You’d be correct to expect this story of a young Renaissance woman’s fantasy trip, to live like her iconic Black American idols, to be sexy and to weave in Josephine Baker. The novel’s heroine goes to Paris in search of Baldwin and finds jazz, interracial love and the freelance hustler life… … More Black Girls in Paris, Harlem and more…
46 years ago, a moving picture testified to sexual assault against a woman. It moved all around the world, in fact. Only, the world called it “art.” Not much has changed since. This most visible example of a public rape frames sexual assault’s most misunderstood and excused forms: coerced consent, false pretenses and pressure as permission. And people can still buy and sell this sexual assault on film to this day. Why? … More Remembering Maria-Hélène Schneider…
This Black woman onscreen had to buy her freedom to agency and complexity for a high price. That price was her child’s life. Such is depicted in a spate of films now depending upon a Black woman losing a child violently with no one held accountable. … More At the Movies, Mammies Make Way for Mourners
Beah Richards and Bette Davis illuminate the essential if fraught alliance between Black women who serviced White men and White women who benefited from it all in the obscure 80’s HBO movie “As Summers Die.” … More Beah Richards, Bette Davis and the Male Member
A 16-year old woman of color received what female slaves may have if they refused their master’s sexual advances: death sentences at worst, and more tortured lives at best. … More Cyntoia’s Done Her Time. Have Mercy and Let Her Go.
Bolivians of African descent introduced Jensen to Saya music, an old artform which was a universal language in the Spanish-speaking land of their political and labor oppressors. Jensen’s film documents Saya music of today. … More An Interview with Maya Jensen, Filmmaker behind ‘Solidarity in Saya: An Afro-Bolivian Music Movement’
