The Post-Soul Cinema of Kasi Lemmons

In this edited volume, Kasi Lemmons, the first African-American woman auteur to solidly and steadily produce a full body of work in cinemaan oeuvre of quality, of note, of international recognitionwill 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 lensthe ambitious bourgeoise, the spiritually lost, the ill and discarded, and the historically erasedand 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.