Unmade According to His Image; or, Night for Day: Radical Black Writing and Film in Spite of the Human

• In Event: Climates of Dissent: Media Ecologies as Oppositional Pedagogy

Abstract

The paper explores a few of the ways in which the conceptual force of radical (or anti-mimetic) black aesthetic production—particularly in the zones of contemporary literature and film—accelerates toward the disavowal of all pre-established Western/neo-liberalist value. Such intensification is accented or made material in the moment that the works formally mark the presumed irrelevance of black intellectual work to those auto-installed, (white) “mainstream” discourses, debates and formal traditions in which they necessarily develop; from which they are always already discarded; and the very traces of which are eviscerated in the figural gestures and projections of each work in its different articulation of an unprecedented imaging of the world. Such figuration, in its evaluative re-projection of blackness as opening, necessarily embeds an emptying out of the representational regimes of institutional “critique” itself, in its confrontation with the demands of sound, image and text now detached from presumptive obligations to cohere into units of meaning.

Author

• Kevin Bell, Penn State University