Born November 30, 1960 in Tupelo, Mississippi, Arthur Jafa is widely known for his work on Daughters of the Dust (1991), Crooklyn (1994), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Shadows of Liberty (2012), Dreams Are Colder Than Death (2013), and Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016). As a cinematographer, Arthur Jafa's experimentation in film has worked to expand the field of Afro-Surrealism and Afrofuturism by introducing the idea of "the alien familiar," as a way of representing the Black experience, and its innate surreal characteristics. As a theorist, his work argues for representations of Blackness through well-substantiated traditions and cultural expectations of the natural world, confirmed through observation and experiment.
Arthur Jafa
(1953 - )
To express the idea that the past is constant but not immutable, and able to impart meaning to present day (and future) experience, Jafa uses movement of camera and subjects, emotional and physical color and echo, and a focus on traditional black folk culture to express the alien aspects of the black experience as the relationship between the sets of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in the particular syntactic roles of Afro-Surrealism. Believing that if a work is meant to succeed in its ability to call upon a black ontology, or the essential spirit and soul of blackness to manifest itself, Jafa
holds that a hypothetical manifestation of the particular tradition of Afro-Surrealism, in the cinematic arena, should be "...both alien because you’ve never seen anything quite like it, and at the same time, it should be familiar on some level to black audiences." *
Afro-Surrealism is interested in the actions of life and how race, an arbitrary social construct, has real-life effects and restructures contemporary moments. Afro-Surrealism centers racial trauma and the psychology of coping with that trauma at the heart of its narratives demonstrate that while racism is very real in its impact and consequences, race itself is arbitrary. Afro-Surrealism recognizes the position of race, when viewed from different historical moments or different geographical locations, and the fluidity of who is considered to be “black” or “of color.” This clash between real-life racism and the invented idea of race means there’s almost always an element of absurdity in the Afro-Surreal text.
Jafa's work also features aspects of Afro futurism as a cultural aesthetic, working to interpret scientific and historic philosophies, combining elements of fiction, fantasy, Afrocentrism, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies to critique not only the present-day black experiences, but to also revise, interrogate, and re-examine historical events.
* Arthur Jafa, “The Notion of Treatment: Black Aesthetics and Film, based on an interview with Peter Hassli and additional discussions with Pearl Bowser,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, ed. Pearl Bowser et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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Considers Afro futurism and Afro-Surrealism as artistic tools for the critique of present-day and future dilemmas of black people, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine historical events.
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Considers the creation of complex personifications of one’s (Black) self while resisting the reductive mechanisms that strive to constrain any non-white (and non-male) subject resistant to privileging hegemonic modes of artists discourse.
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Visits notions of critical race theory, as a way of examining society and culture with regard to the relationships of race, law, and power, over time.
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Directly responsible for theorizing the idea of Black Visual Intonation (BVI), in which the movement and filming of Black bodies respond improvisational to cinematic reproduction.
RELATED STUDY NOTES
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Afro-Surrealism (or Afrosurrealism) -- a literary and cultural aesthetic response to mainstream surrealism that reflects the lived experience of people of color. Coined by Amiri Baraka, this movement focuses on the present day experience of African Americans.
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Afro Futurism -- the term was first used by author, lecturer, and cultural critic Mark Dery, in 1993. Afrofuturism addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through a technoculture and science fiction lens, with an interest in envisioning black futures coming out of diasporic experiences.
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.Intersectionality -- the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.