Love Visual

Love VisualA Conversation with Haile Gerima Sarah E. Lewis (bio), Dagmawi Woubshet (bio), and GerShun Avilez Click for larger view View full resolution Haile Gerima, Sarah E. Lewis, and Dagmawi Woubshet Callaloo © 2012 Click for larger view View full resolution GerShun Avilez Callaloo © 2012 [End Page 634] Click for larger view View full resolution Tracy K. Smith Callaloo © 2012 Click for larger view View full resolution Thomas Sayers Ellis Callaloo © 2012 [End Page 635] AVILEZ: My name is GerShun Avilez. I teach English and African American studies at Yale University. Welcome back from lunch. And I am really excited about this panel because so far in this conference we’ve thought about the performative with love, the spirit with love, the written with love, and now we get to talk about the visual of love, maybe even more particularly given our last panel, the techno visual of love as we think about cinema and film in these conversations, adding to it. This panel I think is also exciting because it’s a conversation. We get, instead of just having a panel with simply respondents, to start with a conversation and then not just have respondents, but what I want to think of as interlocutors, further interlocutors, and we’re going to add to this conversation about film. So I think it’s kind of a special kind of moment for us. So the first part of this different kind of panel will be a conversation with Haile Gerima. Dagmawi Woubshet and Sarah Lewis are going to have that conversation before we move on to add other people to this conversation. So as I am sure you all well know, Haile Gerima is an Ethiopian filmmaker who’s most popular film is Sankofa, which he wrote, produced, and directed. Other films include Bush Mama, Imperfect Journey, Adwa, and Teza. He has won numerous national film awards. And we are actually just glad to have an artist of his esteem here with us today. And sitting beside him is Sarah Lewis, who is a faculty member at Yale School of Art, and she has a book under contract at Harvard University Press called Frederick Douglass, The Circassian Beauties, and American Racial Formation. And adding to that already really impressive description, Sarah has also worked at the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. So she is really someone who has seeped herself in the history of art and the history of thinking about race and art. And then beside Sarah, we have Dagmawi Woubshet who is an assistant professor at Cornell University and who has a book he is finishing called Looking for the Dead on AIDS discourse and the diaspora. So we will just get started and after we have our conversation, I will introduce the other respondents and we will keep adding to our discussion of Mr. Gerima’s work. So let’s get started. WOUBSHET: Thank you, GerShun. This is, for both Sarah and myself, a great privilege to be in conversation with Haile Gerima. We cannot think of another filmmaker who has managed to tell the stories of both continental Africans and Africans in the diaspora with such depth and texture, with such sophistication, with political force, and vision showing [End Page 636] us the universal in the particular. Sarah and I as friends, but also as interlocutors, it’s been incredibly generative for us over the past few weeks to go back and consider Haile Gerima’s corpus—this man has been making films since 1975, an incredible body of work—and to actually look at it with the optic of love. And I think it’s a fair statement to say that one can think of Haile Gerima’s work as a meditation on love. And I am reminded of a quote that Dr. Rowell mentioned yesterday in his opening remarks from Toni Morrison’s Paradise where she says, in that section on divine in that sermon, “love is divine only, difficult always.” And something that captures the work of Haile Gerima is that intersection that mixes the profane and the sacred. Love that is intimate and tender

Aesthetics · Art · Conversation · Literature · Performative utterance · Sociology · Visual arts · African history and culture studies · Cinema and Media Studies · Communication · South Asian Cinema and Culture