Black women can certainly tell a story. And where others are more subdued or might strain unto artificial performance and nearly-rehearsed expression, such embellishments to a tale are attributes we can't help but deliver automatically. While the privileged classes were fortunate enough to bask in the glamour of the novel and epic poems they created using the … Continue reading Black Woman Gossip (Or, Ten Great Black Women’s Story Collections)
Category: Women
Are You a Joyce Vincent?
I A definitive 21st Century Western biography concerns a Black female Londonder who passed away in her government-subsidized bedsit/SRO flat in 2003, at a time she was wrapping Christmas presents and writing Christmas cards—and she remained in there, seated on her couch, putrefying and finally skeletizing, for the next three years. In 2006, a government agency kicked in … Continue reading Are You a Joyce Vincent?
Bush Mamas: A Black Film Gives Birth to Sociohorror
Professor, Writer and Director Haile Gerima’s 1975 student thesis film Bush Mama premiered on the independent and student film circuit a year before I was born. I was born in the small-town Midwest: Kankakee, Illinois, a town most people have not heard of and can barely pronounce when they do. Once I was born, I … Continue reading Bush Mamas: A Black Film Gives Birth to Sociohorror
Patriarchy Gone Awry: The White Exploitation in The SnowTown Murders
On the one hand, The Snowtown Murders is an unquestionably brilliant depiction of a provincial environment of chain smoke and gray pallor that I recognize very well--whereby the simple offerings of eggs, bacon, toast, sausages and coffee can cement the beginning of a kinship stronger than many blood relatives... But on the other hand, the absolutely unnecessary (and true crime) atrocities against human beings that The Snowtown Murders depicts is satisfactorily unfamiliar to anything I have ever known in my life.
My First Grays
It is startlingly appropriate that I was introduced to my first gray hair this past evening, at about a quarter to 7 p.m. in the basement of the Logan Center for the Arts on the University of Chicago campus right around the corner from my home. I came out of a bathroom stall to wash … Continue reading My First Grays
Women Should Tell Women’s Stories: on the films of the capital punishments of Wanda Jean Allen and Aileen Wuornos
In 2002, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus was forced to end her documentary on the last three months of Oklahoman Wanda Jean Allen, a twice-convicted murderer. Allen was the sixth woman put to death in the United States after the 1977 reinstatement of the death penalty. The Execution of Wanda Jean depicts the frantic and pathetic clemency pursuit in the Bible … Continue reading Women Should Tell Women’s Stories: on the films of the capital punishments of Wanda Jean Allen and Aileen Wuornos
In Search of Our Daughters’ Gardens: A Meditation on Hadiya Pendleton’s Life*
She was 15. She was an honors student. The shooter remains at large. Her parents live in shock. Her school is in silent mourning. Residents of Chicago are outraged. A nation is unaware.
negression 