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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
This project explores the critical work of Beyoncé, Solange, and Janelle Monáe’s visual albums as seen in Lemonade, When I Get Home, and Dirty Computer, respectively. I figure the aforementioned trio as Black feminist contemporaries who conceptual projects are apt to investigate the entanglements of the poetics of landscape, conceptualizations of Black female subjectivity, and fugitive practices as they are situated in the sonic and visual performances of Black feminism. Through a textual analysis, grounded in a Black feminist praxis of close reading and listening, of the trio’s individual and collective conceptual opuses, I explore the ways in which they articulate and reimagine Black feminist present and futures by attending to the co-constitutive logics of time, space, and the intimate felt life of Black women. I argue that the music, visuals, and films of these contemporaries are a material site to theorize why the (im) possibilities of Black women’s production of time, space, and sound are necessary to think through new ways of thinking, feeling, being, and knowing. Drawing on Black feminist epistemologies, Black cultural studies, and feminist media studies, I demonstrate how these artists use the intimate site of Black female subjectivity to produce flights and fissures of Black feminist performance that works to reinvent, cite, archive, and critical examinations of Black womanhood in what Katherine McKittrick calls “the past elsewhere and present incomplete.” In doing so, it asks does the affective labor of contemporary Black feminist cultural production push us to reconsider the (im) possibility of representation?
Emotion Pictures: Affect, Return, and Futurity in The Sonic and Visual Life of Black Feminist Performance
This project explores the critical work of Beyoncé, Solange, and Janelle Monáe’s visual albums as seen in Lemonade, When I Get Home, and Dirty Computer, respectively. I figure the aforementioned trio as Black feminist contemporaries who conceptual projects are apt to investigate the entanglements of the poetics of landscape, conceptualizations of Black female subjectivity, and fugitive practices as they are situated in the sonic and visual performances of Black feminism. Through a textual analysis, grounded in a Black feminist praxis of close reading and listening, of the trio’s individual and collective conceptual opuses, I explore the ways in which they articulate and reimagine Black feminist present and futures by attending to the co-constitutive logics of time, space, and the intimate felt life of Black women. I argue that the music, visuals, and films of these contemporaries are a material site to theorize why the (im) possibilities of Black women’s production of time, space, and sound are necessary to think through new ways of thinking, feeling, being, and knowing. Drawing on Black feminist epistemologies, Black cultural studies, and feminist media studies, I demonstrate how these artists use the intimate site of Black female subjectivity to produce flights and fissures of Black feminist performance that works to reinvent, cite, archive, and critical examinations of Black womanhood in what Katherine McKittrick calls “the past elsewhere and present incomplete.” In doing so, it asks does the affective labor of contemporary Black feminist cultural production push us to reconsider the (im) possibility of representation?
Bio
Daelena Tinnin is a PhD candidate in the Radio-Television-Film department at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her MA in Communication Studies from the University of Denver. She currently works with the Moody Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as a graduate research assistant. Her research focuses on the intersections of black geography, the afterlife of slavery, time and space and performances of Black female subjectivities through the visual and cultural modalities of media. Her work has been published in Media Industries and Flow. Recently, she was awarded the Graduate Student Writing Prize on behalf of Society for Cinema and Media Studies Black Caucus for her project “Black Feminist Futures: Technologies of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer.”