Wynter Film Theory Essay

In applying for the Sylvia Wynter Graduate Fellowship, my area of interest is film theory, especially as it is challenged by the work of Sylvia Wynter. Wynter’s work challenges us, as diasporic people of African descent, to create unique stories, and to approach them as “new ceremonies.” In cinema, Wynter’s challenge is primed to authorize the film scholar to approach other ways of performing humanness as a verb, and to find inventive ways of implementing humanness as a creative and biographic practice. As a student, I have noted that a large segment of African American film scholars are both resistant and dismissive of the film theory that is integral to the success and continuance of Black independent film study. It is my contention that …show more content…
These structural conversations, lodged in race, gender, and sexuality, covering aspects of spectatorship, narrative, characterization, exhibition, technology, directorial and editorial authority, all work to build an accessible, interactive, multidisciplinary tool for the study of Black independent film, covering the fifty-year period extending from 1967 to 2017, with the potential for extension into a bold and ongoing cinematic future. Focused on Black film theory, with the aim of exploring how ontological conceptions of “the human” and the press and direction of whiteness are inseparable, given the dominant conceptions and categories of human – as duly critiqued by post-informed theories, posthumanisms, new materialisms, and some ecologies – all generally articulated around whiteness, heterosexism, ablisim, and profound Eurocentrism, this project will be available for individual and classroom