BlackStar Film Festival

Lower-Frequency Politics

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Stream began August 5, 2021 8:00 PM UTC
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With Rashaad Newsome, Maya Cozier, Leilah Weinraub, A'Ziah Zola King and Vashni Korin; moderated by Samantha Noël


In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy evokes a “politics of transfiguration,” which is a kind of counterculture that “reconstructs its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy in a partially hidden public sphere of its own.” Gilroy points to the presence and possibility of this kind of politics that had been “created under the very nose of the overseers” existing fugitively “on a lower frequency where it is played, danced, and acted as well as sung and sung about.” These artists use visual approaches to lower frequencies that are sites for arousing, enacting, and negotiating power away from the idea of respectability and towards conditions of being free.