UCLA

Due to the awareness of how visual technologies have historically functioned as hostile and violent forces that render Blackness as aberration, this dissertation pays special focus to the creative practices of Black women and queer image-makers who are invested in decolonizing the ways in which we see. Through a careful examination of films and photography that spans from South Africa, and across the African diaspora, this dissertation is able to explore the edgeless connections between slavery and colonialism as ongoing histories that continue to rupture contemporary Black visual cultures. By orientating towards Black feminisms and queer theories to examine film and photography, this project inaugurates an interdisciplinary avenue that is able to reveal how the field of vision has continued to make marginal assessments on the compounding intersections between race, gender and sexuality. To further decolonize the process of knowledge production, this project recognizes the creative work of image-making, as an aesthetic practice that theorizes in its doing. Thus, I further draw from my positionality as a media practitioner and the experiential knowledge I have garnered in order to offer a methodological intervention that centers Black feminist creative praxis. As a prevailing enquiry in each chapter of this project, I interrogate how Black women and queer image-makers subvert the use of the camera as an institutional apparatus and technology of capture. In an anti-Black visual culture that is often calibrated by abject representations of Black women and queer identities, I believe that there is something bold and subversive about positioning Black women’s visual productions as constituting counter-hegemonic historiographies and archival repositories. Thus, I consider that due to the institutional neglect and erasure of Black women in hegemonic visual history, a decolonial approach to scholarship ought to contend with questions of materiality to contemplate the role played by Black film and queer photography in producing narratives that are able to collapse colonial framings of histography and archive. Therefore, I postulate that the films and photography examined in this dissertation, serve as revolutionary and decolonial visual archives of an otherwise due to the ways in which the hegemonic visual histories are challenged and subsequently refused.