Released on July 4th, 2024, Philip Kaisary spoke with the team of librarians at Syosset Public Library who host Turn the Page: Official Podcast of the Syosset Public Library!

Episode 305b: Philip Kaisary’s From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary is a fascinating exploration of the depiction of slave rebellions on film. He stopped by to chat about his research into some extremely interesting films.

Guest Post by Philip Kaisary

Way back in the fall of 2002, I discovered the films of Gillo Pontecorvo and life hasn’t ever been quite the same since. I remember well the visceral impact of seeing for the first time The Battle of Algiers of 1966, which is justly regarded as one of the greatest anticolonial films of all time. I watched it alone, on VHS and wearing headphones, in a viewing booth in the University of Sussex Library. After I emerged from that booth, I was subtly changed. I’d also been reading the works of Frantz Fanon for the first time that fall and suddenly I had a fuller, more evocative panorama in which to position Fanon’s writings. I immediately went on a mission to watch every Pontecorvo film I could lay my hands on. Only a few days later, I watched Burn! (also known as Queimada)of 1969, a fascinating depiction of slave resistance and revolution on a fictionalized Caribbean island starring the magnificent, inimitable Marlon Brando and the majestic, magnetic Evaristo Márquez, an Afro-Colombian nonprofessional actor who was described by one critic as having the appearance of “a mahogany saint.” To my delight, I discovered that Burn! skewered the mythos that the British abolition of slavery was a product of philanthropy, moral virtue, and humanitarian sentiment. What a film! A rare and radical bird that communicated a stunning and radical message of Black insurrection as a liberatory historical force. But, as I was intuitively aware even back then, Burn! is a conspicuously atypical slavery film: the representation of Black agency in Hollywood has always been, and very much remains, taboo…

Congratulations to Victoria Hawco and Maki Salmon on the inaugural issue of Scaffold, the new open access, peer-reviewed graduate journal of the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture (ICSLAC) at Carleton University!

Elio Rodriguez’s magnificent GONE WITH THE MACHO served as the basis for the cover design of From Havana to Hollywood. Here is the unmodified, original version of GONE WITH THE MACHO! Elio Rodriguez Valdes, “Gone with the Macho,” Las Perlas de tu boca, silkscreen on paper, 27,5″x19,5″, edition of 8. 1995. Courtesy of Elio Rodriguez and 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, NYC, 532gallery.com. ©

Original cover design artwork by Georgia Kaisary for From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary. (Inspired by the cover design for Fredric Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System.)