Blackness, Performance, Freedom
The Carters’ APES**T music video opens with black man with angel wings on the steps of the Louvre. He wears ripped jeans and sneakers and no shirt. Later, two black women sit on the floor, facing away from each other, linked by white fabric on both of their heads. They are placed in front of…
With Donald Glover at the helm of this episode, the audience is pulled into a parallel TV network that shocks, exposes, and tackles issues of the Black experience in America. Glover’s satire binds together a multitude of underlying messages. Current media repeatedly avoids gray areas. The binary of good and evil is something to cling…
The space I chose to use as my garret was actually already constructed. My sister’s room (for whatever reason) has a Coroline-esque door which leads to a small, enclosed room. The door itself can’t be more than a foot and a half tall. The ceiling is slanted, and I can’t fully straighten my back out…
While watching Beyonce’s music video for “Diva,” I noticed Beyonce performs the same punch dance move that was featured in the choreography that Toni and the Lionesses perform in The Fits. The motion of punching is an offensive attack. It is an action where one strikes their opponent. However, in both choreographed performances in The…
Dear Ms. Jacobs, Over this past weekend, I attempted to replicate a space similar to your garret escape to try to begin to comprehend what you lived through. Although I will never be able to truly understand what you experienced, I hope to gain some insight on what your reality was like during your time in the garret. The…
The Fits (2015) shows an 11-year-old girl, Toni, as she joins a dance team, the Lionesses. Before she joins and during her early days of being on the team, she spends time with her older brother at the school’s boxing gym. She trains along side him in addition to helping out at the gym by…
The Fits centers around Toni, a child on the verge of becoming a teenage girl. Throughout the film, it is clear that Toni is different; stoic and awkward, she does not fit in with the dance crew. This is only exaggerated by the arrival of a mysterious ailments that is causing the girls to have…
To begin approaching an analysis of the chapter title “The Loophole of Retreat,” I asked a couple friends what their associations with the word “loophole” are. Words like “legal,” “white collar,” “politicians,” “corporations,” and “universities” were prevalent responses, confirming my original perspective of the word having a legal or professional connotation—implying someone in a position…
As we were examining the line “I knew what I did, and I did it with the deliberate calculation,” (47) from chapter ten in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I thought about Solange’s music video for “Almeda.” I was hooked onto the line “Nothing without intention. Do nothing without intention,” said by…
Just recently, I heard some very good news that transformed my perception of my immediate future. My mom is a foreign service officer, and recently I found out that her next post will be in Madrid. This made me so happy as I will have one home in Spain for the next couple of years…