Read more
"Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene offers a consideration of Buster Keaton's classic 1924 film, The Navigator, from the combined perspectives of critical race theory, especially Black Studies, and posthumanism. The principle argument that the book puts forward is that Keaton's film exemplifies in its treatment of non-white characters and animals an antiblack logic that also is at work in Keaton's cinema more generally. More than this, the book engages with how Keaton is a central figure in discourses surrounding early cinema, playing a notable role in the film-philosophical thinking of Gilles Deleuze, and in the film-ecological thinking of Jennifer Fay. The book charts, then, how Keaton's film can help to tease out the otherwise unexamined whiteness - and by extension the antiblackness - of both Deleuze's thinking and that of ecological theory more broadly"--
About the author
William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013). He also is a maker of zero-budget films including En Attendant Godard (2009), Common Ground (2012), Selfie (2014), Circle/Line (2017), and This is Cinema (forthcoming). He is also currently co-writing a book on cephalopods and cinema with David H. Fleming called Kinoteuthis Infernalis: The Emergence of Chthulumedia. He lives in London, UK.
Summary
Through an analysis of Buster Keaton’s classic The Navigator through the combined lenses of posthumanism and critical race theory, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene deconstructs white modernity and posits a ‘black’ future.
