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In this edited volume, Kasi Lemmons, the first African-American woman auteur to solidly and steadily produce a full body of work in cinema-an oeuvre of quality, of note, of international recognition-will get the full film-studies treatment. This collection offers the first scholarly examination of Lemmons' films through various frameworks of film theory, illuminating her highly personal, unique, and rare vision. In Lemmons' worldview, the spiritual and the supernatural manifest in the natural, corporeal world. She subtly infuses her work with such images and narratives, owning her formalism, her modernist aesthetic, her cinematic preoccupations and her ontological leanings on race. Lemmons holds the varied experiences of African-American life before her lens-the ambitious bourgeoise, the spiritually lost, the ill and discarded, and the historically erased-and commits to capturing the nuances and differentiations, rather than perpetuating essentialized portrayals. This collection delves into Lemmons' iconoclastic drive and post-soul aesthetic as emanations of her attitudes toward personal agency, social agency, and social justice.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction by D. E. Wynter, California State University Northridge.- Chapter 2. Some Illnesses are Hard to Put a Finger on: Race, Memory and Revision in Eve's Bayou Chinaza Okoli.- Chapter 3. The Caveman's Valentine: Fight the Towers that Be D. E. Wynter.- Chapter 4.Talk to Me: A Post-Soul Allegory Jonathan Tazewell.- Chapter 5. Black Nativities: Transgressing Tradition Monique Taylor.- Chapter 6. Framing the Feminine: Constructing Black Female Subjectivity in Harriet Joi Carr.- Chapter 7. Conclusion: Lemmons and the Art of Post-Soul Resistance.
