Black Camera has announced a new call for submissions for a Close-Up section on Ava DuVernay’s film, SELMA:
Close-Up: Selma: The Historical Record and the American Imaginary
The 2015 release of the Oscar-nominated film Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, offers the opportunity to revisit not only the significance of the historical figures and events depicted on screen, but also the cultural impact of cinema and its capacity to both reflect upon and critique historical activity. Indeed, Selma and the considerable press it has received become an index to gauge both the legacy of the civil rights movement and the status of race relations in the fraught contemporary moment.
As with many works in the historical film genre, Selma has won acclaim and generated controversy in equal measure. The film has been applauded for its powerful historical reenactments, characterizations of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and other protagonists of the period, and its depiction of the protest movement spawned by the violence and injustice of Jim Crow. Conversely, Selma has been criticized for its alleged historical misrepresentations, particularly the depictions of Lyndon Baines Johnson and of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Submissions may interrogate issues of race, class, and/or gender, through thematic, historical, and sociocultural contexts. Other topics might include but are not limited to narrative strategies, genre studies, psychoanalytic/feminist readings, sexuality, black female bodies, masculinity, whiteness, violence, the revenge motif, fugitivity narratives, revisionist historiography, the black vernacular aesthetic tradition and signifying, classic Hollywood filmic stereotypes, the audio/visual landscape of the film, musical scoring, reception, exhibition, marketing/publicity, and distribution.
We welcome submissions exploring Selma from a variety of disciplinary and analytical perspectives for publication consideration. Essays, film reviews, and commentaries will be considered. Essays should be 4,000–6,000 words, commentaries 1,000–2,000, and film reviews 500–1,500 words.
Suggested topics include Selma’s production, exhibition, and reception histories, as well as formal and conceptual analyses of the film as a text. Other suggested lines of inquiry are Selma’s relevance to
• contemporary U.S. race relations
• mediations of posterity, memory, and history
• historical accuracy and “truth” in relation to revisionist history or ideological motivation
• the filmmaker’s intentionality and project of recovery
• interrogation of the notion of the “postracial”
• African American women filmmakers in Hollywood
• the biopic and/or the historical film as genres
• transnationalism
Please submit completed essays, a 150-word abstract, and a 50–100 word biography by January 1, 2016. Submissions should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Please see Black Camera‘s journal guidelines for more on the submission policy.
Direct all questions, correspondence, and submissions to co-editor Mark Hain (blackcam@indiana.edu).
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