Reclaiming Black Film and Media Studies

Historically, the study of the idea of black film has been a fraught, insightful, and generative enterprise--be it a matter of industrial capital and its delimitation of film practice in terms of profit, or the tendency to insist that the "black" of black film be only a biological determinant and never a formal proposition. In many ways, the black film as an object of study mirrors the history of America, the history of an idea of race. While the field continues to shift and change, and the study of black film becomes more common, it is often still tokenized by the industry. For far too long, both the academic and popular study of black film and media studies has focused too narrowly on the mere presence of black bodies both in front of and behind the camera. Black bodies do not equal blackness. Blackness does not necessarily equal black liberation or recuperation.