Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics
African Spirituality in American Cinema
By (author) Kameelah L. Martin
Publication date:
30 September 2016Length of book:
256 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498523288
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.
Overall, with Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics Martin offers a strong resource for both research and classroom usage. Her writing style and narrative voice invite the reader to engage with the presented material in an enjoyable and thoughtful manner. There are vivid descriptions of the cinematic elements and imagery under evaluation, accompanied by rigorous unpacking of those sequences. Additionally, when needed Martin includes visual stills from the films to further clarify the imagery and her perspectives. Martin constructs a narrative space that allows the reader to follow along with her critical viewing, whether or not one has seen the specific film in question. . . Martin’s methodology offers other scholars a template on how to engage the existing stereotypes of non-Protestant Christian religious representation in cinematic and popular culture that are rooted in historical perspectives that perpetuate racist and sexist tropes created by nonpractitioners of that religious practice.