Intersectionality to the Front: Detroit, Double Consciousness & Radical Politics

• In Event: Liberating Popular Aesthetics: Race & Revolution in Film, TV & Literature

Abstract

The colonial project is typically understood to have been for the purpose of creating and building capital for those in power. In Sorry to Bother You (2018), writer/director Boots Riley hones in on this fact, and highlights it in a present-day Oakland, CA; examining the economic and labor stresses survival there. The main supporting actress plays the role of Detroit, a creative, political, artist and thoughtful partner of the lead character, Cassius Green. When it comes to the myths of black women in film and popular culture, they have often fulfilled distinct spaces as over-sexualized, caregivers, or as tough women who emasculate men. In the Americas, black women’s bodies have a complex history as a site of symbolic and actual rape, as a breeder of slaves, as sexually available and promiscuous, or as caretakers and mammies. Historical and contemporary portrayals of black women, featuring their physical aesthetic and their performed sexuality, serves as a site of messaging around their politics, acceptability and activism. Detroit is a figure who in the tradition of black womanhood, uses hair, style and art a as space to express and subvert identity, sexuality, culture, beauty, art and labor. In Sorry to Bother You, Detroit’s presence represents a resistance to tropes of stereotypical black womanhood while exploring double consciousness and misrecognition, as she herself struggles for creativity, space, and survival strategies in an exploitative capitalist system.

Author

• Mzilikazi Kone, College of The Desert