The black diaspora cinema culture of the film
Question 1
The black diaspora cinema culture of the film is one of many modes of expression that is based on representations simply because media representations are the first and often the only source of information about people outside of their social and cultural circles. Black diaspora cinemas are created so as to be able to examine the impact on film-making of western culture, which is a heavily capitalist production and distribution methods that affect how colonialism and the continuing neo-colonial status of the people and countries in which film-making is practiced. Cinemas in the black diaspora explore along the social, cultural, and political lines, thereby analyzing the works of a radical and aesthetically alternative cinema. Black diaspora cinemas should serve as an essential and valuable primary reference tool that should be used during research for the study of world cinema.
Black diaspora cinemas should celebrate the diversity, innovation, and fecundity of film-making in different regions of the world, and this critical collection also explains the historical importance of film-making as a cultural form and political practice. It is important to note that cinematic traditions and film practices in the black diaspora are made from contributions by film scholars, film critics, and filmmakers. These are different divergent people who are from Europe, North America, and the Third World. The diverse collection of information and experience provides for critical reading of the film-making approach in the black diaspora cinemas that challenges the assumptions of colonialist and ethnocentric discourses about the third world, Hollywood and European cinemas.
Black diaspora cinemas should depict how the African diaspora has been shown or created in films by directors representing distinctly different loci of the diaspora in the United States, Brazil, and Nigeria. Although films differ in terms of genre and come from diverse cultural and directorial traditions and styles, they always share a common thread, which is the systematic racism that members of the African diaspora often experience and people.
The underlying treatment of racism in films ultimately affects its commercial success and culture in mainstream society, for example, African Americans in the United States. They have often found ways to get the proper information or messages into artistic products such as film. As a result of this, its significance in fostering transnational identities and dialogue becomes of primary importance. Hence filmmakers and producers can use this as a tool by creating a popular genre to send critical information that may have been misguided to niche audiences, who are eager for self-representation in film and contribute to its commercial success.
Films that have the most blatant treatment of racism will have the most significant commercial success; hence audiences want to see movies in the black diaspora cinemas that address such issues, and box-office sales reflect this. People of African descent around the world may not deliberately identify as part of a diasporic community; therefore, specific nuances may go unnoticed by a community that is used to seeing particular messages and information on a daily basis. In this way, one may not be aware that they are viewing a diasporic media product, and outsiders to culture may have a keener eye for noting certain cultural aspects that have been normalized through frequent use of the media and films. Hence audiences relate to the diaspora on a daily basis as they are going about their lives, which may or may not be accurate.
It is important to note that the significance of black diaspora cinemas and their role in fostering transnational identities and dialogues is based on the notion of how one arrives and leaves. The individuation that takes place in the journey provokes the idea of a homeland serving as a base, while the concept of collective functions as a construction of the now to carry out one’s imagination; however, this image is not based in unreality, but an identity and subsequent space placed in the localize meaning-making (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998). To identify as a Diaspora signifies that movement of the character is an ongoing process and one that occurs at sites that are also connected to moments, thus reconstituting selfhood in a fluidity that continually redefines identity.
When it comes to having a better understanding of transnational identities in the black diaspora cinemas, Stuart Hall’s primary focuses were on interdisciplinary theoretical work on race, class, and representation in 1980s Britain and his engagement with the film culture. During the postcolonial and postwar period of United Kingdom history, Hall’s theoretical work on emerging cultural identity and public intellectual and connotative presence on the T.V. screen are of great stride and significance to the black diaspora cinema.
His frequent interventions into public debate have helped shape and advance the development of emerging Black identity in Britain. In this way in which Hall’s work accomplished these things from the 1980s through the development of cultural theory while also raising critical questions on the role of film art in the formation and articulation of the Black diaspora identity as a whole.
There is a further inquiry into the role of experimental and conventional forms of cinematic language for the development and expression of emerging identity in 1980s Britain, and the purpose of public and private funding for the development of Black British cinema. Hall’s work and engagement with social justice remain relevant for broader understandings of historical conjunctures, and progressive readings of new sub-cultures and representational forms resistant to cultural hegemony in corporate media societies.
It is also important to note that interdisciplinary programs which bring the skills of historians, archaeologists, linguists, social psychologists, and geneticists to seven distinct projects to challenge disciplinary boundaries and develop a new understanding about the impact of deep time diasporas on the formulation of identities in Britain, past and present.
Over the past two decades, black diaspora cinema has evolved from a term with a somewhat restricted usage to something considerably more ubiquitous, simultaneously crossing over from political and academic discourse into the vernacular. In academia, the word diaspora has come to be applied to almost any population or group living outside its homeland. In contrast, in widespread usage, diaspora now seems to be a collective noun used to refer to anyone, not at home (Brubaker 2005).
Therefore identity, like diaspora itself, has emerged from a particular psychological context to become something of a keyword in social science and the humanities. In the process again, like the black diaspora cinema, the term has risked losing acuity as it becomes a vague byword for individual or group characteristics (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). The early formulations of identity, whether individual or group, established a concept somewhat analogous to the homogenous and discreet culture of early anthropology; hence an individual had a character that developed over time. However, it might undergo subsequent minor changes that were generally well established by the end of adolescence.
Similarly, groups also had an identity that all within the group shared and allowed them to define themselves (and be determined by others), such as being Sioux Indians or U.S. Government employees (Erikson [1959] 1994, 22). But much as anthropology has taught us to recognize that cultures are neither bounded nor unchanging, so too identity has become a term to describe a set of characteristics to which individuals and groups may differentially subscribe but which are neither fixed either per se or in their relations with the individuals or groups they are intended to characterize or subscribed to universally.
Finally, when talking about the black diaspora cinema in a contemporary context, identity may appear in two guises one as something that defines an individual or a group, and that is thus effectively unique though rarely stable, somewhat akin to the notion of the self or it is taken to refer to specific sets of characteristics, expressed in particular ways, to which both individuals and groups may subscribe in order to emphasize who they are and to distinguish themselves from others. Identity is mutable in this latter definition too, but it is differently constituted and more overtly political.
Question 4
Using South Africa as a case study, the period of transition to constitutional democracy in South Africa has been one of great hopefulness, vertiginous possibility, and expectation, of quiet sadness and reflection, much joy and celebration, of contradictions and vexing complexity. The breathtaking rendering extent of colonial and apartheid atrocity intelligible but tentatively took place. The lived inscriptions of layer upon layer of sentient injustice had marked every day through the passage of the past three hundred and fifty years in these southernmost parts of the African continent.
In the global political and moral imaginary the new South Africa, there was however either as a miracle of reconciliation in which the moral victory of good which was the struggle against Apartheid that had prevailed against evil white supremacist rule and or as yet another instance of the failure of neoliberal macroeconomics where huge class disparities, social inequity, and structural poverty increasingly paint a gritty canvas depicting the horizons of society as a crisis, despair and struggle.
Both views hold implicit though programmatically incompatible assumptions about time, history, and oppression. They have seldom interrogated the light of what remains vexing, creative, resilient, hopeful, human, and, therefore, fundamental in the picture. This work is a meditation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The ways that the institutionalization of memory has managed perceptions of time and transition, of events and happenings, of sense and emotion, violence and recovery, of the past and the coming.
Through this process, a public language of memory has been carved into collective modes of meaning-making. This is a language that seems bereft of the hopes, dreams, and possibilities for the promise of a just and redemptive future it once nurtured people.
During this process that has undergirded the truth and reconciliation, narrative key concepts and discourses embedded in and generated through the truth and reconciliation have reproduced and reinscribed through the public sphere. The thoughts and conversations have produced a compelling regime of historical meanings that has contoured social perceptions of political change.
Hence time as a living, which is seen to be an experiential category related, in different ways to memory, and time as a historical category, which is what comes to be represented as the past and what does not? Time in the postcolonial requires theoretical elaboration as it impacts on the ways in which the past as a sign of knowledge and experience is produced. Therefore, the ways in which the truth and reconciliation have organized notions of time in the production of a past and a present. To properly examine the truth and reconciliation as a part of a growing global economy of institutions of political transition management.
We can unpack that a common language of remembrance and reconciliation has come to stand in for a state practice of redress and a social debt of responsibility. From this perspective, the referential economies of key discursive terms of the truth, reconciliation, and forgiveness are explored.
In theorizing the relationship between forms of public and institutional discourses of transition, social perceptions of time, and subjectivity that these endorse and the material, historical and geopolitical contexts of their production, this chapter interrogates how social and historical meanings are assimilated into the foundational notion of a nation. These have recalibrated perceptions of what is perceived as the political in the postcolonial.
It is also important to note the ways in which testimony and voice have figured in giving life to the idea that time is organized as the new and the past. This involves examining the interconnections of sound to democracy, of atrocity to the narrative, and listening and interpretation to silencing and appropriation. The chapter interrogates how the operative assumptions which frame testimony, how mediations of proof, and how mediatized disseminations of statements have contributed to the depoliticization both of evidence as a narrative genre for radical social change, as well as of memory as a discourse about the past.
Something that cannot be ignored and is central to this discussion is an examination of the ways that pain, trauma, and woundedness operate in the framing of testimony. It is then that theorizing the ways that technologies of mass media have insinuated truth and reconciliation testimonies into the cognitive operations of the public as mediated and mediatized declarations have been rendered into a poetics of pain for public consumption and how this has diluted the interpretative, historical and political substance of testimony and of the act of testifying itself.
Drawing from a selection of televisual coverage of the truth and reconciliation, it is possible to examine how testimonies are absorbed into a depoliticizing economy of witnessing in which discourses of trauma loom large. Instead of enriching, humanizing, and deepening understandings of politics, the ways in which pain is framed displaces the politics that are not necessarily in terms of testimonies content but their broader narratological framing.
Finally, it is essential to note and examine the mediation of testimony in relation to how, having been conceived as a discrete corpus of information to be interpreted and rendered into knowledge, testimony is appropriated and delinked from the lives, experiences, and right of recount ability of the witness-narrator as an issue of ethical, political and economic import.
In the case of South Africa as an example, the conceptual category of place and the urban context of Cape Town explore the ways in which constructions of lived and historical time are specialized. This can be developed by thinking how memorial cartographies the routes and networks of emplaced narratives that constellate spatial and temporal relations grounding, materializing and containing historical sensibilities act as topographical mnemonics, inscribing permitted modes of specialized remembrances. Memorial cartographies produce historical meaning, mirroring similar processes of historical visibility and social occlusion that technologies of transition management, such as the truth and reconciliation inaugurate.
References
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