn Marks e Franklin Saint. Nossos resultados indicam que ambos os personagens dialogam com a figura do negro paradigmático: sendo que em Atlanta a figura é aprofundada e deslocada com a complexificação da subjetividade do personagem, e em Snowfall é transformada, por meio de uma narrativa de amadurecimento.

This paper presents an investigation of black masculinity construction in the TV series
Atlanta (FX, 2016-current) and Snowfall (FX, 2017-current), in connection with contextual aspects associated with FX branding. FX began to build its brand in the early 2000, directing its efforts to capture the white male audience. More recently, the company has redirected this address, seeking to broaden its target audience. The series analyzed appeared in this context, both with black characters in a leading position. Based on two basic types of injured subjectivities of black masculinities, proposed by bell hooks (2004) ghetto gangsta-boy and the paradigmatic black man we analyze the characters Earn Marks and Franklyn Saint. Our results indicate that both characters relate to the paradigmatic black figure: in Atlanta, this figure is changed by a complex character construction and in Snowfall, this figure is transformed through a coming of age narrative.

Generally speaking, Hollywood cinema relies on a narrative form that panders to prevailing discursive ideas of race, gender and class in order to be ‘culturally intelligible’ and to create characters, plots and objects of representation that viewers can access with familiarity. The success of such objects of representation in eliciting a desired response from the viewer is firmly rooted in the ability of the film to construct objects that have an explicit relation to a hinterland of already existing myths and tropes, which allow the viewer to read such objects referentially. Vice versa, films can ‘play’ with this mechanic of referencing, provoking confusion and paradoxes through the construction of familiar objects that resist the rearticulation of myths and stereotypes. This essay aims to examine how race has historically been represented in Hollywood cinema in order to offer a critical analysis of the film ‘Precious’, with particular attention paid to the use of various stereotypes and myth in constructing a main character who elicits particular emotions from the audience. In examining how racial stereotypes embolden sizeist and classist ones, this essay will hopefully show how it is not simply a white-interpellated audience that is being pandered to, but also a middle-class one. With reference to how white-passing as both an identity and an act were represented and glorified in early Hollywood cinema, it will be argued that ‘Precious’ indeed presents whiteness as the salvation to Precious’ blackness, her lower-class status and her intersectional alterity. Finally, it will be considered to what extent one can read Precious as a figure who denies certain associations with racist myths.

Artists Carris Adams and Danny Giles converse with scholars Jenn M. Jackson and Jared Richardson on the stakes of white terror and its gaze. Drawing from histories of social justice, police brutality, and recent happenings in popular culture, these four individuals ponder the intersectional entanglement of optics and affect in the time of potential state collapse. Ultimately, this discussion elucidates how white spectatorship in politics and popular culture shapes terror and horror: two states of affect bolstered by race, politics of representation, and pandemic. Accordingly, these forces constitute Black life and its modes of entertainment. At a time in which the genre of Black horror is being increasingly codified by scholars and eagerly consumed by movie-goers, white terror has, once again, illustrated the lethal dynamics of looking and feeling.