Organizer: Xavier Lee, University of California Davis
These papers respond to current and developing trends in cultural studies, cinema studies and black studies by formulating a correlative and theoretically productive relationship between black cinematic experience and the feelings of dread, anticipation and anguish. We define the former as the relationship between black audiences and representative media engaged with cultural, political, historical and aesthetic themes pertinent to black viewers. Our readings advance the arguments that the experience of the black filmgoer remains under-theorized and that black film-watching is often structured by certain spectatorial affects. We focus our attention on the curious affect of dread, at once a retrospective and a prospective sentiment of anticipation. First conceptualized by Kierkegaard, angest responds to the foundational possibility that what is imagined or what has already happened can repeat itself. It responds to a knowledge of an uncertain future whose origin is a certain past[1]. Racial dread, intimately familiar to writers like Fanon, Baldwin, Douglass, Césaire and Du Bois, has recently been conceptualized by Jennifer C. James as “a learned foreboding emerging not from faith, but an absence of faith.”[2] Focusing on James’ invocation that “racial dread is [...] a tension produced by that absence of tense,” our papers explore the theoretical utility of apprehension and anticipation for thinking through important and timely questions concerning black life, cultural production, historical narration and possibility in cinematic representation.[3]
The papers ride the coattails of the recent boon in horror studies. Scholars such as Xavier Aldana Reyes, Julian Hanich and Matthias de Bonds have already identified the cinematic experience of dread in horror films and our readings take their attention to cinematic genre and form as a point of departure. None of the papers here fit the generic conventions of the horror genre, but each bear witness to the experience of dread that contemporary audiences are prone to identify with the horror genre. Our papers suggest that the feeling of dread represents something external to the film; the black viewer is made to anticipate narrative elements in advance or to reflect on them in hindsight through a specifically engineered feeling of anticipation and delayed relief. There is therefore an existential and an epistemological component to dread which has remained unthought in film studies. Our papers question how generically dissimilar films like Malcolm X (1992), Nickel Boys (2024), B-Boy Blues (2021), and Devil’s Pie (2019) create affecting and compelling atmospheres of anticipation but also quest to understand the broader ramifications of narrative tropes that generate existential and racial dread in the viewer. Andie Berry and Xavier Lee’s papers question how suffering is paradigmatic of black cinematic storytelling. Berry’s paper questions how dread manifests in memory and hindsight, drawing special attention to the representation of heartbreak, tragedy and betrayal in Nickel Boys' storytelling and cinematography. Lee’s paper examines the final scenes of Malcolm X to study the architecture of doom surrounding the inevitable death of the civil rights leader and icon. These two papers question dread's relationship to historical knowledge and intimate memory and expound on dread's retrospective connotations. Thinking proleptically, Henry Washington, Jr. and zuri arman offer papers concerning forestalled futures. Washington’s paper questions how B-Boy Blues must "sustain certain lies” about black queer life through the collusion of storytelling and the romance plot, critiquing the fabricated sentiment of apprehension that undergirds the film’s fairy tale story. arman’s paper looks at how documentary filmmaking figures black suffering from the vantages of structure and narrative. By attending to Devil’s Pie and its representation of apprehension towards its subject matter’s untimely disappearance from the public eye, arman questions how documentary narration generates and misapprehends black despair. Our papers each think broadly about cinematic visions of black life and experience and ground our readings in our own phenomenological viewership as black viewers.
Each speaker will have twelve minutes to present, inclusive of screen time for any clips. We'll spend five minutes on introductions and allot about twenty-five minutes for discussion and q&a.
[1] Søren Kierkegaard, “The Concept of Dread,” The Kierkegaard Reader, p. 201.
[2] Jennifer C. James. “Dread.” American Literature, vol. 92, no. 4, Dec. 2020, p. 692.
[3] James, p. 693.