Interlude

Abstract

This chapter introduces the section on Postracial Resistance which pivots away from cinematic and televisual texts that foreground whiteness and turns to the ways Black directors, Jordan Peele and Ryan Coogler, “trouble” prevailing representations of Blackness in the realm of cinema. It argues that the expectation of racial veracity in realist film limits the artistic range of Black filmmaking, produces normative discourses about Black life, and appears to make Black lived experience and subjects knowable to (white) audiences. This chapter foreshadows the arguments made in chapters eight and nine that Peele and Coogler utilize speculative fiction to disrupt the realist visual field in which Black life has been presented as knowable and consumable. SF enables Black filmmakers to forego the responsibility and weight of having to represent the “truth” of Black life and experiences.