Introduction

Jenn Nkiru’s work is invested in integrating the agenda of the most radical work in Black Studies, particularly Black Feminist Thought, with experimental film and music aesthetics. Steeped in a simultaneously Pan-African and Afrofuturist sensibility, the Black Arts Movement and Black Power, as well as the desire to draw from her Nigerian roots, Nkiru’s work is also in dialog with the North American Avant-Garde (Maya Deren, in particular) and always firmly grounded in the history of black music –from Sun Ra to Pharoah Sanders, from Sarah Vaughan to Queen Latifah, from Alice Coltrane to Nina Simone. The relationship between visual, sound, and music, as well as movement and tone, are central concerns of her work, which, when possible, is shot in 35mm. She is inspired by Kahlil Joseph, for the way “he showcases black people, black experiences and spirituality in such a visceral way,” and finds Moonlight by Barry Jenkins to be indicative of the possibilities of black cinema: “to be black, to be layered, to be indie, to be arthouse, to critique gender and masculinity, particularly black masculinity – and for all this to be universal.”

The relationship between visual, sound, and music, as well as movement and tone, are central concerns of her work, drawing influences from the Black Arts Movement, Black Power, and her Nigerian roots. Her works have a Pan-African and Afrofuturist sensibility, which are grounded in the history of black music, the aesthetics of experimental film, international art cinema, and the rich and variegated tradition of cinemas of the black diaspora and their distinct experimentation with the politics of form. 

Research

Nkiru’s work demonstrates the ways Blackness and its aesthetic forms, as Derrick Jones discussed, “remixes, rewrites, rewinds, reiterates, reforms and reshapes in its liquidity.” That is, “Blackness resists.” Our study of Nkiru’s work seeks open up the political and aesthetic sites of resistance in this art by exploring alternative temporal imaginings, radical praxes, and feminist and queer methodologies because, as Nkiru says, “it’s going to take all of us to arrive at the gates of freedom, right?”

THEORETICAL CONTEXTS

 PAN AFRICAN FUTURISM 

Anderson, Reynaldo and Carles E. Jones, eds., Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-blackness Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.

Cervera, Felipe. “Astroaesthetics: Performance and the Rise of Interplanetary Culture.” Theatre  Research International 41, no. 3 (2016): 258-75.

Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Wesleyan  University Press, 2015.

Corbett, John. The Wisdom of Sun-Ra: Sun Ra’s Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets. WhiteWalls; 2006.

Crawford, Margo Natalie. Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and   Billie Holiday. Vintage, 2011.

Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3,    no. 2 (2003): 287–302.

Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998.

Gaines. Malik. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible. New York: NYU Press, 2017.

Marriot, David, ed. “Experimental Poetics,” special issue of The Black Scholar, 47 (2017).

Marks, Laura U. “Monad, Database, Remix: Manners of Unfolding in the Last Angel of History.” Black Camera 6, no. 2 (2015): 112-34.

Nelson, Alondra. “Introduction: Future Texts. Social Text 20 no. 2 (71) (2002): 1–15.

Steinskog Erik. Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Tarik, Latif A. “Travel Notes: Pan Africanism (Re)Visited: From Sankofa to Afrofuturism – Summary of the ‘2nd Kwame Nkrumah Pan-African Intellectual & Cultural Festival.’” Journal of Pan African Studies 12 (1): 537–59. 2018.

Teague, Jessica E. “Black Sonic Space and the Stereophonic Poetics of Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time.” Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 22-39.

Terri Francis. “Introduction: The No-Theory Chant of Afrosurrealism.” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (2013): 95-112.

Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. Random House, 1983.

van Veen, tobias c, and Reynaldo Anderson. “Future Movements: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—an Introduction.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies  (2018): 5-21.

Youngquist, Paul. A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

See also: Jazz Aesthetic from Larry Clark’s Passing Through Bibliography.

See also: Terrence Nance’s section from the Holding Place, Taking Flight event research page.

BLACK RADICAL AESTHETICS

Blue Black. Curated by Glenn Ligon. Pulitzer Art Foundation, Jun 9–Oct 7, 2017.

Baraka, Amiri. It’s Nation Time. Chicago: Third World Press, 1970.

Beverly, Michele Prettyman. “No Medicine for Melancholy: Cinema of Loss and Mourning in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter.” Black Camera 8, no. 2 (2017): 81-103.

Ellis, Trey. “The New Black Aesthetic.” Callaloo, no. 38. (Winter, 1989), pp. 233-243.

English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Boston: MIT Press, 2007.

Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays.  New York: Grove Press, 1988.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Iton, Richard. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Kelley, Robin. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press Book, 2002.

Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Moten, Fred. The Universal Machine. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Moten, Fred. In the Break the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

O’Dair, Barbara. “Heavenly creatures: the great gospel singers – Sister Rosetta Tharpe.” Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock. 1st ed., Random House, 1997.

Ongiri, Amy Abugo. Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Taylor, Clyde. “New U.S. Black Cinema.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 46-48, 41.

See also: Our research page on The Black Audio Film Collective.

BLACK FEMINIST AND QUEER THOUGHT

“British Council Film: Jenn Nkiru,” accessed March 19, 2019.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Cox, Aimee Meredith. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Duke University Press, 2015.

Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. Duke University Press, 2016.

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. The New Press, 1995.

High Tesfagiorgis, Frieda. (1987). Afrofemcentrism in the Art of Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold (a View of Women by Women). Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 4, no. 1: 25-32 (Spring 1987). 

Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

hooks, bell. Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. Pluto Press, 2000.

hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman Black Women and Feminism.  Boston: South End Press, 1981.

Hull, Gloria, Patricia Bell, and Barbara Smith. “All the Women Are White and All the Blacks Are Men.” But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982.

Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 2012.

Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light: Essays. Firebrand Books, 1988.

Murray, Derek Conrad. Queering Post-Black Art Artists Transforming African-American Identity after Civil Rights. I.B. Tauris, 2016.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentification: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Nash, Jennifer. The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography. Duke University Press, 2014.

Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Simon and Schuster, 2010.

Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65-81.

Tinsley, Omiseke Natasha. “Black Atlantic Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ 14 (2-3), 2008.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

Page compiled with contributions from Corey Couch, Jenny Gunn, Jazmine Hudson and John Roberts.