QUICK TAKES

MOVIES & POPULAR CULTURE

—Allyson Nadia Field, co-editor of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema

Looking at everything from classic movies like James Whale’s e Old Dark House to contemporary works like Hereditary, e Conjuring, and the Net ix series e Haunting of Hill House Dahlia Schweitzer explores why haunted homes have become a prime stage for dramatizing anxieties about family, gender, race, and economic collapse.

DAHLIA SCHWEITZER is an associate professor of lm and media at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Her many books include L.A. Private Eyes and Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (both Rutgers University Press).

A volume in the Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture series, edited by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Wheeler Winston Dixon.

“Christina N. Baker offers an engaging study on the vibrant and, yet, overlooked contributions of Black women directors. With astute and accessible prose, Baker deftly reveals a rich cinema history that highlights forgotten, groundbreaking, independent, and mainstream Black women lmmakers. This compact and resourceful text will inform and inspire.”

—Samantha N. Sheppard, author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen

BAKER Black Women Directors

Black Women Director s

CHRISTINA N. BAKER

“This eloquently written book is an essential read for those who want to learn about Black women behind the camera. Baker skillfully weaves Black feminist theory with the ideals and goals of Black women directors from the beginnings of cinema to contemporary times. Her careful consideration of how pioneer Kathleen Collins in uenced the women of the LA Rebellion and Ava DuVernay is thoughtful and illuminating.” www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

—Zeinabu irene Davis, Professor and Independent Filmmaker, University of California, San Diego

Black women have long recognized the power of lm for storytelling. For far too long, however, the cultural and historical narratives about lm have not accounted for the contributions of Black women directors. This book remedies this omission by highlighting the trajectory of the culturally signi cant work of Black women directors in the U.S., from the under-examined pioneers of the silent era, to the documentarians who sought to highlight the voices and struggles of Black women, and the contemporary Black women directors in Hollywood. Applying a Black feminist perspective, this book examines the ways that Black women lmmakers have made a way for themselves and their work by resisting the dominant cultural expectations for Black women and for the medium of lm, as a whole.

CHRISTINA N. BAKER is an associate professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance (2018) and the editor of Kasi Lemmons: Interviews (2020).

Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture

96 pp 4.5 x 7

978-1-9788-1333-5 paper $17.95T

978-1-9788-1334-2 cloth $65.00SU

March 2022

Film and Media Studies

African American Studies • Women’s Studies

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Recognizing the Pioneers

2. Women of the L.A. Rebellion

3. Moving into the Mainstream

4. More than Mainstream

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Selected Filmography

Works Cited

Index

308 pp 12 b/w illustrations 5 x 8

978-1-9788-2803-2 paper $26.95T

978-1-9788-2804-9 cloth $65.00SU

March 2022

LGBTQ+ Studies • Literary History

Table of Contents

Introduction

Judy Grahn: Your First Audience Is Your People

Allen Ginsberg: American Glasnost and Reconstruction

Sarah Schulman: AIDS and the Responsibility of the Writer

Essex Hemphill: Does Your Mama Know About Me?

Susan Grif n: The Effects of Ecological Disaster

Pat Cali a: More Fuel to Run On

John Preston: AIDS Writing

Lesbians and Gays of African Descent Take Issue

Mariana Romo-Carmona: The Color of My Narrative

Dorothy Allison: Survival is the Least of My Desires

Janice Gould: Speaking a World Into Existence

Melvin Dixon: I’ll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name

Allan Gurganus: What Fiction Means

Chrystos: The Gift of Open Sky to Carry You Safely on Your Journey as Writers

John Preston: An Exceptional Child

Samuel R. Delany: An Excerpt from “Aversion/Perversion/ Diversion”

Jewelle Gomez: Less Than a Mile from Here

Kate Rushin: The Bridge Poem and A Paci st Becomes Militant and Declares War

Linda Villarosa: We Have to Fight for Our Political Lives

Tony Kushner: On Pretentiousness

Luis Alfaro: Heroes and Saints from Downtown

Edmund White: Remembrances of a Gay Old Time

Minnie Bruce Pratt: Imagination and the Mockingbird

Cheryl Clarke: A House of Difference: Audre Lorde’s Legacy to Lesbian and Gay Writers

Nancy K. Bereano: Keeping Our Queer Souls

Craig Lucas: Making a Fresh Start

Peggy Shaw: from “A Menopausal Gentleman”

Voices from OutWrite

Acknowledgements

Index