Introduction 

Holding Place. Taking Flight: Childish Gambino, Bradford Young, Terence Nance, and Grace Jones brings together signature works by, or about, some of the most thought-provoking visual and sonic artists working today: the award-winning musician, writer and actor Donald Glover/Childish Gambino, the creator of the FX series Atlanta; Oscar-nominated cinematographer, director and installation artist Bradford Young; experimental filmmaker Terence Nance, the creator of HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness; and the intramontabile legend, Grace Jones. The event seeks to develop a conversation about the work of artists who engage with the fact of racial violence in America, including its viral visibility, while developing artistic forms that refuse to be restrained. By pointing simultaneously to ground and groundlessness, mourning and celebration, the weight of what is and the power of what could be, this event strives to provide a space for a conversation about the world-making powers of black art.

Research

Theoretical Contexts

Animation

Please see the liquid blackness research page on the dancer Storyboard P for a bibliography on animation.

Afro-Surrealism

Bohn, W. (2002). The rise of Surrealism : Cubism, Dada, and the pursuit of the marvelous. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Francis, Terri. “Introduction: The No-Theory Chant of Afrosurrealism.” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (2013): 95-111.
Francis, Terri. “Close-up Gallery: The Afrosurrealist Film Society.” Black Camera: An International Film Journal (The New Series) 5, no. 1 (2013): 209-19.
Kelley, R. (2002). Freedom dreams : The Black radical imagination. Beacon Press Book.
Michel, J. (2000). The black surrealists (Francophone cultures and literatures ; v. 29). New York: P. Lang.
Rosemont, F., & Kelley, R. (2009). Black, brown, & beige : Surrealist writings from Africa and the diaspora (1st ed., Surrealist revolution series). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Stockwell, Peter. The Language of Surrealism. Palgrave, 2017.

Afro-Atlantic flight : speculative returns and the Black fantastic

Commander, Michelle D. Afro-atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Young, Jason R. “All God’s Children Had Wings: The Flying African in History, Literature, and Lore.” Journal of Africana Religions 5.1 (2017): 50-70.
Commander, Michelle D. “The Space for Race: Black American Exile and the Rise of Afro-Speculation.” ASAP/Journal, vol. 1 no. 3, 2016, pp. 409-437.
Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism : the World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013.
McKittrick, Katherine. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography. 12.8 (2011): 947-963.
Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 2007.
Eburne, Jonathan P., and Jeremy Braddock. “Introduction: Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 4 (2006): 731-40.
King, Lovalerie. “Resistance, Reappropriation, and Reconciliation: The Blues and Flying Africans in Gayl Jones’s Song for Anninho.” Callaloo 27.3 (2004): 755-767.
Storey, Olivia Smith. “Flying Words: Contests of Orality and Literacy in the Trope of the Flying Africans.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5.3 (2004).
Matory, J. Lorand. “Afro-Atlantic culture: on the live dialogue between Africa and the Americas.” Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American experience (1999).
Walters, Wendy W. “” One of dese mornings, bright and fair,/take my wings and cleave de air”: the legend of the flying Africans and diasporic consciousness.” Melus 22.3 (1997): 3-29.
Bell, Derrick. “The Afrolantica Awakening.” In Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, 32-46. New York: Basic, 1993.
Wilentz, Gay. “If You Surrender to the Air: Folk Legends of Flight and Resistance in African American Literature.” Melus 16.1 (1989): 21-32.
Walmsley, Leo. “The Recent Trans-African Flight and Its Lesson.” Geographical Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1920, pp. 149–160.
Young, Jason R. “All God’s Children Had Wings: The Flying African in History, Literature, and Lore.” Journal of Africana Religions 5.1 (2017): 50-70.

Image/Iconography/Distortion/Constructedness:.

Shaviro, Steven. “Corporate Cannibal.” Post-Cinematic Affect, Zero Books, 2010, pp. 11-34.
Mckean, Cameron. “The Goude, the Bad and the Ugly.” Japan Times, August 29, 2014.
Anderson, Carolyn G. “En Route to Transnational Postmodernism: Grace Jones, Josephine Baker and the African Diaspora.” Social Science Information vol. 32, no. 3, (1993): 491–512.

Gender and Presentation:

McMillan, Uri. “Introduction: Skin, Surface, Sensorium.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 28, no. 1 (2018/01/02 2018): 1-15.
Pritchard, Eric Darnell. “Grace Jones, Afro Punk, and Other Fierce Provocations: An Introduction to ‘Sartorial Politics, Intersectionality, and Queer Worldmaking.’” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 1–11.
Hobson, Janell. 2012. Body As Evidence : Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.
Royster, Francesca T. “‘Feeling like a Woman, Looking like a Man, Sounding like a No-No’: Grace Jones and the Performance of Strange in the Post-Soul Moment.” Women & Performance vol. 19, no. 1 (March 2009): 77–94.
Powell, Richard. Cutting a Figure. Fashioning Black Portraiture.  Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Kershaw, Miriam. “Postcolonialism and Androgyny: The Performance Art of Grace Jones.” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 19-25.

[3]Anderson, Melissa. 2018. Keeping up with the Jones. Artforum International, vol. 56, no. 8, pp. 37-38. New York.