INTERSECTIONALIST

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. Intersectionality Matters! Accessed May 30, 2021. [podcast]

Crenshaw’s range of guests in this series demonstrates the wide relevance of intersectionality theory to contemporary topics that range as widely as voting rights, the music industry, ageism, white supremacy, and COVID. Crenshaw curates her discussions around the work of her guests and co-hosts and produces in-depth narrative explorations of different chapters both in US history and the history and contemporary understanding of intersectional questions themselves.

 “Each episode will explore a different topic or theme through an intersectional lens, ranging from the supreme court to grassroots activism in Brazil and the Congo to #SayHer Name and the future of the Me Too campaign.” [Episode Preview]

“This is an ideas travelogue - it lifts up the work of leading activists, artists, and scholars, and helps listeners understand politics, the law, social movements, and even their own lives in deeper, more nuanced ways.” [Episode 1]

Saidiya Hartman. “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.” Presented at the Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC, November 24, 2019. [lecture]

In this reading, Saidiya Hartman gives an introduction to the themes of her book, “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments”, and reads a passage of the book that illuminates its general narrative scope. Hartman also responds to a variety of questions on technology, media, image-making, and mobility, focusing on the relevance of cinema and the vision of black modern life. The relevance of photography and the foundation of narrative using photography is also discussed, as well as methods for organizing and re-reading historical accounts.

“Clearly what I’m talking about here is this revolution of Black intimate life between these years of 1890 and 1935 and that is basically the landscape of the book. I guess the essential paradox it’s exploring is this avid desire to make a different kind of life in the context of a new racial order being made, and a racial order that is going to be as punitive and restrictive as previous orders.”

 Tsang, Wu. Wildness. Documentary, 2012. [documentary] 

Wildness is a documentary about the lives and community associated with the Silver Platter bar, a historical nightclub that hosted the Latin/LBGT communities of LA since the early 1960s, and a weekly party called Wildness it hosted. It addresses the complex identities of the people who attended the nightclub and attempts to complexify the bar scene, straying from typical portrayals of a homogeneous community. The film all addresses questions of representation, of and by whom. The film uses a non-human narrator, positioning the bar itself as narrator in an attempt to create a non-hierarchical perspective.

“It's harder to convey in words what cinema makes possible: to show people as complexly layered as they are in real life. In the film, everyone has a different way of articulating these differences, depending on their point of view. I wanted to challenge the popular notion that "safe spaces" are utopic and homogenous, whereas in reality if they are to function, they must be risky and contested, even dangerous.”