Hip-hop Cinema

Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up focusing on hip-hop cinema. Cinema is an underutilized medium for critically engaging how hip-hop sonically and visually experiments with memory, music, and identity to articulate a post–civil rights Black experience. Where earlier representations of hip-hop cinema (such as the Breaking films and Wild Style [dir. Charlie Ahearn, 1983]) focused on documenting its elemental aesthetics, or conceptualizing contemporary black agency and protest (such as the “hood” film era of the early and mid-1990s), there is still room to consider how hip-hop cinema stands as a curator of race, identity, and performance in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This call for submissions looks to break new ground in identifying how film helps visualize and navigate hiphop’s increasingly ambiguous intersections of race, identity, and commercial appeal. In other words, how does hip-hop cinema redress and/or link critical depictions of Blackness in the past, present, and future?

The guest editor invites essays from multiple disciplines, aesthetic inquiries, and theoretical perspectives. Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to

• • hip-hop musicals

• • queer studies

• • cinematic depictions of regional and/or diasporic hip-hop identities

• • black gender scripts

• • hip-hop artists as film actors/producers

• • hip-hop satire and parody

• • manifestations of digital hip-hop aesthetics (e.g., social media, “vines,” etc.)

• • fashion and costuming

• • marketing/publicity and hip-hop cinema

• • hip-hop and protest

• • race and urbanity

Essays, film reviews, and short commentaries will be considered. Essays should range between 5,000 and 8,000 words; commentaries between 1,000 and 3,000 words; and reviews between 800 and 1,500 words.

Please submit completed works, a 150-word abstract, and a biography of 50–100 words by August 31, 2016. Submissions should conform to The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Please see journal guidelines for more on submission policy:

www.indiana.edu/~blackcam/call/#guidelines

Direct all questions, correspondence, and submissions to guest editor Regina Bradley (regina.bradley@armstrong.edu).