Visitation
The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema
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Book Presentation:
In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue shows how Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers draw from historical archives in order to visualize and reckon with violence suffered by Black women in the United States. DeClue argues that these filmmakers--including Kara Walker, Kara Lynch, Tourmaline, and Ja'Tovia Gary--create spaces of mourning and reckoning rather than voyeurism and pornotropy. Through their use of editing, performance, and cinematic experimentation, these filmmakers intervene in the production of Blackness and activate new ways of seeing Black women and telling their stories. Theorizing these films as a form of conjure work, DeClue shows how these filmmakers raise the specters of Black women from the past and invite them to reveal history from their point of view. In so doing, Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers channel spirits that haunt archives and create cinematic arenas for witnessing Black women battling for survival during pivotal and exceedingly violent moments in US history.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient.
About the Author:
Jennifer DeClue is Associate Professor of the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College.
Press Reviews:
"Jennifer DeClue’s original study centers the ‘shifting ground of many pasts . . . where the embodied and disembodied meet.’ Visitation honors Black feminist artists whose avant garde films are revealed to be conjure work. A transformative, vital work." - Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University
"Jennifer DeClue’s Visitation powerfully and imaginatively turns to the works of Black women filmmakers to point to the alternative archives that their films produce, archives that counter the histories that are recorded and solemnized in official repositories. This is a must-read text for all of us." - Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale University
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