Editor's Notes

With a decade of publication behind us, this is an opportune moment to take stock of Black Camera's contributions to the world-wide study of African and Black diasporic filmmaking.

Consider this:

• • Ten volumes, comprising twenty issues of original scholarship, interviews with world-class auteurs as well as little-known but accomplished filmmakers, commentary, manifestos, festival and symposium reports, book and film reviews, and professional notes of interest and importance to our readers.

• • The creation of two unique dossiers (Africultures and African Women in Cinema) that regularly feature critical and lengthy essays and reviews in Black Camera.

• • And, unlike any other journal of its kind, beginning with vol. 3, no. 2, the publication of in-depth Close-Ups engaging with particular films, filmmakers, cinematic movements and traditions, and contemporary issues and debates in film and media studies.

  Such Close-Ups:

  Afrosurrealism

  Ava DuVernay's Selma (2014)

  Beyoncé: Media and Cultural Icon

  Black Film and Black Visual Culture

  Black Images Matter

  #BlackLivesMatter

  Django Unchained

  Fugitivity and the Filmic Imagination

  Hip-Hop Cinema

  John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective

  The Marginalization of African Media Studies

  Mediated Contests: Sports, Race, and the Power of Narrative

  The New York Scene

  Nollywood—A Worldly Creative Practice

  Nothing But a Man

  On the Colony's Postcolony Encounter in Claire Denis' Chocolat and White Material

  Postcolonial Filmmaking in French-Speaking Countries

  Precious

  Senegalese Cinema

  Sexuality, Eroticism, and Gender in Black Films and New Media

  South African Cinema

  Teza

Not to quantify the yield or overstate the sum of Black Camera's production in the past decade, nevertheless, credit the ledger approximately 5,100 pages.

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No less invested in our work documenting and celebrating the Black cinematic experience, we invite you to peruse and digest the contents of this vol. 11, no. 1.

First, note the calls for Close-Up submissions—Contemporary Cuban Cinema; Nina Simone, Now; and BlacKkKlansman (2018): On the Right Side of History—as well as that for volumes on contemporary Black Hollywood and FESPACO.

Two interviews follow, the first with Bridgett M. Davis, author and film-maker of Naked Acts (1998), whose compelling drama about a black actress and her challenges "on-screen and off" complicate negotiating the dynamics of a matrilineal family. The second interview engages with the extraordinary curatorial work and practice of June Givanni, founder and director of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA), London.

Next, two distinct Close-Ups. The first, curated by Jane Bryce, "Caribbean Cinema as Cross-Border Dialogue," takes up as its organizing thematic the matter of the Caribbean as "a physical space occupied by gendered and racialized bodies, a space of complicated and specific histories, of landscapes imprinted with memories of peculiar forms of violence and resistance." In the second, Stephanie Li, who guest-edited the Black Camera Close-Up on Beyoncé in 2017, marshals a critical exchange on the evolution of JAY-Z as "a global hip-hop star" in the wake of his 2017 release 4:44 and Everything Is Love collaboration with Beyoncé in 2018.

In the Africultures Dossier, read Olivier Barlet's favorable review of FESPACO 2019 (unlike his of FESPACO 2017); and in the African Women in Cinema Dossier, Beti Ellerson's chronology and chronicle of African women on the film festival landscape.

And lastly, David C. Wall's read of Jordan Peele's new horror film, Us (2019), along with updates to our section devoted to professional notes and research sources, including obituaries for Camille Billops, Med Hondo, John Singleton, and Pierre Yameogo.

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Regarding staffing, Katherine Johnson has moved into the position of Editorial and Production Manager of Black Camera, and we welcome Megan Connor, who joins us as Assistant Editor. Megan is a PhD Candidate at Indiana University in the Media School. She studies girls' media cultures, celebrity, and fandom. Her dissertation examines the 2000s as a period of intensification of celebrity girl culture through the lens of girls' magazines like Seventeen and Teen Vogue. In her free time, Megan bakes elaborate novelty desserts and enjoys bar trivia.