Intersecting Aesthetics

Abstract

Intersecting Aesthetics: Literary Adaptations and Cinematic Representations of Blackness illuminates cultural and material trends shaping Black film adaptations during the twentieth century. Contributors reveal how Black literary and filmic texts are sites of negotiation between dominant and resistant perspectives. Their work discloses the effects bigotry has on film adaptations and how race-inflected cultural norms influence studio and independent film depictions. Using archival material, several chapters analyze how self-censorship and industry censorship affect Black writing and adaptations of Black stories in early/mid-twentieth-century America, with commercial obstacles leading Black writers and white-dominated studios to mask Black experiences. Other chapters document instances in which Black writers and directors navigate dominant norms and material realities to realize their visions in literary works, independent films, and studio productions. The volume considers travelogue and autobiography sources along with the fiction of Black authors H. G. de Lisser, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Frank Yerby, and Walter Mosley. Contributors examine independent films The Love Wanga (1936) and The Devil’s Daughter (1939); Melvin Van Peebles first feature, The Story of a Three Day Pass (1967); the Senegalese film Karmen Geï (2001); studio-era films In This Our Life (1942), The Foxes of Harrow (1948), Lydia Bailey (1952), The Golden Hawk (1952), and The Saracen Blade (1954); and post-studio films The Learning Tree (1969), Shaft (1971), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). Uncovering patterns in Black film adaptations, Intersecting Aesthetics illuminates themes, aesthetic strategies, and cultural dynamics that rightfully belong to accounts of film adaptation.