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WRITING EXCERPTS

A.

TERMS OF REFERENCE: AUTONOMY, ACTIVISM, AND ART DIRECTION

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
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“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all

that gave on an identity, the end of safety” - James Baldwin

Autonomy:

How to resist the “seedy demon born when the ignorant tastes of the people mate with the fiscal lust of the capitalist”?

Slater and Tonkins (2001) describe the autonomy of culture as meaning at least two things: On the first instance, “autonomy from economic values, the creation of art in relation to its own inner gods rather than the marketplace”

- and secondly: “autonomy from the false and inauthentic 'culture' that arises in and through the
marketplace, the seedy demon born when the ignorant tastes of the people mate with the fiscal list of the capitalist”.

In practice however, the boundaries are in a constant state of flux. Oakley (forthcoming) identifies the struggle for artistic autonomy as both an ethical and a social practice, 'the importance of being an artist lies not in its anti-commercialism, but in an assertion of meaning beyond the commercial'.

B.

New sensibilities:
An exploration of the contemporary Black Aesthetic on film

AUTHOR
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...The black aesthetic, however, transcends questions of authorship and ownership. It speaks to both the artistic and political merits of a work of art. For Larry Neal the black aesthetic also embodied a visceral element - “a cosmic sensibility”. In his 1971 essay, Reflections on the Black Aesthetic , he explains that while formal ingredients like “black speech, Black authorship, soul or jazz music”, were important, they did not necessarily produce the effect of the black aesthetic (Neal, 1971).

This effect could be argued to arise as a result of the certain cultural sensibilities black filmmakers and writers brought to their work from their actual lived experiences. These sensibilities, by nature, are difficult to package into a tidy unifying ‘Black Aesthetic Film Theory’. Actor and writer, Julian Mayfield, for example remarked “deep down in my guts [I know] what it mean[s]” (Leirow, 2013).

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