Category: Watching
Interracial Couples as Outcasts in Loving
In the 2016 movie Loving, the interracial couple of Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga) experience discrimination under segregation in 1950s and 1960s Virginia. Outside forces (i.e., people in the community and institutions) continuously try to separate the couple, making it difficult for them to be together. These outside forces use a
Teaching Race with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric. Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism.
Slavery on Screen and the Black Trauma Genre
Upon the release of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum (2020), the film was met with mixed reception. Antebellum follows a young Black woman author, Veronica Henley (Janelle Monaé), who, after leaving her home and family to complete her book tour, “wakes up” to find herself enslaved on what appears to be a cotton plantation
Curating the Civil Rights Archive in I am Not Your Negro and Dreams are Colder than Death
In my last post, I examined Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While most of the critical backlash against March Through Time has centered around the project’s “tonal dissonance,”—the seeming incompatibility of
The Nurse’s Repertoire in Romeo and Juliet
What does it mean to know? “Epistemology” describes a way of knowing, and, as you might expect, many different epistemologies exist. One episteme that has come to define the Western world is heteropatriarchy, a power-knowledge system organized around white, masculine supremacy. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes theorized that the mind is separate
March Through Time: Fortnite’s Passive Engagement with the Photographic Archive of Civil Rights
In August of this year, Epic Games collaborated with TIME Studios to host a special, virtual event dedicated to the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech, is accessible through the
Cannibalizing Mothers: Pre-Oedipal Horror in Hannibal and Titus Andronicus
[Trigger Warning: brief discussions of sexual assault.] It’s been nearly ten years since Bryan Fuller’s TV show Hannibal (2013-2015) debuted. Since then, it has garnered a cult viewership and a devoted online fanbase, often referred to as “fannibals.” However, to their (and my) chagrin, the show was preemptively cancelled after Season 3. As a late-comer
Why Are They Smiling?: Representations of the Shoah
Okay. It’s pretty much impossible to write anything about representations of the Holocaust (from here on our referred to as the Shoah) without talking about Adorno, so I’m going to get that out of the way immediately. German theorist and philosopher Theodor W. Adorno once wrote, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”[1] It’s amazing
Captivating “Us”: What a Film Can Teach Us About Introductions
I first decided to watch Jordan Peele’s Us on a relatively bright morning … on my phone … while I was on an airplane. This is far from the best context to get a good impression of anything, much less a densely loaded horror film like Us. The fact that these opening moments stuck with
“Remarkable Boy … I Think I’ll Eat Your Heart”: Revisiting Hannibal
This week, we return to the archive for a post by Molly Cavanaugh, where she discusses the non-traditional erotics of the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. In the same vein as Mark’s posts, which have considered representations of gay relationships in film and television, Molly’s post contemplates the homoerotic tension created between predator