The Books Of My Critical Language

Recommended Reading Of Foundational Texts

On several occasions, I’ve been asked what books form the basis of my critical thought. For those who don’t know, I’m a fan of poetry and short story writing (I’ll do a separate piece for those soon) and my background is in English (I have a BA/MA in Literary Studies). Much of my grounding stems not from film theory (I acquired that later in my career) but in literary theory. So a few of the outlined works below align closer to what you’d see in a graduate studies program.

The other works are foundational pieces of Black thought that you should read. They interrogate the ills of colonialism, white feminism, monolithic identity, and racist mythification. They are tremendous, life-altering and approaching-changing resets. And I hope you seek them out.

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Black Skin, White Mask

Black Skin, White Masks is an anti-colonialist Bible. And time has not dulled the edge of Fanon’s incisive words. He argued against a Black monolith and spoke against Blackness as defined through a white Eurocentric lens. He also defines the effects colonialism has on the colonized and the colonizer. Fanon often uses a creaky psychoanalysis to explicate self-hate and identity by Black folks in the face of toxic whiteness, but the sharpness of his observations still carry a fully felt weight. A controversial figure, particularly for his advocation of violence in pursuit of Black liberation, his Black Skin, White Masks is the kind of world that will flip your worldview upside down.

The Devil Finds Work

There are plenty of works by James Baldwin I could pull from. But The Devil Finds Work is what I’d primarily recommend for film critics. The essayist recalls his childhood and teenage years visiting movie houses and the ways these movies and movie stars either reflected or ran against his worldview. His thoughts on The Defiant Ones should be read by everyone. And the pitfalls he outlines are still the ones most white filmmakers are still falling into. But most of all, it’s Baldwin’s prose, and how he perceptively outlines actorly performance, which is the defining quality of this masterpiece. I also can’t get enough of the book’s ending. Read it and tell me this isn’t imperative:

“The grapes of wrath are stored in the cotton fields and migrant shacks and ghettoes of this nation, and in the schools and prisons, and in the eyes and hearts and perceptions of the wretched everywhere, and in the ruined earth of Vietnam, and in the orphans and the widows, and in the old men, seeing visions and in the young men, dreaming dreams: these have already kissed the bloody cross and will not bow down before it again: and have forgotten nothing.”

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Similar to Baldwin, there are so many works by bell hooks I could highlight. But I’ll pull out the first work I read by her: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. “There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few,” says hooks. On a wider scale, hooks uses this book to explain how feminism too often centers white women, rather than the oppression of Black women. This is an essential text for differentiating what is forward thinking and what is reductive and exclusionary with regards to Black women characters. Because the mistake that’s often made by filmmakers is imbuing an importance in Black stories by inserting a white woman. In actuality, Black stories are important in of themselves. Julia Hart’s I’m Your Woman is a perfect subversion of what happens when a white woman enters a Black world (which makes me believe she’s read plenty of hooks’ words).

Film Blackness

If you’ve read my writing, then you know that I religiously quote Michael Boyce Gillespie’s landmark statement on Black filmmaking. When I read Gillespie, he broke my brain by totally changing how I watch Black movies. His parsing of the difference between “sincerity” and “truth,” and how the latter portends an unrealistic monolith for not just Black cinema, but identity, is a gamechanger. Gillespie argues against using film as mirror for defining a singular kind of Blackness. Instead, he takes pictures like Coonskin, Medicine for Melancholy, Chameleon Street, and Deep Cover to examine the transformation of Blackness and how they reflect our contemporary existence in the face of passing, capitalism, gentrification and so forth.

Lyrical Ballads

No English graduate student worth their salt would ever skip over the Lyrical Ballads. It’s mostly a collection of poems by two seminal authors (some of the greatest hits include The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey, and The Idiot Boy). But the preface written by Wordsworth is where my primary attention lies. Pieces of advice I retain in my writing include the author’s insistence that great poetry should derive from everyday language. It does my head in when I read a piece written by a critic intent on proving their prosaic prowess rather than trusting their ability to elevate plain language by way of sturdy structuring and an ear for rhythm. Wordsworth also speaks about how art is more than plot or meaning, but a true expression of emotion (that is, a work needn’t always make logical sense, but should emotionally work). Which leads us to my favorite quote about writing: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Film and writing itself should always derive from the feelings felt by the author. The effects of the writer’s thoughts should be tangible to me, the reader. As a writer, if what you’re composing doesn’t deeply speak to you, pushing you to the brink of anguish, fear and worry—then why are you writing it?

Migrating to the Movies

I’ve spent the entire year making my way through Migrating to the Movies. I initially picked up Jacqueline Stewart’s book as a reference for a piece I’m still planning on writing. But it’s taken me so long to comb through it; not due to any fault on the book. At every turn Stewart mentions a short Black silent film that needs watching. This perfect guidebook through early Black moviegoing, is a perfect reference to take you through early African American cinema. Because the best lesson from her research is how multifaceted Black filmmaking has always been, and that we have seen these stories before, they’ve just been forgotten (and often times, erased) from the history books.

The Poetic Principle

I don’t think any single piece of writing, save for John Milton’s Paradise Lost, has continually inspired my writing more than the The Poetic Principle. I’m not sure how many people catch the myriad of references from it that appear in my writing, but I’m greatly aware. Written near the end of Poe’s life, it lays out his creative ethos for the form, function and potentiality of verse. Poe argues against didacticism, opting for a structure and design conscious of aesthetics and done for its pure pleasure. As people who read my writing know, I love big swings by creators. I love the film that opts to rush toward an unknowable end because the beauty of the piece says it must. The pursuit is, as Poe says, one that compares to “the moth for the star.” A thought that forms my general mental approach to writing: The piece isn’t finished when you’ve done the best you can do, it’s when you know you’ve past the best you think you can do.

The Signifying Monkey

I first encountered Henry Louis Gates Jr’s seminal work The Signifying Monkey during my second year of grad school. I employed the book for my final paper on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Moby-Dick and how the Black characters in both novels utilize language to subvert the oppressive whites surrounding them. Generally, Gates’ literary criticism utilizes signifying—the wordplay that interchanges the common meaning with the secondary connotation—to analyze how major Black authors took the components of literature’s past and altered their meaning for subversion and recontextualization. It’s a profound work that has so often served as my basis for interrogating dialogue spoken by Black characters in film, and the varied meanings that can arise from person, place and context.

White Screens/Black Images

When I first made my way into film criticism, I researched the top books written by Black critics. James Snead’s posthumous work, White Screens/Black Images, was at the top of that list. Some of the criticism since its publication in the 1994 has become common knowledge—we know King Kong is a racist metaphor against Black folks as supposedly oversexed beings—but his thoughts on the mythification of racist ideology by cinema, which perpetuates the stereotypes of the harmless Black best friend and the loyal Black servant—remain prescient (in fact, I recently used it in my review of James Gray’s Armageddon Time).