More than Nationalism in Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and Kasi Lemmons's Talk to Me

This article situates film as a critical framework for challenging scholars to use a Black feminist methodology to complicate the notion of an inherent link between blackness, maleness, and crisis in the twenty-first century. Kasi Lemmons's Talk to Me (2007) offers a trans-historical context for considering the difference that both time and a Black feminist theoretical perspective contribute to a re-reading of Killer of Sheep (1977) through a post-nationalist lens. Killer of Sheep is both produced and set during the waning of the Black Nationalist era. Talk to Me begins during the waning of the civil rights movement and ends in the dawning of the post-national era, but it is produced in 2007. The thirty-year difference between the productions creates considerable possibility for viewing and imagining Black manhood in a way that allows Black men to be agents rather than victims. Reading these films through a Black feminist lens not only creates a space for Black male agency in these films, but it also reveals an unfamiliar narrative for wider examination—Black men as emotional, feeling human beings whose greatest acts of agency are rooted in their own humanness, fallibility, and "weakness."