Particularly within visual media, genre may be thought of as a way of looking, a kind of thematic and ideological point of view (POV) that distills the innumerable complexities of reality into narrative and aesthetic patterns that work toward imparting rhetorical stances to audiences. For example, the generic POV of the Western privileges guns and open landscapes, inviting an onslaught of...
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. In a 2020 interview...
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 in the antebellum south. In the film, viewers watch as...
“The Man Who Lived Underground” was first published as a short story in Edwin Seaver’s Cross-Section: An American Anthology of New American Writing in 1944, and again posthumously in Wright’s 1961 short story collection Eight Men (Literary Classics 22). This version of the narrative begins with an unnamed protagonist already on the run from the police. The audience is left to infer the...
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 civil rights imagery and Fortnite’s...
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 from the body. As...
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 free-to-play game’s creative mode. Creative mode...
“Archive,” as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept.” This definition not only locates them within a particular physical space, but also within the bounds of what is considered “important” and “historic”. This raises a few questions: who determines what is important enough to be in an archive? What...
Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, published by Duke University Press, examines various representations of Black life including the literary, cinematic, visual, and everyday life experiences of Black people. She offers a cipher to navigate the unspeakable and unknowable realities of existing in the violent afterlives of transatlantic slavery. To live while Black in...
[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 to Hannibal (in that I’ve only just started...