Lydia Hagan

     Birth of a Nation  is a very interesting film to watch. Black characters are depicted as violent, and greedy while white people are looked at as heroic and "good." The film even glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, which is very strange to be. As I was watching the film I couldn't help but wonder about the meaning behind the film. If the maker of the film knew that they were switching the roles of blacks and whites during the Civil War and whether they actually know that what they were telling in the film was wrong. But after reading Michele Wallace's article, "The Good Lynching and The Borth of a Nation: Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim '"  I realized that people at the time actually praised the film for its accuracy. Clearly, we now know that the depiction of blacks in the film is extremely false. The film was anti-black propaganda.       Michele Wallace argues that The Birth of a Nation " is a landmark in the development of the feature film a...

     Lara Mark's Article, "Close-Up: John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film, clears up the confusion I had with the film, "The Last Angel of History." While watching the film it was hard for me to grasp what was happening or what the narrator's main argument was. The way it was filmed and jumped from scene to scene made it hard for me to comprehend the meaning of the film. I knew it was about different black artists have contributed to the science fiction world and the definition of Afrofuturism. Lara Mark's article instantly defines the argument of the film.  " Black Audio Film Collective’s “The Last Angel of History” (1996) sketches the artistic and intellectual movements that have come to be called Afrofuturism, which argues that since the great rupture of the Middle Passage, African diaspora people have been doing science fiction, assembling futures from fragments of the past." (Mark's, Page 1) After hearing Marks describe Afrofutusim and th...

  I recently read the article, "Black Women and the Science Fiction Gebre," a Black Scholar Interview with Octavia Butler. Octavia Butler is a science fiction writer who won a Nebula award. She wrote books such as "Clays Ark," Kendra," and, "Mind of MY Mind". The interview conducted in this reading was recorded on October 29, 1985.      In this interview, Butler is asked many questions. Still, I believe the most important question she is asked is, "Why is the science fiction literary form that black and female writers have not sufficiently explored?"  She argues that women and black writers don't write science fiction as much because it was first a white boys' genre. It was targeted at white males and written by white males. This is interesting to me because science fiction has no limits. You can make up almost anything and anything can happen in these books, so why aren't more women and blacks writing them. It is a genre that sh...