At the very least, the following should be nominated or shortlisted this year:
Last year, in addition to Wendell & Wild (the winning entry), the following should have been nominated:
Long live the king. Watch the new trailer for Marvel Studios #BlackPanther. In theaters February 16! ► Subscribe to Marvel: http://bit.ly/WeO3YJ
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via YouTube
I’m watching #Twilight for the first time. This movie is awkward!
My takeaway:
*Breathe…..*
Everyone was jumping out to help her! Everyone was a robot! Exposition overload! Edward had a hard time with words! Carlisle is a mannequin! Jasper is Justin Timberlake circa 1999! Waylon was a weird uncle dude! James barely had any eyebrows! Werewolf dude’s father spoke only in cliches and dad jokes! I don’t know if I want someone to look at me like Edward was looking at Bella in chemistry because his head was shifting wayyyyyyyyyy too much!
*Breathe*
The play we deserve!
I woke up one morning in late January and thought “I’m going to write a play about this.” I had seen and read “Fences” (the play, screenplay and movie) and had yet to see “Hidden Figures”. I wanted to reclaim that slip-up and felt like it was ripe for satire. As a kid, I watched some of the best black comedians and learned from the greats. Whether it was The Wayans with “Don’t Be A Menace To Society While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood” at the movies, “Chappelle’s Show” on TV, or my Grandmother saying “whitey” on the la-z-boy. I was born and raised in the projects in Queens, New York City, youngest of two, by a single mom, one project over from the infamous QueensBridge Housing projects. I’ve chipped my front tooth twice and clocked hours observing from my project window. I’m like the Nas of comedy.
via I Wrote The Play ‘Hidden Fences’ Because Someone F*ucking Had To | AFROPUNK
I’ll be honest. The trailer for Nate Parker’s vehicle “The Birth of a Nation” feels too much like Mel Gibson’s vehicle “Braveheart”, which is considered one of the most cringe-inducing films to win an Oscar for Best Picture.
I mean, yes, both films have received almost the same generally-positive Rotten Tomatoes (78%), but Braveheart is mocked to this day for that one-liner from William Wallace.
I’ve realized something. Armond White is certifiably allergic to films which depict “Black Pathology” or “Black Victimization” writ large. He hates “Precious”, he hates “Selma”, he hates “The Butler”, he hates “Monster’s Ball”, he hates “The Help”, he hates “Do the Right Thing”, he hates all of the films made by Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen and most of those directed by Spike Lee.
He praised, among other films, comedies such as “Meet Dave”, “Norbit”, “Marci X”, “Little Man”.
He thinks of the above films he hates as “sob stories”, perhaps because they reflect very much upon social or socio-psychological vulnerabilities of Afro-American characters in unequal ways. Films like Meet Dave, I guess, don’t reflect on that vulnerability or victimization.
Maybe he is contrarian (in a #Diogenes of Sinope way) when it comes to films directed by Black people, or has experienced anger from other critics regarding his reviews of such films, because he has different standards or expectations about films in general.
But I think that, in his hatred of depictions of vulnerability and “sob stories”, he shows a bit of his own vulnerability as an African-American moviegoer in a society which heaps praise or scorn upon films which affirm the prejudices of the status quo viewers.
Unfortunately, he now writes for the National Review. Oy.
Watching “A Chinese Ghost Story: The Tsui Hark Animation”. If anything, it shows that Chinese animation can be as excessive and CGI-abusive as Bollywood. #anime
While reading about Black characters and authors within the speculative fiction genres, I came across two terms: “Afrofuturism” and “sword-and-soul”.
I was more familiar with the first term, at least in reading about how African-descended writers incorporated vivid and challenging mishmashes of aesthetics and cultural experiences into their science-fiction writings, including Samuel Delany and the late Octavia Butler. But the latter term – “sword-and-soul” – was something less familiar to me, but it appealed to me a bit more.
“Sword-and-soul?” As in, “sword-and-sorcery”, but with Black people in it, set in Africa?
Then I searched into it, found several articles which helped to explain what is meant by sword-and-soul: “fantasy fiction which involves African/African-descended people and their mythologies in the same way that ‘sword-and-soul’ revolves around people of European descent and their mythology.”
This intrigues me. Finally, a term for the type of fantasy fiction I was looking for, even though the genre has only been revived and expanded from just one writer – Charles Saunders – to an entire publishing label – MVmedia – thanks to an Atlanta-based professional chemist and part-time writer, Milton Davis, who has taken strategic advantage of the e-book era to publish Afrocentric SpecFic.
Finally, we have “sword-and-soul” as another fiction genre to geek out over!
While we’re on the subject of Black SpecFic, I looked at the subgenre of “steamfunk”.
Again, it’s similarly set in the “steam” era of the 19th and early 20th centuries, just like the pseudo-Victorian “steampunk”.
But that’s it, though. Unlike the striking visual difference between Sword-and-soul and Sword-and-sorcery, the art used in current works of Steamfunk largely harkens to Steampunk’s Victorian-era European aesthetics. Why?
Instead, shouldn’t there be a continuity between steamfunk and African-themed sword-and-soul?
I cite Nickelodeon’s Avatar franchise for its setting in a pan-Asian fictional universe. The first series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, takes place during an earlier period that’s wedged somewhere within ancient/medieval (“sword-and-sorcery”) Asia with a bit of steampunk mixed in at certain points. The second series, The Legend of Korra, takes place 100 years after the Avatar, in a world that is between steampunk and dieselpunk, but still within a very pan-Asian setting and with harkenings to the “past” of sword-and-sorcery.
I think the way that Nickelodeon’s Avatar franchise handles this historic continuity from the medieval to the steam era within a thoroughly pan-Asian fictional universe is a model that can be followed for an “Afrocentric” fictional universe. Avatar, which I guess could be described as “sword-and-chi”, has a sense of alt-history chronology and technological succession that those who write Afrocentric SpecFic really need.
Simply placing Black characters in pseudo-Victorian-era garb, or medieval armor, is not enough. Let’s start with the aesthetic of Sword-and-Soul and work our way forward.
Finally, when talking about aesthetics, I feel that Fantasy Fiction Artworks, especially works which are commercialized, are seriously lacking in the inclusion of People of Color (PoC). The artistic depiction of sword-and-sorcery themes, at least here in the U.S., are typically steeped in medieval European culture and aesthetics. But I think there is precedent in works like Avatar for the medieval aesthetic to be shaken up and made more diverse.
The issue raised by the Racebending.com initiative against the “whitewashing” of lead characters in Nickelodeon’s Avatar franchise brings to mind just how non-diverse that modern fantasy fiction tends to be, or at least the commercial challenge faced by artists and writers of fantasy fiction which is affirmatively diverse in skin color. Avatar is perhaps the most groundbreaking Western-authored fantasy fiction franchise in terms of PoC inclusion, as the story universe of the franchise is set in a highly-inclusive pan-Asia-Pacific setting, pulling together anagramic ethnicities, languages, kingdoms, topologies, geographies, climates, skin pigments, clothing, cuisine and so on from the entire continent and almost all ends of the ocean.
With its ongoing realization of a newer pan-mythos from the entirety and vicinity of Asia, Avatar and other similar franchises have ship-tons-plenty of written history and mythology to draw from.
Unfortunately, as a PoC of African descent, I feel incredibly jealous for this pan-Asia-Pacific setting. I don’t feel that Africa, as a continent, lends as well to such an expansive pan-mythos as does Asia or Europe. Africa doesn’t have the the sort of geographic or climatological expanse that is endemic to the Asian continent, nor does it have the heritage of written language which is endemic to both Asian and European peoples, nor do its peoples – including our ancestors – have the best experience or history of relaying their own mythological, spiritual or artistic canons on their own terms, nor do Africans have the history of mass settlement outside of the continent like Europeans (the slave trade still constitutes the primary historic source of the African diaspora in the Americas).
Hence, for developing a fertile space for fantasy art and fiction, African-descended artists and writers who are conscious about PoC inclusion have more of a reason to improvise and derive. I guess that’s where Sword-and-soul kicks in.
These galleries provide good sources for PoC-affirmative fantasy fiction, and I’ll add more links in the future:
And MVmedia, Milton Davis’ publishing label, is the premiere house for Sword-and-soul fiction. Please check it out.
