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To many men and women of color, as well as many white women, meaningful diversity occurs when the actual presence of different-looking bodies appears on screen. For them, this diversity serves as an indicator of progress as well as an aspirational frame for younger generations who are told that the visual signifiers they can identify with carry a great amount of symbolic weight. As a consequence, the degree of diversity became synonymous with the quantity of difference rather than with the dimensionality of those performances. Moreover, a paradoxical condition emerges whereby people of color have become more media savvy yet are still, if not more, reliant on overdetermined and overly reductive notions of so-called “positive” and “negative” representation. Such measures yield a set of dueling consequences: first, that any representation that includes a person of color is automatically a sign of success and progress; second, that such paltry gains generate an easy workaround for the executive suites whereby hiring racially diverse actors becomes an easy substitute for developing new complex characters. The results of such choices can feel—in an affective sense—artificial, or more to the point, like plastic. Black representation, as it's been understood in a popular sense, has been dominated by the circulation of mediated imagery yielding deleterious effects for the groups depicted. The fear of the effects of such “poor” representation has resulted in a set of binary, nonscientific, underdeveloped metrics—positive and negative—that constitute a nebulous catch-all system wherein the characteristics that define each pole on the spectrum shift depending on the era and the expectations of the audience. What marks a representation as “positive” or “negative”? Responses are often aligned with class (good job, education, community minded), behavior (hypersexual, well-spoken, “woke”), or with characterizations of character that either successfully assimilate into normative culture or fail to do so. However, such a scale oversimplifies the complexities of black identity that require audiences, pop culture critics, and scholars to invest in screen characters through experiencing nuances developed over time and ironically reinforces the stereotypes that operate as industry shorthand. The rationale for solely demanding plastic representation is understandable as a sanity-preserving tactic that can also build esteem and confidence, but it is not nearly enough. Meaningful, resonant diversity is a more difficult, underdeveloped approach that requires all stakeholders to think harder about what on-screen difference looks and feels like. But if representation truly matters, then it is an approach worthy of pursuit.

While the lack of black femme presence is theorized explicitly with respect to film genres and the canon of American cinema in the work of Kara Keeling, the ontological position of the black femme (whom Keeling understands to be both visually impossible and interdicted yet full of cinematic possibility) has long been a point of interrogation in Black Studies with an extensive critical genealogy. In Saidiya Hartman's book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, the loss of the black mother animates the historical imagination of transatlantic slavery, just as her loss is irreducibly felt in relation to its afterlife. In the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, there is an explicit rejection of the potential of the black woman within film, specifically the viability of her maternal function, insofar as the black mother remains categorically essential to the construction of black (masculine) subjectivity. In light of the contradictory arc of this genealogy, the current task is not only to theorize the black maternal as an extension of the black femme, but to bring that position into view as the unthought. The black mother tends to be dramatized as the singular figure through which the cinema cultivates a distinctly black visual historiography. Even when placed under narrative erasure or withheld from view, the mother crystallizes a cinematic black aesthetic that fashions and envisions diasporic culture and forms of black collectivity as tied to a speculative and fraught filial genealogy. The critical arc in black narrative cinema over the last ten years from Get Out to Pariah, to Mother of George, and finally to Moonlight insists upon black motherhood as integral to the aesthetics of form and the genre-making capacities of film. One could go so far as to claim that the elements of cinematic form that drive these narratives reflect aesthetic choices that have to do with coloration, shot position, and narrative flashbacks that are themselves bound up with and inflected through the haunting and cipher-like construction of black maternal figures. Furthermore, these films insist upon simultaneously marking and excluding the mother from the emotional drama of black subjective life and its complex and contradictory expressions of intimacy, which have as much to do with the breaking and splintering of familial bonds as bridging gaps. It is clear that the mother sutures these bonds; she is a scar, a visible reminder and remainder of a terrible historicity that cannot be assimilated into the idealization of the American family.

On November 8, 2013, filmmaker Leslie Harris announced a new feature-length project on Kickstarter, the popular online crowdfunding platform for creative projects. Lauded a decade earlier for her provocative coming-of-age film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992), which took the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 1993, this “Sundance-Miramax era” independent filmmaker had resurfaced in the “Kickstarter-YouTube era.” At the end of the fundraising period, Harris's I Love Cinema campaign had raised only$4,074 from fifty-eight potential backers, falling quite short of her $ 35,000 target. The failure of Harris's Kickstarter campaign to garner support provides a telling and consequential sense of how the very idea of black film circulates in the current moment of presumed breakthrough, crossover, and arrival. Her unsuccessful appeal to the masses soberly dismantles some of the logic of inclusivity that permeates the contemporary media environment, especially in what is a celebratory moment for black film and media, in which the visibility and viability of a few diverse voices do not necessarily translate into greater opportunities for either new or old faces. What does online crowdfunding, particularly Kickstarter, signify for the efficacy of black film today? The presumed democratization of cinema production and distribution through this kind of financing practice challenges but also reinforces dominant and reductive narratives about the idea of black film's appeal to targeted and general audiences. Issues of faux democracy, populism, and quality that need to be addressed are at work here, especially in terms of their racial dimensions.

The television screen has increasingly come to serve as a complex threshold for images of blackness across genres. What could be termed “televisual reparations,” therefore, emphasizes the medium's attempts to address the paradox of black “unfreedom” and provide redress for continuing race-related grievances, especially those connected to histories of violence. Such televisual acts of reparation occur at the levels of television industry, text, and audience. The industry maintains a tenuous commitment to provide opportunities for African American producers, writers, directors, and actors to the degree that such practice continues to be helpful to the reputation of the medium as well as profitable. The programming created often comments on civil rights by mobilizing references to the past of racial injustice in a variety of imaginative ways. Reparations, in this way, underscore how blackness comes to be televisually transmitted to audiences through the realm of spirits—spirits that come to resonate with viewers and call forth engagement with, and response to, representations of black mortality in the afterlife of slavery.

There has been a shift away from formal and textual analysis in the field of film and media studies. These methodologies are seen as passé, “old school,” or even overly simplistic (and no doubt some of this work may warrant these critiques). Yet, I suspect that, as with the celebration of style in Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), here, too, other politics are at play. In some ways, to reject formal analysis is to subconsciously reject the earlier era of film studies that treated the study of black film (and eventually television) as marginal or inconsequential. In other ways, this move away from formal analysis is also an acknowledgement of the incredibly rich and multifaceted terrain that black representations cover: the critical study of industrial practices, labor, and global strategies—to list some of the most popular topics in the field right now—are all essential to any understanding of the complicated subject of black film and media. Questions of style, though, cannot be separated from questions of politics. Aesthetics bear the indelible imprint of racial ideologies. This is tricky territory, then, and requires scholars to tread carefully. The celebration of certain “beautiful” aesthetics can serve to reinforce an established taste politics that has traditionally dictated an aesthetic marginalization and degradation for people of color throughout the history of the medium. I intend these questions as provocations rather than condemnations. I am not suggesting that high-quality images are simply indicators of whiteness or that low-quality ones are inherently more authentic for representing blackness. On the contrary, I am fascinated by the power that style holds, especially as it pertains to the black image, and how the implementation of that style can form a powerful critique of the film and television industries' longtime racism. At the same time, I want a more rigorous, thoughtful, critical interrogation of how these images come to be, what they signify, and how they train viewers to read race in ways that extend beyond narrative. In proposing an emphasis on aesthetic and formal analysis, I am suggesting, not a “return” to traditional film studies approaches, but instead, a study of black images that was never “there” in the first place.

Black death in contemporary cinema requires understanding how film blackness always means provoking new entangled measures of the aesthetic, political, social, and cultural capacities of black visual and expressive culture. As a result, the critical consequence of film blackness always entails issues of affect, narrativity, visual historiography, and genre/modalities. Black death, then, signifies both the violent injustice of African American deaths and the rendering of death in cinema. Three short films by black women filmmakers represent an ever-growing archive of recent works that merit critical attention as they advance cinematic practices that point to new political philosophies and circuits of knowledge related to black death and film form. Taken together as a “cinema in the wake,” the three—Leila Weefur's Dead Nigga BLVD (2015), Frances Bodomo's Everybody Dies! (2016), and A. Sayeeda Clarke's White (2011)—pose a range of formal propositions about black death that include animation, the racial grotesque, and speculative fiction. With distinct and compelling conceptions of black death, these three short films are deeply located in their contemporary American moment. Thinking with these films involves thinking through performing objects, the racial grotesque, and the futurity of social deletion. Together these films exquisitely suspend, disrupt, and disturb constituting distinct visual historiographies and strategies. As cinema in the wake, these films are stirred by incitements of film form, materiality, temporality, and conceptions of black being. But, more importantly, to think through black death across the formal experimentation and critical capacities of this work is to contend with an enduring urgency, the precarity of black life.

Over the last decade a number of historical dramas, including Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014), Twelve Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), and The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker, 2016), have been the recipients of numerous accolades, screening at festivals and winning prestigious awards. The films are linked by a focus on the past, particularly the antebellum and Civil Rights eras, and a shared commitment to providing historical narratives from African American perspectives. In many ways, they continue in the tradition of the slave narrative/abolitionist melodrama, with Twelve Years a Slave perhaps the closest embodiment of the genre and Selma, despite its more contemporary setting, a close second. At first glance, the green-lighting of such historical films, particularly those that capitalize on the genre's melodramatic aspects, can be interpreted as signaling the industry's belief that antiblack racism is a thing of the past, or perhaps a conviction that American society is ready to face its “original sin” of slavery. A more generous interpretation might suggest a genuine media interest in African American history. Regardless, the continuing engagement with such narratives raises important questions about the longstanding relationship between cinema and history, and the former's capacity to relate African American stories within a medium that has its own troubled representational past as a birthright, one memorialized in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). Films such as Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation and Selma reflect upon and refract many pasts and presents, prompting considerations of what's changed, and, more importantly, what hasn't. They also raise questions about the feasibility of the historical genre's ability to convey black history, especially when the form is overdetermined by contemporary expectations of historical accuracy. If Hollywood's plantation/Civil Rights formula no longer works, then productive alternatives can be created, either in fiction or nonfiction film, that cannot only relate the past but also link that past to the ongoing effects of antiblack racism in the twenty-first century.