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Conjuring Caliban's Woman: Moving beyond Cinema's Memory of Man in Praise House (1991)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2021

Ayanna Dozier
Ayanna Dozier*
Affiliation:
Communication and Media Studies Department, Fordham University, 441 East, Bronx, NY10458, USA
*
Corresponding author. [email protected]
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Abstract

Julie Dash's experimental short film, Praise House (1991), situates conjuring as both a narrative and formal device to invent new memories around Black womanhood that exceed our representation within the epistemes of Man. I view Praise House as an example of conjure-cinema with which we can evaluate how Black feminist filmmakers, primarily working in experimental film, manipulate the poetic structure and aesthetics of film to affect audiences rather than rely on representational narrative alone. Following the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, I use Man to refer to the representational body of the Western episteme that defines value through mass accumulation. It is through Wynter's scholarship that we find the ontological emancipation from Man that is Caliban's woman, who represents discourse beyond our normative, colonial mode of feeling/knowing/being. Through an analysis of Praise House that foregrounds film's ability to generate affect via its aesthetics, this article argues that aesthetics can similarly enact the same power of conjure as found in Praise House's narrative, and as such conjures an epistemological rupture to our normative order that is Caliban's woman.

Type
Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Special Issue 3: Conjure Feminism: Tracing the Genealogy of a Black Women's Intellectual Tradition, Summer 2021 , Summer 2021 , pp. 503 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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