Haile Gerima’s Black Radical Tradition On Screen: African Cinema of Liberation at Home and Abroad

Black Camera invites submissions for a special issue or section of a future issue devoted to Haile Gerima’s Black Radical Tradition On Screen: African Cinema of Liberation at Home and Abroad.

A revolutionary figure in the area of continental African cinema and Pan-African black independent film, Haile Gerima has written, produced, and directed an extensive and undoubtedly extraordinary body of work. Over ten major features and shorts constitute his corpus to date, not to mention a number of works in progress. Yet critical engagement with this screen work is perhaps surprisingly scarce, and the politics of such film criticism continues to fall quite short of the great radicalism of filmmakers in the pioneering tradition Gerima historically shares with Ousmane Sembène and Med Hondo. This apparent deficit belies the plethora of elite international prizes awarded to Harvest 3000 Years (1976) several decades ago and Teza (2009) most recently, for example, as well as the tremendous grassroots community support for the absolute cinematic phenomenon of Sankofa (1993). What’s more, his making of films set in Watts or black ghettos and communities in Afro-North America as well as Ethiopia has troubled a film criticism committed less to Pan-Africanism or “African Unity” and more to “the pitfalls of national consciousness” (as outlined by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth) or bourgeois state boundaries originally imposed and continuously policed by Western European imperialism. Nonetheless, this special issue of Black Camera shall focus on the cinematic cultural-political work of Haile Gerima—a Global African filmmaker of the Black Radical Tradition who writes, produces, directs, and even distributes films from his base, Sankofa Video, Books & Café, on Georgia Avenue in Washington, D.C., where he also teaches at Howard University.

The editor thus seeks critical essays as well as various kinds of creative compositions on this subject. Some possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to, the following: Haile Gerima and auteur cinema; Haile Gerima’s independent cinema; Hollywood and beyond; Haile Gerima and African cinema; Haile Gerima’s “Triangular Cinema”; the Los Angeles school; early Haile Gerima films; Haile Gerima shorts; Haile Gerima and experimental film; new interpretative takes on Sankofa; individual and comparative analyses of assorted films; Shirikiana Aina’s Through the Door of No Return; the Maroon Project; Gerima, Sembène, and Hondo; political heresy; feudalism, colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism; Haile Gerima’s ideological influences: Fanon, Malcolm X, Che, George Jackson, Cabral; Haile Gerima and Haile Selassie; scriptwriting; Haile Gerima and teaching; production, exhibition, distribution, and/or reception; Haile Gerima and the economics of filmmaking; Sankofa as a phenomenon or virtual movement; the space of Sankofa Video, Books & Café; Haile Gerima in essays; Haile Gerima interviews and interventions; the cinematic language of Haile Gerima; Haile Gerima and questions of genre; Haile Gerima in Europe; black women in Haile Gerima’s films; political imprisonment; the Battle of Adwa; maroonage; violence and resistance in Haile Gerima’s films; Haile Gerima and continental Africa; Haile Gerima and the African diaspora; transcending national and regional divides; sexual politics in Haile Gerima’s cinema; transcending gender; Haile Gerima and Pan-Africanism; Haile Gerima and the Black Radical Tradition.

Please e-mail inquiries or abstracts (100 words), submissions (10,000 words, maximum), and biographies (50 words) to Greg Thomas at both gthomas@syr.edu and eshu69@yahoo.com. All written work should be in Microsoft Word and use the latest edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. (See Black Camera’s website for specific journal guidelines: http://www.indiana.edu/~bfca/publication/blackcamera_contribute.shtml.) Complete essays and other types of submissions are due by May 31, 2012.