Cinema of Black Protest

The histories of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence continue to shape the present, even as narratives of racial progress insist that these issues no longer exist. Contemporary Black filmmakers have found a powerful way to expose this contradiction: by disrupting time itself. In films where police killings repeat in endless loops, slavery persists in the present, and revolutionary movements offer possibilities for future liberation, time becomes a way of representing the ongoing realities of anti-Black violence as well as possibilities of resistance. Cinema of Black Protest examines how Black filmmakers use temporal disruptions to challenge America's preferred racial timeline. Matt Richardson develops the concept of "Black Time," in which past and present coexist, through close readings of films including Body Cam, Alice, Judas and the Black Messiah, and Moonlight. Richardson centers Black queer and trans perspectives that offer alternatives to linear narratives of progress and carceral time. Cinema of Black Protest shows how cinema can make visible the temporal realities of racial violence—and imagine forms of Black life and liberation that refuse the constraints of the past, present, and future as conventionally understood.