Introduction

Abstract

Introduction L. H. Stallings (bio) As a follow-up to Black Camera’s Special Issue on Sexuality and Eroticism in volume two, number two, this Close-Up continues to examine how black cultural imagination has learned to revel in the fluidity of sexuality and the nourishing impact of eroticism in as many ways as possible, despite Western patriarchy’s deployment of sexuality as power and violence. This alternative utility of sexuality and eroticism occurs in films thematically concerned with black sexual subjectivity. Black people have moved beyond simply wanting to see themselves and their sexual desire represented on screen in Hollywood: they have moved on to creating what they would like to see. Characters such as Mandingo, Sweet Sweetback, Foxy Brown, Nola Darling, and Mr. Marcus, and films such as Looking for Langston (dir. Isaac Julien, 1989), Tongues Untied (dir. Marlon Riggs, 1989), and Young Soul Rebels (dir. Isaac Julien, 1991) are from a bygone era of independent black filmmaking, though their cinematic tropes often land in other films and their political platforms and artistic ideals arise in classrooms. If the proliferation of hundreds of black sex tape scandals, the massive production of black-themed porn, the Afrocentric sexual instruction videos from the Adam and Eve production company, the R. Kelly child pornography trial, or the big-screen adaptation of erotic writer Zane’s Addicted (dir. Bille Woodruff, 2014) doesn’t convince us that black sexuality in film, video, and new media matters to black communities and art, then perhaps Silence: In Search of Black Female Sexuality in America (dir. Mya B., 2004), Afrodite Superstar (dir. Venus Hottentot and Candida Royalle, 2006), A Good Day to Be Black and Sexy (dir. Dennis Dortch, 2008), Karmen Geï (dir. Joseph Gaï Ramaka, 2001), The Aggressives (dir. Daniel Peddle, 2005), Mississippi Damned (dir. Tina Mabry, 2009), Children of God (dir. Kareem Mortimer, 2009), Pariah (dir. Dee Rees, 2011), and Gun Hill Road (dir. Rashaad Ernesto Green, 2011), can better substantiate the growing importance of black sexuality and eroticism in black film. These films serve as evidence that filmmakers’ concerns [End Page 163] and approaches to sexuality and eroticism have moved beyond representation politics and onto consider questions of agency, subjectivity, and the interiority of black life. Analysis of these complex elements has led to more radical conversations about sexuality in black film scholarship over the last two decades. Academic research and knowledge, in addition to mass popular conversations on black sexuality, have shifted the terrain from the approaches of arguing for proper and normative representations in Hollywood films or independent cinema. The new crop of film scholars learned a lot from Jacqueline Jones and bell hooks, but they also began incorporating other fields’ examination of sexuality and eroticism into their analysis of black film. Mia Mask’s Contemporary Black American Cinema insists, Since the early 1990s the field of Cinema Studies has grown considerably to encompass a wider array of scholars researching and studying black American cinema and cinemas of the black diaspora. The field now encompasses scholars situated squarely within the discipline of Film Studies and those who are located in other fields (i.e., Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Education, Art History, Queer Studies) but who publish interdisciplinarily. Across the United States, and internationally, there are growing numbers of scholars invested in Cinema Studies as a discipline.1 Mask’s statement about interdisciplinarity in Black Film Studies cannot be overstated, since the growth and evolution of Black Film Studies hinged on its founding critics’ ingenuity in rejecting “white” Film Studies early complicity with disciplinarity and elitism. Manthia Diawara, Clyde Taylor, Ed Guerrero, Mark Reid, Valerie Smith, Tommy Lott, Jacqueline Bobo, Phyllis Klotman, Michael Martin, bell hooks, Jacqueline Stewart, Haile Gerima, and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster are now joined by the likes of Mia Mask, Kara Keeling, Keith Harris, Norma Manatu, Terri Francis, Angelique Harris, Christine Achman, Akin Adesokan, N. Frank Ukadike, Yvonne Welbon, and Regine M. Jean Charles, who also emphasize interdisciplinarity. The list grows when you include recent porn scholars such as Mireille Miller-Young, Jennifer Nash, and Ariane Cruz. Thus to avoid further reinscriptions of white supremacy and patriarchal gazes embedded within the analytics of traditional film scholarship and...