It is an inescapable fact that Hollywood slavery films have established a popular historiography of slavery for a global audience and have played a major role in the generation of public knowledge and opinion about slavery and its inheritance. However, from the earliest days of cinema, Hollywood has promoted, at best, a very partial view of slavery. Black subjectivity, Black points of view, Black voices and stories, and Black historical achievement have all been routinely marginalized or overlooked. In particular, there is a striking lack of films that centre Black resistance to slavery.

While conducting research into the representation of slavery in cinematic history, I discovered that, in contrast to films coming out of the United States, in Cuban cinema there is a tradition of foregrounding Black resistance to slavery. In my recent book, From Havana to Hollywood, I argued that this foregrounding challenges the ways in which slavery has been fundamentally misremembered and misunderstood in North America and Europe. I also argued that the widespread absence of representation of Black agency in Hollywood slavery films should be understood in systemic terms and as an instance of a longstanding aversion to the recognition of historical Black achievement.

This themed playlist showcases four cinematic feature-length films produced in Havana in the 1970s that challenge the longstanding tradition of eliding Black resistance to slavery. It also showcases one atypical Hollywood production that spectacularly subverts the format of the Hollywood ‘swashbuckler’ to stage a dramatic story of Black revolution – Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! of 1969.

In recent years, there has been an increased push for more diversity and representation on our entertainment screens. The #OscarsSoWhite campaign of 2015 and the enduring social justice movement it generated increased public awareness of the longstanding problematic issues of discrimination and exclusion in Hollywood.

The movement drew needed attention to Hollywood as an insular industry characterized by institutionalized racism and entrenched ….

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.

“‘In some cases, it was the women who were fiercest in the fight’: The female freedom fighters of the Haitian Revolution” by Emi Eleode. Looking forward to the exhibition (“Resistance, Revolution and Reform: Cambridge and the Caribbean in the Age of Abolition”) coming to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2025.

At the 56th Annual NEMLA Convention in Philadelphia, March 6-9th, 2025, Dr. Philip Kaisary will organize and moderate a panel titled “Radical Futures and Decolonization: Law, Marxism and World Literature.”

Description

This panel will consider Black diasporic literary and/or legal texts in relation to the interdisciplinary field of ‘Law and Literature.’ An emphasis will be placed on the relations and intersections of race, class, and gender, and the historical experience of capitalist modernity, as well as materialist approaches employing ‘world-literary’ perspectives.

Abstract

This panel will consider Black diasporic literary and/or legal texts in relation to the interdisciplinary field of ‘Law and Literature.’ Literary and legal texts generated by the histories of African descended peoples throughout the Atlantic world brim with substance for law and literary studies, yet the field of Law and Literature has not identified Black diasporic writing as a privileged site of analysis. This panel addresses that gap, focusing on questions of race, class, gender, and the historical experience of capitalist modernity, alongside iterations of the law. The panel will contribute to the work of reimagining and reorienting Law and Literature along more globally inclusive and materialist lines.

Notwithstanding such notable recent work as Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler’s edited volume, New Directions in Law and Literature(Oxford University Press, 2017), Law and Literature’s Eurocentrism remains discernible in its tendency toward literary materials drawn largely or exclusively from European and White Anglo-American traditions. Conversely, the proposed panel is animated by the conviction that the task of ‘unthinking’ Eurocentrism is a precondition for the continued relevance of the Law and Literature project. To this end, the panel will engage with: (1) recent work undertaken within world literary studies which has argued for the reconceptualization of world literature as a problematic that demands theoretical and methodological reconsideration; (2) Black diasporic theoretical models that have situated African American literary and cultural production in American hemispheric and ‘Black Atlantic’ frames; and (3) work in the cultural materialist tradition that has sought to revisit the connectedness of legal and literary discourses in nuanced terms.

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.)