Dreams are colder than Death and the Gathering of Black Sociality
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15415699 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alessandra Raengo (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 120-120 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Black Camera (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1536-3155 • E-ISSN: 1947-4237 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/blackcamera.8.2.07 |
| OpenAlex | W2613005267 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 3 |
While "Afro-Pessimist" scholars understand blackness under the rubric of "social death," the ascendance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement vindicates instead the opposing "Afro-Optimist" position, which affirms the generative capacity of black social life. Arthur Jafa's essay film Dreams are colder than Death (2013), a meditation on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, conducted through interviews with African-American intellectuals and artists, examines this tension. Woven together with lyrical, slow-motion images of unnamed black people, of water, and of cosmological images of deep space, these voices reflect on the ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the concept of the human. Eventually, through the words of Fred Moten, the film questions the possibility to love black people once blackness is solely understood within the "afterlife of slavery." This essay reads the film's edits as "passages" that effectively perform the very networks of solidarity, grief, and grievance sought by #BlackLivesMatter as the evidence of such love. Through its aesthetic liquidity, i.e., the film's facility to move across scale, from the minute to the cosmological, from the familial to the collective, and the way it disjoins some of the very conditions for black surveillance—voices strategically recorded independently from the image; faces hardly visible because shot against intense light sources—the film claims for blackness the expansiveness that institutes radical networks of black love
Aesthetics · Afterlife · Art · Literature · Political science · Reincarnation · Sociology · Solidarity · Spectacle · Theology · Critical Race Theory in Education · Gender Studies · Law · Music History and Culture · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.8 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |