The Caribbean Cinematic

Catalog description

Drawing on Kara Keeling’s notion of “the cinematic” as a hegemonic common sense conditioned by cinematic processes, we will consider the way the cinematic circulates in the Caribbean and the way the racial, heteropatriarchal and capitalist logics it reproduces have shaped the organization of social life there. We will also consider the way cinematic processes have become interlinked with other aesthetic, social and spiritual practices in the Caribbean. Does that interlinking further consolidate the cinematic or does it open it to other possible configurations of life? We will view films and videos made about the Caribbean (Hollywood, Soviet, anthropological, political, etc.) and films and videos made in and around the Caribbean (by filmmakers such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Sara Gómez, Hugh A. Robertson and Suzanne Nunez Robertson or Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and diasporic filmmakers such as Horace Ové, Richard Fung, Raoul Peck or Miryam Charles). We will read about the creation of alternative filmmaking infrastructures (the state-sponsored institute in post-revolutionary Cuba, for example, as well as radical collectives like the Victor Jara film collective in Guyana). We will also study various quasi-cinematic practices such as: music by dancehall deejays who adopted the names of cinema stars and characters; the deployment by poet Kamau Brathwaite of a computer-generated font he calls “Sycorax Video Style;” video “transmissions” in Santeria rituals documented by scholar-practitioner Aisha Beliso-De Jesus; and the radical venue-shaping activities of intellectuals and artists like M. Jacqui Alexander, Sean Leonard, Christopher Cozier and Kriston Chen.