Episodes
Aurelia Belfield
Episode 47: Magic Mike 2: Sisterhood of the ...
Episode 47: Magic Mike 2: Sisterhood of the Traveling Thongs
Essays
Aurelia Belfield
My Depression is Like.

My depression and anxiety has manifested itself in a number of self-hating and harmful ways and it becomes easy to convince myself that my appearance is what’s wrong. I recognize that at the root it is often about me not being enough and a desire to somehow become someone other than who I am. It’s easier to believe that my thighs or my skin or my stomach or my hair is what’s causing me so much grief than to confront the fact that something real is wrong and that something is beyond my control.

My Depression is Like.
Interviews
Aurelia Belfield
Filling the gaps with "Strolling": an interview ...

In an interview for Film Comment, French director Axelle Ropert said that as a director she made films that she felt were missing as a spectator- that she was filling gaps. Though Ropert wasn't talking about racial representation (or the lack thereof), it is the same impulse that prompted UK-based visual artist Cecile Emeke to create Strolling, a series of short documentaries in which the director herself goes on a walk with beautiful black Londoners to talk about various issues ranging from free tampons to European colonization. She took some of her time to answer our questions about this brilliant series and her upcoming short "Ackee & Saltfish." — interviewed by Fanta

Filling the gaps with "Strolling": an interview with Cecile Emeke

Interviews

An Interview With Dear Kate Models Roxanne & Ty

An Interview With Dear Kate Models Roxanne & Ty

You’ve listened to our chat with Dear Kate founder and chief creative officer, Julie Sygiel, and heard how we fell in love with the different shapes, sizes, and stories of women brave enough to strip down to their underwear to model the different Dear Kate styles on the website. We were lucky enough to speak with two of those models: Ty Alexander, the creator of beauty and lifestyle blog Gorgeous In Grey, and Golly magazine founder and editor-in-chief, Roxanne Fequiere. Here’s what they had to say about representation in media, beauty icons, and of course, underwear.

Grime, Black British identity & Kanye's Brit Awards Performance: an interview with Rianna Jade Parker & Selina Thompson

Grime, Black British identity & Kanye's Brit Awards Performance: an interview with Rianna Jade Parker & Selina Thompson

I was curious about people’s thoughts on Kanye’s Brit Awards performance last week and took to Twitter to hear about people’s reactions, which resulted in some great responses. I also had a chance to check in with the lovely Selina Thompson and Rianna Jade Parker and get their thoughts on the performance, Black British identity, diaspora, and the importance of disrupting white spaces. - Fatima

Visual Representations of Nature and Blackness: an interview with Naima Green

Visual Representations of Nature and Blackness: an interview with Naima Green

In his essay The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media, Stuart Hall posits that through the production and propagation of images, the media creates representations of our social worlds and functions as a significant means of ideological proliferation. These ideologies serve to inform us ‘how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work.’ Hall suggests that we construct our understanding of ourselves within these ideologies, and that they enable us to make sense of our societies and our positions within them, noting that ideologies become naturalized and ideological representations masquerade as common sense so that constructed representations are understood to be natural. Within the larger ideological struggle of representation, Hall states that said ideological imagery is resisted through social and political struggle and practice. Visual representations of Blackness in its entirety remain a site of ideological struggle, as persistent ideologically-motivated images of Blackness construct and frame our understandings of what it means to be Black the world over. However, just as media is a site for the construction of racial ideologies, it is also one for the reconstruction, transformation and articulation of imagery that challenges these ideas. I spoke to photographer Naima Green, whose photography series Jewels from the Hinterland does just that. We discussed her intentional approach to representing young Black people in her series as she explores imagery of her subjects engaging with nature, and her interest in challenging perceptions about Blackness and identity through this series. - Fatima

NAKEYA BROWN: Post "good hair" & the rituals of black girlhood

NAKEYA BROWN: Post "good hair" & the rituals of black girlhood

In 2009, a documentary called Good Hair directed by stand-up comedian Chris Rock was released to critical acclaim and became a systematic reference when it came to understanding what’s up with black women’s hair. The documentary is never mentioned in the following interview with New York-based photographer Nakeya Brown, whose first installment is entitled “The Refutation of Good Hair,” but one can't help but think of the documentary when encountering the work of Brown. Like Chris Rock, Nakeya Brown was inspired by her daughter, but her work is more sensible, more empathetic, because it is more curious. Her new work, characterized by a softness and sensitivity – two qualities not largely associated with black girls and women – paints a portrait of black girlhood through hair rituals, objects and cultural icons in hues of mustard, pink and blue. Nakeya Brown’s work is a refreshing, atypical and quietly radical exploration of black girlhood through hair. - interviewed by Fanta, edited by Fatima

Filling the gaps with "Strolling": an interview with Cecile Emeke

Filling the gaps with "Strolling": an interview with Cecile Emeke

In an interview for Film Comment, French director Axelle Ropert said that as a director she made films that she felt were missing as a spectator- that she was filling gaps. Though Ropert wasn't talking about racial representation (or the lack thereof), it is the same impulse that prompted UK-based visual artist Cecile Emeke to create Strolling, a series of short documentaries in which the director herself goes on a walk with beautiful black Londoners to talk about various issues ranging from free tampons to European colonization. She took some of her time to answer our questions about this brilliant series and her upcoming short "Ackee & Saltfish." — interviewed by Fanta

The Future Weird: an interview with Derica Shields

The Future Weird: an interview with Derica Shields

BLACK GIRLS TALKING: Remote Control is the fifth installment of THE FUTURE WEIRD after Non-Resident Aliens, Supra-Planetary Sovereigns and Visions of Excess. Can you talk about this project and what the inspiration was behind it?

DERICA SHIELDS: The Future Weird was born in July 2013 and there have been five programs: Visions of Excess; In Search of a Black Atlantis; Supra-planetary Sovereigns collaboration with Spectacle Theater); Remote Control; and Non-Resident Aliens.

The Future Weird emerged from a number of desires. I’d been wanting to do a screening series for a really long time. There were so many films by black and brown directors which I’d heard about but couldn’t find anywhere, or which I had seen and thought were interesting but they had not secured distribution. So one aim was just to screen these films because they weren’t readily available online or in theatres.

When I thinking about the screenings, I was keen to get away from a tendency I’d noticed to treat African film as though it’s a genre. I’m increasingly compelled by the move to theorise from the global south, rather than the north/West and wanted to have a space where we could privilege the conversations among black and brown people, without the constant reference to whiteness that emerges as a norm in white dominated spaces. So the screenings are organised thematically, and in that way, they tend to follow certain trains of thought or circle around ideas. “In Search of a Black Atlantis” came out of thinking I’d been doing while at grad school and before, since I’ve long been obsessed with water as a site of black cultural memory, loss, forgetting and rebirth. The films look at water as a cleansing force, what returns to us in the water as detritus, and as a site of myth too - black mermaids, mami water, drexciya/atlantis.

Another reason was that I’d moved to New York and it was lonely. I wanted to find people I could talk with about the things I was thinking about. In some part I also wanted to watch these films with other people rather than have this atomized YouTube viewing experience.