Unexplained Presence

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007; Wave Books, 2024), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles, and a finalist for a 2010 LAMBDA literary award. Her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogs for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Suné Woods and Cauleen Smith, and is forthcoming in the anthology Letters to the Future: Black Experimental Women Writers, and in a catalogue of site-specific art from The New School. She has done numerous presentations of cinema essays, most recently at ALOUD's "School of Prince" event at the Los Angeles Public Library, and at "Speak Nearby," a symposium of text and performance inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Tisa Bryant was a commissioned writer/researcher for Radio Imagination, Clockshop’s year-long Los Angeles celebration of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, in collaboration with the Huntington Library in Pasadena, which houses the Octavia E. Butler Papers. She is working on The Curator, a novel of Black female subjectivity and imagined cinema. Residual, a meditation on grief, longing, desire and archival research, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.

• PrefaceDarlingSomething in the AirWhile London Burns . . . Violet is BlueCalifornia NegroesUnder Cover of DarknessIn Melville’s JungleAndre’s Masked BallLooking a Mad Dog in the EyesPortrait of a LadyThe Head of the MoorThe Problem of DidoUnexplained PresenceCredits Afterword

“For this brilliant debut, Bryant narrates the movements of peripheral African-American characters in film and other media—characters who seem to be there innocuously, as in Stephen Frears's Sammy & Rosie Get Laid or François Ozon's 8 Femmes —but end up loaded with multiple, conflicting meanings.”—Publishers Weekly“Bryant’s essay title also captures the way ‘radical writing’ (not ‘just’ writing) seems to have become, for some poets, a synonym primarily for poetry, eliding a great deal of radical drama, nonfiction, and fiction, to say nothing of cross-genre prose.” —Jacket2“What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.” —San Francisco Bay Guardian