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This article examines the Netflix true crime series When They See Us (2019) as a form of "popular legality" (Olson 2022). I argue that the show criticizes structural racism in the US criminal justice system and emphasizes this critique on a level of affect. More precisely, it is through an affective engagement of the audience with the show's protagonists that When They See Us highlights how Black and Latinx communities are discriminated by US law and the criminal justice system. It thereby not only depicts African American and Latinx legal identities as marginalized by the law and legal system, but makes viewers able to feel them to be so. In addition, I argue that the show negotiates issues of testimonial injustice as one form of discrimination against People of Color in the US legal system. This negotiation of testimonial injustice also primarily takes place on a level of affect by inviting the audience to feel the effects that testimonial injustice has on the show's protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thinking from the imagery construction of the current pandemic, we propose a reflection on the recognition of mourning in part of Brazilian's media coverage. After all, where are the bodies of our dead? What does 670,000 really mean when that's only a number? Based on the work of Judith Butler, Susan Sontag and Michael Hardt, we discuss the dichotomies about the production of subjectivity as an act of breaking up the commotions that public mourning is capable of producing. We bring some examples of this imagery construction from Jornal Nacional, Rede Globo de Televisão and also from the documentary 13th, by Ava DuVernay (2016). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black intellectualism, particularly in the public sphere, tends to be associated with male figures from the academy. This trend risks excluding a broader range of viewpoints and traditions – particularly the contributions of Black women, artists and community organisers whose intellectual praxis has been wrought from experiences outside the academic paradigm. This article argues that filmmaker and activist Ava DuVernay should be recognised as a Black female public intellectual. It demonstrates how DuVernay uses her work to grapple with the racial histories, philosophies and ideologies which have permeated American history and society. An artist-intellectual-activist, DuVernay sits in a historical lineage of Black artists employing visual cultures to interrogate and resist the operation of racism in the United States. Her work centres and explores Black lives, particularly women, rendering Black characters as complex and multifarious – an act of intellectual rebellion against a hegemonic narrative that centres whiteness, a narrative which has long dominated mainstream film. Through intellectual labour adjacent to her filmmaking, DuVernay also works to promote the perspectives of women and people of colour as interventions in the national imaginary. Ava DuVernay's work and approach demonstrate that a multiplicity of intellectual identities exist beyond the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article analyzes the 2014 melo drama film, Selma directed by Ava DuVernay. Topics include the depiction of ant blackness and racism in the U.S. in many sectors including education, employment, and social acceptance; the issue of black representation and, black women and girls in the film; and the presence of feminist logic.

This essay examines how several contemporary black women artists—Attica Locke, Natalie Baszile, Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, and Kara Walker—interrogate the afterlives of the sugar plantation in present day literature, performance, and visual art. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick's conceptualization of "black women's geographies," I show how these artists turn to the landscape and built environment of the sugar plantation and factory to restore black women and the US South to the global history of sugar. Part one, "Plantation Pasts," examines Locke's 2012 novel, The Cutting Season , alongside Kara Walker's 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby , as critiques of the sugar plantation's ongoing economic viability through plantation tourism and modern agribusiness. By foregrounding a "logic of perishability" that insists on the plantation's dissolution and demise, Locke and Walker interrogate these sugar plantation afterlives to exhume, expose, and ultimately revise buried histories of racial dispossession and consumption in the US and global sugar industries. Part two, "Plantation Futures," examines how Natalie Baszile's 2014 novel, Queen Sugar , its television adaptation created by Ava DuVernay, and several of Beyoncé's music videos—"Déjà Vu" (2006), "Formation" (2016), and the visual album Lemonade (2016)—"return" to Louisiana's sugar plantation geographies to confront the violent histories of slavery and Jim Crow and to reconcile African Americans' contentious relationship to land, agriculture, and contemporary southern identity in the post-Civil Rights era. Given the limits of colonial and state archives of slavery, I argue that these artists reestablish the landscape and architecture of the sugar plantation and factory as counter-archives, wherein the slave cabin, big house, refinery, and cane fields are figured as contested sites of official history and memory. In doing so, they "respatialize" hegemonic geographies, exposing and indicting the persisting legacies of racial-sexual dispossession and violence, on one hand, and positing embodied practices of pleasure, mourning, and collectivity as modes of "reterritorialization" on the other, imagining a new relationship to land, agriculture, and the earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The recent motion picture Selma infused fresh interest - and controversy - into the political and emotional peak of America's modern Civil Rights Movement. Ava DuVernay, the film's director, faced criticism for her exclusion of the Jewish presence from the movie's portrayal of the March 21, 1965 Voting Rights March. The recent attention presents a teachable moment and new energy for thinking deeply about this pivotal event in America's past. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - The authors provide valuable historical domain knowledge surrounding the 1965 Voting Rights March, present the requisite plans and curriculum resources for implementing wisepractice instructional strategies, and explore the rationale underpinning the inquiry-based activities. Findings - The authors share innovative approaches, at the secondary and elementary levels, integrating historical domain knowledge with renewed interest in the 1965 Voting Rights March to create powerful teaching-and-learning experiences. The approaches are innovative because they contain dynamic curriculum materials and reflect wise-practice use of historical photographs within the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. Practical implications - The approaches shared here are centered around questioning, a key to student learning. The lessons feature the development of questions, both from teachers and students, as classes work collaboratively to interpret a potentially powerful historical photograph and use historical events to practice thinking deeply about important topics. Originality/value - Social studies classrooms are ideal educational spaces to develop and practice the analytical skills and dispositions students need to meet the challenge of critiquing visual information that concerns complex public issues, such as the role of religion in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that documentary methodologies are situated within a digital media ecology today, this article considers the ramifications of social justice films that purport to establish emancipatory truth claims in an era of "fake news." In addition to treating documentary filmmaking as a methodology, rather than a discrete film genre, this article demonstrates the ways in which participatory media culture is reshaping what gets defined as "truth" and how it is achieved. Looking specifically at racial justice themes in Ava DuVernay's 13th, this article observes how documentary rhetorics are part of a larger media ecology that includes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Perhaps a defining feature of our cultural moment--at the same time that there is great suspicion regarding the relationship of images to "truth," there is also a great need and desire to establish non-racist narratives to counter the hegemonic historiography that passes for the "real" in U.S. culture. This article demonstrates how social justice documentarians are stepping up to the challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers criticism of the television programs "Shots Fired," directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and Millicent Shelton, starring Al Mitchell and Aisha Hinds, and "Queen Sugar," directed by Ava DuVernay, starring Rutina Wesley, Kofi Siriboe, and Dawn-Lyen Gardner. The notion of womanist television is addressed. Topics including prison, prayer, and protest movements are noted.

Every historical film must contend with the possibility that its viewers will be scandalized by its mixture of fact and fiction, but no recent historical film has faced such pressure to justify its hybrid nature as Selma has, in large part because no recent film has taken on somomentous and controversial a historical subject: the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The renewed urgency of the issues Selma dramatizes, along with the film's own commitment to the "moral certainty" of the civil rights movement, helps explain why Selma wavers in a self-defense that links the fictionality of its historical reenactments to the purposely theatrical element of the marches themselves. But politics are not the only problem for fiction in Selma, and to show why, this essay compares Selma to an earlier historical film, The Westerner (1940), that openly flaunts the commercial nature of its fictionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This department column explores digital and disciplinary literacies across learning contexts and disciplines within and outside of school. Digital enhancements will encourage readers to post questions, comments, and connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines kinship, intimacy and carceral care in the 2012 African American film "Middle of Nowhere" directed by Ava DuVernay. It explores the material and affective consequences of incarceration for those whose intimate spheres are shaped by their interactions with the penal system. It also examines the conceptualuization of carceral images in film contribute to the assessment of the intimate costs of incarceration.

Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar arrives at a defining moment in American cultural life, as politics and art converge in an unprecedented moment for black creativity. The unapologetic emergence of full-fledged black subjectivity onscreen runs parallel to a new chapter in the civil rights movement. Black Lives Matter has propelled long-overdue conversations about policing, the prison-industrial complex, inequality, and structural barriers into the mainstream. The ongoing renaissance in television enabled by streaming platforms and new revenue models has opened doors for artists to explore these issues with revived creative freedom. The feisty sitcoms and criminal dramas that have contained black lives for far too long have been surpassed in quality by works more ambitious, aesthetically daring, and politically relevant. Whether it is FX's Atlanta created by and starring Donald Glover, Marvel's Luke Cage on Netflix, or the intergenerational family politics of Queen Sugar, there isn't a more exciting time to watch black lives matter and shimmer on American screens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]