Research Statement

Research Questions

In a Vanity Fair interview, the award-winning filmmaker and visual artist Steve McQueen described his Small Axe (2020) cinematic anthology, which chronicles Black British life in London from the 1960s through the 1980s, as “[a] commentary on where we were, where we are and where we want to go” (2024, n.p.).  This preoccupation with the time-collapsing capabilities of film (and media) aesthetics and their pedagogical potential is a mainstay of McQueen’s work. It is little surprise, then, that the series’ overall reception, following its release in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, emphasized the contemporary relevance of these historical films, noting both the pervasiveness of structural antiblackness across time and the relationship between resistance and necessary belief in the possibility of livable Black futures. In addition to these readings, McQueen’s prismatic collection of films made visible critical histories traditionally excluded from the narratives Britain uses to describe itself. They highlight Black resilience amid experiences of systemic racial discrimination in the British judicial system (Mangrove), the police force (Red, White and Blue) and educational institutions (Education); they also show how ordinary networks of care sustain radical, life-giving forms of refusal, including through music (Lovers Rock and Alex Wheatle).

My video essay The Black Ecstatic uses sound to explore these connections between resilience, belonging, and liberation in Black diasporic communities across time in a scene from McQueen’s musical Lovers Rock. Critically lauded as one of 2020’s best films, Lovers Rock is an intimate look at Black joy during a fraught period of high unemployment and the state-sanctioned criminalization of racialized communities in early 1980s Britain. Staged in a West London house party, the film is both the Cinderella story of its young protagonist Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and a celebration of the expressive rituals and sounds of Black communion that comprise the partygoers’ life worlds as descendants of Britain’s Windrush Generation. Many viewers have written about the soundtrack’s affective capacity to generate nostalgia for a time and place they never experienced (Carty-Williams 2020; Collins 2020; Frazer-Carroll 2020; Harris 2020). As such, my video essay asks: How can sound memorialize these networks of care, migration, and radical ways of imagining liberated Black futures across diasporic histories and presents? How might the expressive possibilities of creative digital research practices illuminate the nearness, repeatability, and traces of histories? The Black Ecstatic aims to mark how attending to sound enables us to think across generations of Black diasporic dreaming, striving, believing, and resisting bodies.

Context

Originally developed as an epigraphic video essay exercise during the Scholarship in Sound and Image: Workshop on Videographic Criticism at Middlebury College, The Black Ecstatic follows parameters, combining a brief, continuous film scene with an unrelated critical quotation and visual effect (Keathley, Mittell, and Grant 2019). Although Lovers Rock presents a wealth of captivating expressions of uninhibited communality, I selected a raw, rapturous exchange between dancers markedly different from the almost reverential moments of seduction and tenderness that precede it.

As the first strains of The Revolutionaries’ haunting instrumental dub ‘Kunta Kinte’ play on the DJ’s turntable, the romantic pairings give way to a masculinized collective united in their passionate pursuit of catharsis. The epigraph and visual doubling of the tonearm conform to the Scholarship in Sound and Image exercise parameters and draw from Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman’s engagement with Judith Butler’s meditation on ecstasy in the face of queer loss: ‘To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and this can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief’ (Butler 2004, p. 20). In the selected scene, the men (and two women) shout and stomp, their commingled visceral utterances rising above the music and testifying to the already and not-yet nature of the ‘fullness of Black life’ amidst the pervasive Euro-Western production of Blackness-as-abjection (Sharpe 2016, p. 115). I read their rapturous abandonment through Abdur-Rahman’s theorization of the Black ecstatic as ‘an aesthetic performance of embrace, the sanctuary of the unuttered and unutterable, and a mode of pleasurable reckoning with everyday ruin in contemporary black lives under the strain of perpetual chaos and continued diminishment’ (2018, p. 345). Part celebration, part protest, their passionate freestyle dancing ruptures the respectability politics and double consciousness of Black diasporic life subjected to the (now internalized) visual logics of the plantation (Mirzoeff 2011).

Methods and Outcomes

Working with this scene within the prescribed editing parameters, I analyzed how performance, camera movement, setting, and shot duration contributed to its affective charge; and I posed a series of sub-questions to guide my investigation of the initial research questions. What are the expectations for how the Afro-Caribbean children of economic migrants from the Commonwealth should behave? What cultural work does this private space enact for these gathered bodies as the music enraptures them? Which modes of freedom can they imagine, experience, and anticipate during the ‘space of a song’ (Dyer 2012, 56)? The epigraphic exercise also limited manipulation of the sequence’s visuals to using ‘two different types of transitions or effects’ and causing the quotation to ‘appear onscreen in some dynamic interaction with the video’ (Grant 2023, slide 10). These constraints on how I could modify McQueen’s visuals provided a unique opportunity to use the doubled tonearm to foreshadow the dancers’ ecstatic states and the floating ‘to be beside oneself’ epigraphic excerpt to explore and respond to the key tensions raised by these sub-questions.

Until the ‘Kunta Kinte’ sequence, McQueen’s film presented a series of culturally specific and universally recognizable exchanges that one might expect to see at a house party. We understand Lovers Rock to celebrate Black belonging and resilience explicitly. However, the interlude depicting this masculinized collective’s passionate bodily and vocal call-and-responses complicates this understanding. This arrangement of Black men (and two women) is inadvertently implicated in a long history of antiblack representation in ways the romantic images preceding the sequence are not. As scholars of slavery and its afterlives have noted, images of Black subjection have played and continue to play an integral role in preserving racial hierarchies and failures to see blackness otherwise (Bogle 2001; Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010; Page 2022). Despite McQueen’s careful work, the Kunta Kinte dancers’ bodies are, therefore, also subject to unconscious anti-Black viewing and interpreting practices that read Black male presence and movements as potentially aggressive, dangerous, and violent.

I use the floating epigraphic excerpt to consider what it means for McQueen to use these dancers’ ecstatic movements to extend the notion of community depicted in earlier scenes. As the camera oscillates between the DJs and the crowd, the excerpt hovers over the dancers’ expressions of passion, rage, grief, and joy. This pairing of onscreen text with McQueen’s images asks us to reexamine our thinking about the presumed oppositions of the dancers’ ecstatic affects—which can be read as aggressive—and the film’s focus on Black joy to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the community's role in black liberation. However, this impulse to use onscreen text to emphasize communality between these characters, many of whom are men, and disrupt the violence of conventional antiblack viewing practices could be misread as a gesture invested in “humanizing” Black bodies which are often spectacularized through images linking blackness with criminality, suffering, and death. But my interests here lie in how the floating text draws our gaze to their pleasurable self/other-recognition so we see them seeing and delighting in each other. The excerpt directs our looking to produce new knowledge about the small decisions and ordinary exchanges that support the development of resilience.

Another research method involves using a “chopped and screwed” style of remixing, famously attributed to DJ Screw, to create a sonic palimpsest of Pathé newsreel clips that make sensible these modes of freedom and economies of Black diasporic containment. While my approach to this third sub-question extends the film’s nod to hip-hop’s West Indian roots, these sonic interventions offer another vantage point for understanding Black diasporic community as simultaneously past, present, and future. Turning my attention to the mass migration of West Indian labourers to rebuild Britain in the post-World War II period, I considered the Trinidadian calypso singer Lord Kitchener’s impromptu performance of ‘London is the Place for Me’ for reporters upon his 1948 arrival on the SS Empire Windrush. By ‘chopping’ (isolating and repeating) the first line of this song, I aim to invite viewers to consider the promises and failures of the British Nationality Act (1948) for the Windrush generation and its descendants through overlapping multiple temporalities that include diegetic time, the Windrush Scandal and subsequent independent review (i.e., 1948, 1980, 2018, 2020). In so doing, these sonic interventions highlight the role of black diasporic community across generations in the ongoing project of black liberation and imaginatively produce a longer view of community that builds on and extends McQueen’s work.

In the second Pathé clip, ‘screwing’ (slowing down) the reporter’s claims about the non-effects of Black migration on white employment marshal these multiple temporalities to emphasize the heavy, oppressive registers of antiblack and anti-immigration fears and their persistence across time. I regard this slowness, this distortion, as a vehicle for phenomenological experimentation, to note the temporal constitution of slow state violence. Rather than repeat this technique in the video essay’s final use of a Pathé recording, I juxtapose its interviewee’s claims of Black labour migrants’ desires for peaceful societal integration with the dancers’ raised fists to emphasize the political charge of this moment. It’s important to note that Lovers Rock already establishes the characters’ radicalism through this musical choice, especially given the song title’s homage to the heroic protagonist of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976). In my view, using videographic techniques to situate this radical act and its musical accompaniment within the context of Lord Kitchener’s lyrical declaration of belonging, fears about the impacts of West Indian immigration on employment, and promises of smooth cultural assimilation reveals something profound about the characters’ complicated processes of self-location (Gilroy 1993). And with these careful interventions, we are left with an opportunity to remember the people represented by these defiant, hopeful expressions of a desire for liveable Black presents (pasts) and futures (presents) in Britain and across the diaspora.

Impact

While this video essay addresses a significant gap in scholarly videographic research on films featuring Black people and works by Black filmmakers to contribute to the field, its focus on the widely praised Lovers Rock also creates non-academic opportunities for future dissemination in public platforms such as film festivals and social media. I anticipate presenting this creative research project alongside my other videographic investigations of Black joy and ecstasy in narrative film to invite viewers to think expansively about the politics and aesthetics of what Tina Campt has called the ‘historical and contemporary archive of Black life’ (2021, p. 20).

References

Abdur-Rahman, A. I. (2018) ‘The Black Ecstatic’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 24 (2-3), pp. 343-365.

Bogle, D. (2001) Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Campt, T. (2021) A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Dyer, R. (2012) In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film. London: Routledge.

Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.

Grant, C. (2023) “Exercise #3 – Videographic Epigraph.” Scholarship in Sound and Image: Workshop on Videographic Criticism at Middlebury College. June 21, 2023.

Haley, A. (1976) Roots: The Saga of an American Family. New York: Doubleday.

Hartman, S. (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Keathley, C., Mittell, J., & Grant, C. (2019) The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. Available from http://videographicessay.org.

Mirzoeff, N. (2011) The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. London: Duke University Press.

Page, A. (2022) Media and the Affective Life of Slavery. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sharpe, C. (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. London: Duke University Press.

Vanity Fair (2024) ‘Q & A with Steve McQueen.’ Vanity Fair [online]. Available from https://www.vanityfair.com/sponsored/story/q-and-a-with-steve-mcqueen. [Accessed 15 July 2024]

Wilderson, F. (2010) Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press.

Filmography

Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, 2020, UK).

Our Jamaican Problem (British Pathé, 1955, UK). Available from https://youtu.be/A2VyKtfByXk?si=5_mnJlWXj7wrkeNt&t=1. [Accessed June 20, 2023]

Pathé Reporter Meets (British Pathé, 1948, UK). Available from https://youtu.be/QDH4IBeZF-M?si=TFgF1XKL9lK4WZiT. [Accessed June 20, 2023]

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement (these should be outlined in detail in the review).

Watching Desirée de Jesús’s The Black Ecstatic (2024) without reading her film’s corresponding statement, I determined that she wanted to spotlight the way West Indians in Britain found joy in an antiblack world. The filmmaker, using visuals from Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock (2020) and sound from British Pathé newsreels, created an experimental project that linked what was happening in Britain from the beginning of West Indians’ en masse arrival after the Second World War to the period when McQueen’s film was set, the late 1970s, early 1980s. Viewing the film without having read de Jesús’s corresponding statement, I felt like there was a disconnect between McQueen’s visuals that show men dancing in an aggressive almost violent manner at a party, and the added sound clips from Pathé. The disconnect, I think, came from my thoughts on intellectual property. In de Jesús’s remix, other than the addition of text, the visuals were presented exactly as they were in the film, in other words, she made no attempt to manipulate the images she used. Nevertheless, the inclusion of sound from Pathé juxtaposed against the partying men, in my opinion, made a powerful assertion about expectations and perceptions. I gathered from the film that the good life West Indians sought in the UK was far from the life they lived there and the joy they found was entirely wrapped up in the West Indian culture and music they left behind in their pursuit of that good life. The partying men in Lovers Rock were in a bubble, separate from the troubles of the real world and they were ecstatic. Now that I have also read the filmmaker’s accompanying statement I can confidently say that de Jesús was successful in her aim to use sound to activate a reflexive mode in her audience when drawing attention to the ambition and the treatment of the West Indian diaspora in Britain. 

An essential part of the methodology in practice-based research involves the creation of an artwork in the investigation of the research question which, can lead to new insights. Embedded in one of de Jesús’s methods is the claim to a power in the text that she has added to McQueen’s visuals. She writes that it should lead the viewer to reflect on the community’s role  in black liberation. But that is the thesis of McQueen’s Small Axe anthology. His films assert that the West Indian community in Britain are the heroes in their own stories, where they liberated themselves from within the constraints of Britain’s antiblack boxes. de Jesús cannot take credit for that. However, her research questions do explore sound design and practice in a way that could only be determined by the creation of The Black Ecstatic. Because de Jesús’s inquiry focuses on sound and the self-referent nature of the medium, her film effectively exposes ways sound, as a creative digital research practice, allows the viewer to consider, recall and uncover diasporic histories. It is not so much a new insight but it is a rarely told one.

Review 2: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

This videographic essay presents a compelling concept that effectively draws viewers into its central themes through a well-chosen visual sequence that anchors the work. The exploration of the "black ecstatic" weaves together discussions on joy, resilience, and the black experience within the context of a moving-image framework. It thoughtfully connects these themes to the visual work of Steve McQueen, engaging in a nuanced dialogue about the black gaze and McQueen’s unique contributions. The essay approaches this dialogue in an innovative and thought-provoking manner.

The integration of audio with the visual track broadens the exploration of black experience, particularly within the black British context. Music, a significant aspect of black identity, is skillfully employed in the piece, complemented by the use of Pathé archival material. This strategy powerfully underscores the historical portrayal of blackness as "otherness." The inclusion of calypso music further enriches the narrative, evoking for me Fred Moten’s analysis of calypso within the black diaspora and perhaps its displacement in the British context is a further area of research. The essay opens avenues for further exploration of black British music heritage and its influence on global perceptions of blackness, aligning with the writings of Jeffrey Boakye and others who highlight black music's contributions to mainstream narratives of black British history and culture.

The interplay between text—both spoken and written—and the visual track could be expanded to further emphasize the notion of the ecstatic. McQueen’s work exists within a continuum of significant black filmmakers and collectives, including the Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa, Maureen Blackwood, John Akomfrah, and Isaac Julien who have in different ways, disrupted the audio-visual tracks. The essay gestures toward articulating what sets McQueen’s aesthetic apart, particularly in the context of long-form storytelling, but this point could be more fully developed. Ultimately, the essay's strength lies in its ability to bring together visual representations of black joy, ecstasy, and resilience as an archive of black life and experience. While historical examples like Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898) provide early cinematic glimpses of black joy, they lack the dimension of black authorship that this essay engages with. By addressing the gaps in the archival record of black life, this work contributes meaningfully to a growing conversation about the representation and preservation of black experiences.

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response