Julianna Blair Watson

This project examines aesthetics of self-representation across Anglophone and Francophone Africa and their diasporas in the cinema of Raoul Peck. Through a transnational, transcultural and translingual reading of Peck’s films on Haiti, the Congo, Rwanda, and the U.S., the project argues that Peck enacts a new mode of representing Blackness, enabling each iteration of the African diaspora to speak its own (hi)stories to and through one another. This cinematic dialogue performs a transnational Black consciousness that defies borders and creates a space for justice and contrapuntal responses to anti-Blackness narratives. This grant will support summer salary for research and writing.