Welcome to Black Life in 2021!
We return to you after respite energized and ready to share once more. Below you’ll find our offerings including a BAMFA conversation we, Ryanaustin and Ruth, will be holding later this month. Scroll on…
Curator Circle Presented by BAMPFA Curator's Circle and Black Life
From BAMPFA: We are pleased to announce the first installation of our monthly conversation series for Curator’s Circle members in 2021. We are resuming this collection of online events offering insights from and Q and As with our curators.
Our inaugural 2021 event on Thursday, January 28, is a collaboration between Curator's Circle and Black Life with BAMPFA Guest Curators Ryanaustin Dennis and Ruth Gebreyesus. Please join us online at 4 PM (PST).
RSVP, as space is limited. You will receive an email with a secure event link on January 22.
BAMPFA Recommendation:
Mandabi (The Money Order)
Ousmane Sembène
Senegal, 1968Available January 22
“Ousmane Sembène’s second feature is a folk comedy set in contemporary Dakar. Ibrahima Dieng (Mamadou Guye) is a middle-aged Muslim man with two wives and seven children. One day he receives a money order from his nephew in Paris, with specific instructions for the division and use of the funds. However, news of the money order spreads quickly through the neighborhood, and soon Ibrahima’s home is filled with interested parties. Before he can collect the cash, Ibrahima is forced to wade through many layers of bureaucratic red tape. “Sembène’s approach is spare, laconic, slightly ironic, and never patronizing” (Roger Greenspun, New York Times). Mandabi is Sembène’s first film shot in Wolof, the mother tongue of the majority of Senegalese. This choice encouraged other African filmmakers to work with local vernacular languages as distinct from French or other languages brought to Africa by former colonial rulers. The film received the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival.” — Susan Oxtoby
BLACK ART MIXTAPE: KEEPING THE CUSTOMER SATISFIED #7
Marsha Hunt - Keep the Customer Satisfied
Marsha is happy to be there, but what can you do? A gig is a gig. Being a musician is work and sometimes you just gotta make it work. Black people aren’t always spectacular and this video reminds me that when taken out of our context we don’t always translate well nor do we want to be.
Marsha Hunt - Desdemona
3. Marsha Hunt - Walk on glided Splinters (1969)
Marsha Hunt (live in the UK, 1971)
Joy James: The Architects of Abolitionism
Here is a clip that starts at James’s theory on the captive maternal. Transcript from this section below:
“I'm totally fascinated by the notion of an ungendered phenomenon whose generative powers have been stolen by the state. But this is the persona that, if you call them at 2:00 in the morning because you're just crying on the floor in your bathroom, they will come over and get you. Like, this is a captive maternal that allows your nervous system to function and for you to show up in these wretched schools…[any] kind of schools that denigrate you and don't give you a real education or these jobs where you're laboring in these, like, factories where you get damaged or poisoned. But here's our bind. We keep our communities functioning because we love them. We will not abandon them, even when they turn on us, because we love them, and the state uses that labor to stabilize itself.
Because we keep our communities from going crazy, just like they kept us from going crazy. And that labor is expropriated by the state. So now I'm like, so what's next for the captive maternal? Like, what's the exit plan? Like, you're not going to leave your community behind, and you're not going to stop helping and nurturing and healing. But every time we stabilize, they build upon that stability and enforce another form of theft--trauma, time theft, loss--for productivity to a state that you find, you know, horrific.”
The entirety of this presentation from Joy James should be taken in over the course of a day, of two days. Repeated twice at least. Hold Joy James’s generosity.
Take Good Care,
Ruth + Ryanaustin