Cinema of Social Death

Nyhet

Blackhood At-Large

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

1 739 kr

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In The Cinema of Social Death: Blackhood At-Large, Tryon P. Woods argues that cinematic counter-narratives to society’s deep-seated racist culture, while claiming to advance racial justice, fail to escape the trappings of anti-blackness and instead function to disguise a parasitic and antagonistic relationship toward blackness, rather than expose how the paradigm works.Through analyses of a selection of purportedly anti-racist narratives from documentarian Liz Garbus and a trio of independent black filmmakers, Tanya Hamilton, Haile Gerima, and Spike Lee, Woods demonstrates the precarious nature of telling stories of racial justice without falling into the contradictory trap of imposing antiblack notions of gender and sexuality. Contrary to the prevalent sentiment that these visual narratives disrupt and unravel the suffering, lack, and pathology attached to blackness, Woods posits that the films being examined are detrimental to black liberation, and thus, to human deliverance. As such, this book's chief concern is in how our efforts to unravel the problems of the world become part of the problem. In the process, Woods highlights the trap of visual culture and its racial discourse as it obfuscates the modern era’s assault on human reciprocity and connection.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-02-19
Mått152 x 229 x undefined mm
Vikt503 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieNew Critical Humanities
Antal sidor192
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781666976588

Tillhör följande kategorier

Medievetenskap inom Samhalle och politik
Film inom Kultur

What does a critique of antiblackness look like? Tryon P. Woods offers us an invaluable account: a deft critique of the system and its configuration of power. Woods calls for an unsettling, self-sacrificing, and critical engagement with our affective investment to the legacy of the human. Cinema, in its circulation and consumption of images of blackness, makes its impact felt in white civil society’s antiblack libidinal economy, and for this reason alone it is a medium to reckon with. In the afterlife of our slaveholding culture, cinematic representations of social death must resist the pull of all forms of sentimentalism. Uplifting personal stories of antiblack violence and recognizing the excluded while leaving the system's naturalized rotten core—its antiblack structures—unchecked can only cruelly prolong the murderous status quo. Woods’s incisive intervention will jolt many of us out of our sanctioned liberal anti-racist slumber, compelling us to take up the political and collective challenge to bear witness and respond to black power, to invent and recreate the world otherwise, and to infuse it with a desperately needed sense of human reciprocity.