Abstract
Abstract: This essay takes Kevin Quashie’s formulation of a black world as the summons and seeding of my engagement with Barry Jenkins’s filmic adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk to speculate upon how a black world might be rendered in visual, multimedia, and cinematic arts. To do so, I reckon with the inherent dangers of black visuality, and of black publicness, within a carceral landscape saturated by ever more invasive, data-driven biometric technologies of surveillance and penal capture. My critical engagement with Jenkins attends to how his evasive and deconstructive cinematic experiments enact a mode of black poesis in line with Quashie’s formulation of a black world in poetry. In so doing, they undermine the constancy (and presumed transparency) of black visuality, along with its affiliated perils in a racist carceral society. Ultimately, this essay theorizes how black visual arts innovate expressive techniques, within a visual field structured by the antiblack semiotics of epidermalization and spectacularization, to render our world in everyday, living black splendor.
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