TOWARDS A BLACK TESTIMONY: PRAYER / PROTEST / PEACE ONLINE SCREENING & CONVERSATION

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ABBEY LINCOLN!

TOWARDS A BLACK TESTIMONY: PRAYER/PROTEST/PEACE

An online screening which was held via the Cubitt Vimeo page on BST | 12pm Wednesday 5th August - 6am Sunday 9th August

Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer, Protest, Peace is a moving image work by Languid Hands that examines Black Testimony as obscured, ignored and undermined. Drawing on archival imagery, Black geographies, and the dying declarations of Black Martyrs, the film explores the complexities of truth, empathy, justice, the law, life and death for the Black Mass. The film borrows its subtitle, structure and aspects of its score, from the third track on jazz drummer and composer Max Roach's 1960 album ‘We Insist! Freedom Now Suite’ featuring jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln.

The film was available to watch online via Cubitt’s Vimeo for a limited period of 90 hours in celebration of Abbey Lincoln’s would-be 90th birthday, 6th August. 

LANGUID HANDS IN CONVERSATION WITH GAIL LEWIS & MICHAEL B GILLESPIE.

Languid Hands in conversation about Towards A Black Testimony with Gail Lewis, writer, psychotherapist, researcher and activist, and Michael B Gillespie, scholar and film theorist, at 6pm on Thursday 6th August.

The conversation took place on 6 August 2020, Abbey Lincoln's would be 90th birthday. A recorded version of this live panel discussion is available via our Facebook Live HERE. 

About the panelists:

Gail Lewis is a sociologist who specialises in psychosocial studies of race and gender. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. Among her political and scholarly concerns are the formation of and resistance to gendered-racilised social formations; the relationship between the organisational psychodynamics and the lived experience of racialised and gendered inequality in organisations; and how to bring black feminist, psychoanalytic and sociological understandings of subjectivity into creative dialogue in the interests of generating ‘practice against the grain’.

She was a long standing member of Brixton Black Women's Group and a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD). She has been a member of the editorial collectives of the European Journal of Women's Studies and Feminist Review. She has published on feminism; intersectionality; the welfare state, social policy and racialisation; citizenship and personal life; and racialised-gendered experience and black feminism in journals such as Race and Class, Signs, Cultural Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies; Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; Identities; European Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminist Theory and Feminist Review.

Michael B. Gillespie is an Associate Professor of Film in the Department of Media and Communication Arts and the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York. He received his MA and PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University. He has taught at Duke University, The New School, and Ohio University. His teaching and research focuses on black visual and expressive culture, visual historiography, film theory, film adaptation, and genre theory. His publications include "Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin, Film Blackness, and the Racial Grotesque" in Contemporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movie; "Dirty Pretty Things: The Racial Grotesque and Contemporary Art" in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights; "Smiling Faces: Chameleon Street, Racial Performativity, and Film Blackness: in Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Televison, and Film, 1990-2010; and pieces on the film/video work of Kevin Jerome Everson. His book, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film was published through Duke University Press. His next book project is entitled Music of My Mind: Blackness and Sonic Visuality.