This is a study of the cinematic traditions and film practices in the black Diaspora. With contributions by film scholars, film critics, and film-makers from Europe, North America and the Third World, this diverse collection provides a critical reading of film-making in the black Diaspora that challenges the assumptions of colonialist and ethnocentrist discourses about Third World, Hollywood and European cinemas. Cinemas of the Black Diaspora examines the impact on film-making of Western culture, capitalist production and distribution methods, and colonialism and the continuing neo-colonial status of the people and countries in which film-making is practiced. Organized in three parts, the study first explores cinema in the black Diaspora along cultural and political lines, analyzing the works of a radical and aesthetically alternative cinema. The book proceeds to group black cinemas by geographical sites, including Africa, the Caribbean and South America, Europe, and North America, to provide global context for comparative and case study analyses. Finally, three important manifestoes document the political and economic concerns and counter-hegemonic institutional organizing efforts of black and Third World film-makers from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Cinemas of the Black Diaspora should serve as a valuable basic reference and research tool for the study of world cinema. While celebrating the diversity, innovativeness, and fecundity of film-making in different regions of the world, this important collection also explicates the historical importance of film-making as a cultural form and political practice.

In Queer African Cinemas, Lindsey B. Green-Simms examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in an environment of increasing antiqueer violence, efforts to criminalize homosexuality, and other state-sanctioned homophobia. Green-Simms argues that these films not only record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience; they highlight how queer African cinematic practices contribute to imagining new hopes and possibilities. Examining globally circulating international art films as well as popular melodramas made for local audiences, Green-Simms emphasizes that in these films queer resistance—contrary to traditional narratives about resistance that center overt and heroic struggle—is often practiced from a position of vulnerability. By reading queer films alongside discussions about censorship and audiences, Green-Simms renders queer African cinema as a rich visual archive that documents the difficulty of queer existence as well as the potentials for queer life-building and survival.

Generating a new understanding of the past—as well as a vision for the future—this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."

Contemporary Black American Cinema offers a fresh collection of essays on African American film, media, and visual culture in the era of global multiculturalism. Integrating theory, history, and criticism, the contributing authors deftly connect interdisciplinary perspectives from American studies, cinema studies, cultural studies, political science, media studies, and Queer theory. This multidisciplinary methodology expands the discursive and interpretive registers of film analysis. From Paul Robeson’s and Sidney Poitier’s star vehicles to Lee Daniels’s directorial forays, these essays address the career legacies of film stars, examine various iterations of Blaxploitation and animation, question the comedic politics of "fat suit" films, and celebrate the innovation of avant-garde and experimental cinema.

Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood’s constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking. Foster provides a voice for Black and Asian women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asian women filmmakers. She also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian filmmakers. Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, "one of a growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are actively constructing [in the words of bell hooks] ‘an oppositional gaze’"; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British Black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity; cultural displacement, lesbianism, and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the "voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker"; and Mira Nair, a Black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.

From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance. Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular culture, and Western modernity's racial underpinnings, Volume 2 contains three interviews with Hall, in which he reflects on his life to theorize his identity as a colonial and diasporic subject.

In the twenty-first century, American popular culture increasingly makes visible the performance of African spirituality by black women. Disney’s Princess and the Frog and Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are two notable examples. The reliance on the black priestess of African-derived religion as an archetype, however, has a much longer history steeped in the colonial othering of Haitian Vodou and American imperialist fantasies about so-called ‘black magic’. Within this cinematic study, Martin unravels how religious autonomy impacts the identity, function, and perception of Africana women in the American popular imagination. Martin interrogates seventy-five years of American film representations of black women engaged in conjure, hoodoo, obeah, or Voodoo to discern what happens when race, gender, and African spirituality collide. She develops the framework of Voodoo aesthetics, or the inscription of African cosmologies on the black female body, as the theoretical lens through which to scrutinize black female religious performance in film. Martin places the genre of film in conversation with black feminist/womanist criticism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis. Positioning the black priestess as another iteration of Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images, Martin theorizes whether film functions as a safe space for a racial and gendered embodiment in the performance of African diasporic religion. Approaching the close reading of eight signature films from a black female spectatorship, Martin works chronologically to express the trajectory of the black priestess as cinematic motif over the last century of filmmaking. Conceptually, Martin recalibrates the scholarship on black women and representation by distinctly centering black women as ritual specialists and Black Atlantic spirituality on the silver screen.