Black on Screen: Global Black Cinema and Anti-colonial Liberation

Join us for program 2,Chronicles of Cultural Survival, as part of our October and November Black on Screen series, guest-curated by writer and film programmer, Yasmina Price. The screening includes Julie Dash’s 1997 short film The Diary of an African Nun and feature length film Udju Azul di Yonta (The Blue Eyes of Yonta),1992, directed by Flora Gomes. The screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Price and Dr. Jaimee A. Swift, executive director and founder of Black Women Radicals.

According to Amílcar Cabral—the revolutionary leader, poet and agronomist—culture had a vital role in securing national liberation on the African continent, as everywhere.

In her gorgeous black and white short film adaptation of an Alice Walker short story, The Diary of an African Nun (1997, 15 mins), Julie Dash explores cultural dissonance through a Black woman’s crisis of faith as she prepares to take her vows as a nun in Uganda. Another breathtaking performance by Barbara O. Jones, following Dash’s historic 1991 Daughters of the Dust, conveys the conflict between the central character’s estrangement from the white nuns at their convent and the familiarity of drums beckoning from her village.

Cabral himself had instructed Flora Gomes to take up filmmaking as part of the struggle against Portuguese colonization in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. Udju Azul di Yonta (90 mins) channels its political purpose through a youthful love story between the dynamic titular Yonta and former freedom fighter, Vincente. Tragicomic in tone, the narrative rehearses a central trope of African Cinema: “tradition” vs. “modernity” as a framework to navigate cultural preservation, European influence and the process of claiming self-determination and independence.

This series, Black on Screen: A Century of Radical Visual Culture, captures 100 years of local and transnational Black movement work and artistic evolution on film. Sourced from The Schomburg’s collection and others, it takes a kaleidoscopic look at Black life and expression across diasporas, rendering a range of storytelling traditions that incite and inspire Black world-building. The Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division (MIRS, pronounced “meers”) at the Schomburg Center collects and preserves audio and moving image (AMI) materials related to the experiences of people of African descent. The division has amassed nearly 400 collections, approximately 5,000 square feet, in a variety of formats, which captures the gestures and sounds of major historical, artistic and cultural moments and influencers. While the strength is the Black American holdings there is considerable Caribbean and African representation in the collection.

Accessibility requests can be made by e-mail [email protected].

Yasmina Price (Guest Curator) a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anti-colonial cinema and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center, e-flux and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles; and The National Gallery of Art, D.C. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and museum catalogues, with essays in The Nation, The Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, Criterion’s Current, Film Quarterly and World Records Journal.

Dr. Jaimee A. Swift (she/her) is the executive director and founder of Black Women Radicals, a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender expansive people's radical activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora. Swift is also the creator and founder of The School for Black Feminist Politics (SBFP), which has a mission of empowering Black feminisms in politics by expanding the field from transnational, intersectional, and multidisciplinary perspectives. She is the co-author, with Joseph R. Fitzgerald, of the forthcoming biography of Black feminist icon, Barbara Smith, who is a founding member of the Combahee River Collective. A political scientist, Swift’s research centers on historical, contemporary, and iterative understandings of radical Black feminist struggles, movements, and memories as modalities of Marronage and abscondence in the Americas, specifically in Brazil and the United States. Learn more about Dr. Swift, here.

This year, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding! Join us all year long for a wide array of special events, exhibitions, and more as we celebrate this milestone and continue the legacy of Arturo Schomburg.

Schomburg100 | Exhibition | Special-Edition Library Card | Become a Member

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FIRST COME, FIRST SEATED Events are free and open to all, but due to space constraints registration is requested. Registered guests are given priority check-in 15 to 30 minutes before start time. After the event starts all registered seats are released regardless of registration, so we recommend that you arrive early. We generally overbook to ensure a full house.

GUESTS Please note that holding seats in the Langston Hughes Auditorium is strictly prohibited and there is no food or drinks allowed anywhere in the Schomburg Center.

ACCESSIBLILITY Accessibility requests can be made by e-mail [email protected].

E-TRANSPORTATION NYPL policy prohibits electric transportation devices (e.g., motorbikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, e-skateboards) from being brought into or stored at library sites for any length of time, as this is the best way to keep our spaces & people safe.

AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING Programs are photographed and recorded by the Schomburg Center. Attending this event indicates your consent to being filmed/photographed and your consent to the use of your recorded image for any all purposes of the New York Public Library.

PRESS Please send all press inquiries (photo, video, interviews, audio-recording, etc) at least 24-hours before the day of the program to Leah Drayton at [email protected].

Please note that personal and professional video recordings are prohibited without expressed consent.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd, New York, United States