Resonance/Dissonance: Black Feminist Intertextuality and Gayl Jones's Eva's Man

• In Event: Form’s Emergent Privacy: "Gayl Jones’s" American Studies Project

Abstract

In 1976, Anita Addison directed and produced a short film, Eva’s Man, based on the Gayl Jones novel of the same title and published in the same year. Addison’s film is shot in super-8, black and white format, and progresses in what might be called a surreal fashion through space and time over the course of 13 minutes. Addison creates an experimental tapestry of sound and image centered around a complex and inchoate black feminist perspective in order to convey Eva's state of mind as a type of structure of feeling. Against the backdrop of her own music as well as that of Rhasaan Roland Kirk, Pharaoh Sanders, and Santana, Addison evokes a range of erotic, violent, and ultimately unstable affective moments that Jones explores in her novel. My presentation considers Addison’s work with film and sound as a sensorial expansion of Jones’s novel. Drawing upon theoretical work in sound studies--in particular, work that focuses on sound and affect, I make the case for the convergence of experimental film and writing as a literary-sonic modality of black expression that explores questions of black subjectivity and ontology through an interstitial representational framework. Put another way, it is through the intersection of film, sound, and the literary that the works of Addison and Jones orchestrate a theoretically rich contemplation of race, gender, sexuality, resistance, violence, and alterity. Addison’s use of sound within the film speaks to Jones’s experimentation with language, a literary project through which she creates an alternate temporal field of experience and memory that troubles established and generally relied upon ideas of psychic linearity. My presentation analyzes how this artistic relationship serves as a crucial flashpoint within 1970s black feminist epistemology, specifically as it is shaped by the horizons of the experimental and the surreal. I situate the projects of Addison and Jones within a broader trajectory of black feminist experimentation including figures such as Jayne Cortez, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Coltrane, in order to ultimately argue that the explorations of black madness articulated by Jones and Addison, suggest a convergence of ethics, politics, and aesthetics that recenters black feminism within traditions of black avant garde artistic production.

Author

• Carter Mathes, Rutgers University-New Brunswick