Fugitivity and the Filmic Imagination

Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up devoted to Fugitivity and the Filmic Imagination.

Drawing from the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, Saidiya Hartman, Daphne A. Brooks, and Nathaniel Mackey, among others, one can define fugitivity as a critical category exploring the artful escape of objectification, whether objectification occurs through racialized aesthetic framing, commodification, or juridico-political discipline. Artfulness results from “the act of fleeing,” which is “an existential act of self-creation,” fostering alternative spaces, ethics, and structures of feeling in the name of being otherwise. Juridico-political discipline targets such ways of being because they indict current moralities. Fugitivity entails a critique of violence, engaging the forces sustaining, resisting, or overturning the status quo, and imagining a “free state, not as the time before captivity” but as an “anticipated future” still to be enacted.

Fugitivity is irreducible to a single genre because it inspires the literary and audio-visual experimentation that founds genres. Scholars have used the fugitive slave as a heuristic for exploring this experimentation across genres. Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave have caused debate over film’s aesthetic (in)capability to engage the historical complexities of black fugitivity. This debate will continue with several other films on slavery slated for 2013 and 2014, including Savannah, Something Whispered, Belle, and Tula, setting the stage for future film criticism. These new films urge a reconsideration of films like Burn!, Sankofa, or The Legend of Nigger Charley 150 years after Emancipation in the United States.

The Close-Up ponders whether American mainstream and/or independent cinema engages or disavows black fugitivity as the imaginative condition for film; a reassessment of the frameworks are most generative for exploring black fugitivity’s complexities; and a rethinking of how online social media informs the discourses that shape the filmic imagination.

Are filmic representations of fugitivity necessarily a foregone conclusion because of the deficit in historical knowledge about slavery, the reproduction of auteur fantasies, and the formidable nature of a neoliberal cultural agenda? Do these critical realities foretell the end of a fugitive imagination with an extensive history? Do they mark film’s disavowal of race and fugitivity at the genre’s overdetermined origin? Or will this string of films avow, even contradictorily, the ongoing relevance of fugitivity? What new or previously underutilized concepts, methodologies, and cultural histories can make filmic fugitivity visible and audible? Topics include but are not limited to

• ▶. How do current debates on films about slavery privilege historical realism? How does historical realism counter or complement neoliberalism’s cultural agenda? Might an expanded genre criticism broaden and deepen the conversation?

• ▶. How do the current string of films on slavery dis/avow their place in the production chain of the mainstream American film industry?

• ▶. Might a form of ensemble criticism reveal productive tensions within film, since film emerges from a shared and fraught vision, based on convergent and divergent efforts of several contributors? Or does black fugitivity abide auteur criticism’s safe limits?

• ▶. How do filmic representations of black fugitivity open or foreclose analyses of gender and sexuality? What are its implications today, when women’s rights and the feminist traditions that uphold them are under attack?

• ▶. What are the roles of intellectuals in fostering public discourse on slavery and black fugitivity in popular culture?

• ▶. Might filmic fugitivity pose new theorizations of class conflict in the United States when bare life becomes synonymous with indebted life and individualized risk sparks collective malaise and outrage?

Contact James Ford at filmicfugitivity@gmail.com to discuss potential articles or submit completed articles. Articles will be 6,000–8,000 words. Interviews are welcome. Completed materials must be submitted by August 1, 2014.