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Everyday Black Matter

Chaz Barracks Antoine, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Media at Risk

Abstract

Everyday Black Matter is an afro-futuristic piece that expands the mind and embodies fugitivity – pushing against power structures that attempt to transmute BLACK JOY into BLACK PAIN.   Black joy is practice, motivating audiences to lean into dreams of Black cultural production rooted in pleasure, self-love, and nuanced identities that defy containment.

Project Narratives

The Root, Making the Academic, Blackademic 

This film is first and foremost about possibility. It is about creating a moment to reflect upon and teach the role of reimagining how university resources can fund and support Everyday Black Matter, my short film that was conceptualized from my dissertation project and filmed during the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. 

Six Points Innovation Center — 6PIC — is a collaborative workspace for non-profit organizations, youth, and community members of Highland Park in Richmond, VA. 6PIC is a center for community building and provides a place for community members to express creativity and for youth to learn a multitude of skills. It is a foundational space in my developing scholarship in media arts and communications, gender, sexuality, and Black studies, and interdisciplinary art practice. 6PIC grounded me in an Everybody Black world while I was in the thick of developing my theory and practice from graduate student to faculty, filmmaker, and podcast host for Black Matter Productions. In my past experiences — including during graduate school and as a university lecturer and Richmond resident who makes media — 6PIC is a pivotal example of what is possible when we (Black scholars, non-traditional scholars, and scholar-artists/activists) discover space through our academic journeying that helps us \create and learn in community without struggling due to a lack of belonging at the institutions where we create knowledge. I say that 6PIC is a foundational space in my work — both physically and metaphorically — because it is a Black-led organization that provided me with a sense of home and belonging at a time when I was navigating studying and existing at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI). My work as a Black queer scholar is to build upon the rich lineage of Black feminist thought and critical storytelling, where the stories of Black lives are valued as a form of intellectual and cultural capital. During my journey as an academic, particularly as a Black queer scholar, I became convinced that university resources are not yet doing all that is possible for Black communities. Due to the way most institutions function, there is still a lot of tokenization and invisible labor thrown onto Black faculty when we are the diversity hire in a space that, while filled with promise, has not done the culture-shifting work to decenter Whiteness as its primary way of doing work and evaluating the work that is done. I have experienced the exhaustion that comes with navigating higher education while Black, but I have also worked with students and other local intellectuals outside of the university who are distrustful of the local university for these reasons. At the same time, they also deserve the resources that the institution has within its gates. It’s complicated.

I stayed in higher education to explore what is possible when someone like me is better able to access, critique, challenge, and reimagine the ways in which university resources are utilized to support, uplift, and create resistance within the Black community — including the ways in which knowledge is produced and disseminated in this community-engagement era, as universities try to ramp up their support for Black communities after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (and the riots that followed). 

Sometimes, this lack of belonging is due to layers of bureaucracy and isolation that Black students and faculty can face when our work is “non-traditional.” It’s like being hired to bring a specific type of change that the university or department has said they want — in theory. Then, when you perform that change in practice, you are constantly asked to explain or justify it. This is the slow-moving engine of change typical of higher education institutions, and it is exhausting and often distracting from the work I and others were hired to do. We also deal with the oppressive structures of Whiteness, such as phony and rigid guidelines of “professionalism” and “scholarship” that often do nothing more than preserve Whiteness as the norm while other ways of doing and being become ostracized. This often forces scholars to assimilate or code-switch to get by in both worlds. This phenomenon that I speak of is prevalent in PWIs at large. The “we” I am speaking of pertains to Black faculty, queer scholars, first-generation students/scholars, low-income folks in education, all of which are some of the intersecting parts of my identity that drive much of my approach to knowledge production.   

Black Matter Productions — including the film made for Stories of Change — relays the space I symbolically embody as a Black queer male in higher education. It is about enhancing the visibility of scholarship that not only makes clear some of the shortcomings of the university at large but also creates more space to listen and learn from Black experiences, including my own. The intent is to shift and challenge disciplinary norms and ways of disseminating knowledge within academia and beyond. By centering Black voices through critical storytelling beyond narratives about oppression and trauma, my media-making addresses ways to include those who have often been excluded. As we see institutions of higher learning “evolving” in this critical moment, we must remind the academy that there is much to be learned from Black life — including from those outside of the academy — so that we may begin to center a more nuanced understanding of joy and pleasure as a part of the resistance against threats to Black life. This is part of my strategy as a creative and a knowledge producer, and what I call conartistry theory (my term): to use my position in academia to spread Black joy as practice, and to make possible learning from Black joy on its own, rather than having our work as Black scholars and makers constantly tethered to responding to trauma and oppression or Whitewashed diversity and inclusion initiatives. 

Since entering higher education as a career scholar who is gendered as male and raced as Black, it has become critical to me how important my role is to make space — in my teaching, in my theorizing, and in my community practice — for more folks to see, hear, and learn from people who look like me as a mechanism for advancing institutional impact and amending gatekeeping practices that have sidelined us for decades. In so, I created Black Matter Productions, LLC as a space within rigid academic structures to leverage university resources and creative media tools (such as podcasting and short filmmaking), to make public scholarship that centers Black people. This is important because while there is a surge to bring more of us into typically White university spaces, I think there is still a lot of pressure for us — Black people and other identities considered marginalized in predominantly white institutions (PWIs) — to assimilate and code-switch in order to stay “safe” in these sometimes toxic institutional settings. I want to make clear in my scholarship and media practice that Black people and queer people+ do not have to conform or assimilate to gatekeepers’ outdated and rigid structurings of knowledge production in order to be read and respected as intellectuals. We are experts of our own stories, and our stories bridge knowledge gaps in the university. Black Matter Productions has allowed me to make this point real in my work as a scholar and to create the vision of what I have imagined higher education to be: a place to make space for using theory, artistic practice, and media critique to generate knowledge rooted in celebrating and learning from personal stories like the everyday lives and cultural wealth of the Black people I grew up surrounded by. 

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Reflections from Black homespaces are a huge part of how I connect my methodology to a media-arts practice. I use media tools to showcase learnings from Black life that are both because of and in response to a lack of representation and appreciation for Black aesthetics in higher ed. Here, I reimagine the ways we think about disciplinary learning. For example, the Black Matter Podcast formulates a space where I can produce knowledge on my terms and in my own voice. Using the ‘story as theory’ method helps me do this because podcasting/oral history collections are collaborative and rooted in learning from personal stories. Black Matter Podcast also serves as a digital homeplace (hooks, 1991) in which to dream and curate narrative materials that have helped build several other projects such as the Everyday Black Matter film, my recent exhibition works with local art galleries in Richmond, VA (such as The Valentine, 1708 Gallery Inlight), the Honcho Music festival, and now Imagining America’s Stories of Change.  

These works are intentionally grounded in storytelling because I want to circumvent some of the challenges many Black students and faculty (as well as artists) experience when we are working with institutions that not too long ago functioned without us and didn’t see that as a problem. I have felt that even with monumental change, our contributions are rarely valued and considered as pivotal in shifting academic cultures that are long-rooted in legacies of white supremacy that silences, discredits, and ignores Black histories. And, rarely are we valued as shapeshifters in changing universities’ otherwise bland, rigid, and outdated ways of producing knowledge. I don’t want to be a part of an institutional change that simply means hiring Black scholar-artists to consume our work but not sustain our work, especially when it challenges and demands institutions to evolve in practice, not just theory. That is why in this piece, Imagining Everyday Black Matter, I am actively gathering the work I have already created to show how scholarship rooted in storytelling and accessible media can push past rigid notions of knowledge production that continue to persevere even in the “diverse” PWI university. 

In this short film, I repurposed visual and digital materials from previous works — film footage and audio recordings that were collected for other projects — because they were not utilized as much as I hoped for. I want to use this body of work to talk about, as much as possible, the ways in which so much material often gets discarded or underutilized due to institutional cultures of working on community-centered projects within the confines of the academic year. Simply put, too often time runs out. In my experience, one reason why this occurs is because Black faculty and other faculty of color are often doing too much within our university positions and are not evaluated properly for all that we do (this includes tasks that only Black faculty can do, which, when disregarded, leads to uncompensated invisible labor). In addition to this issue, there is also a common disconnect between the university administrators who evaluate us and the needs of the community that we’re working with, given the time it actually takes to build relationships and reciprocal community partnerships where everyone is seen as an intellectual. 

In so, by intentionally pulling from projects that have helped me come to the understanding of what my work and creative practice represents, another layer is added to this project which is about archiving: pulling from materials of recent works to reiterate the many ways of creating knowledge from working on interdisciplinary projects with communities of folks outside of the university.   

This film for Stories of Change showcases overlapping narratives and oral traditions inspired by monumental films like Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Solange Knowles’s When I Get Home — two pieces that are on my Everyday Black Matter film syllabus, which elaborates on this media work. Inspired by those films, I use everyday Black materials like the durag and scenes of me moving through Black spaces outside of the confines of the university — spaces that have been a type of classroom for me to contribute to conversations about diversity in ways that center learnings from Black queer life. There are several scenes in the film that help foreground my intention to unpack the nuanced and multidimensional experiences in our lives as a form of interdisciplinary learning and to show how film can be used to make theory and practice more accessible. 

Teamwork for the Dreamwork 

Speaking of collaboration for the visual component of this project, I worked with a multimedia teaching and learning librarian and doctoral student, OK Keyes, who collaborated as an editing assistant on both academic film projects I’ve done. His work centers media accessibility, especially for folks who have never made media projects. Keyes has mentored me in learning media tools to circulate my theory and practice in more accessible ways and to think about the role of representation behind and in front of the camera as agency within Black storytelling that needs to be strengthened both in higher education and legacy media (like major television networks). Keyes and I were both students together in a graduate course and started collaborating then. Our relationship has been inherently collaborative because the projects we have worked on have each involved a media component that puts me in front of or behind the camera — literally. A second collaborator is artist and VCU Arts Instructor, Johannas Barfield, who composed the music for my last film project, Everyday Black Matter. Once I started to share the concept of the film I was working on with folks in my network, Johannas (who had also attended graduate school at VCUarts and was now teaching) was recommended to me as the person I had to work with for Black Matter projects. And, the community has spoken. Our collaboration continues to grow. 

It was so important to include both Keyes and Johannas together on this Stories of Change project because our collaboration and their work as individual interdisciplinary artist-educators demonstrates the ways university resources can be reimagined and reallocated to make work that extends beyond the gatekeeping cultures that often discourage such interdisciplinary knowledge-making because it’s challenging to co-opt or replicate. Not many “traditional” scholars are well versed in other disciplines or understand the ways that collaborative storytelling is often inherently interdisciplinary.  

Artist Statement about Imagining Black Matter Film 

Central questions to consider while viewing the film: 

1- What can be learned from Black Joy as practice?

2- As Black scholars, how does working outside of the university space inform our sense of belonging (when the institution just does not see our value)?  

In addition to the questions I’ve posed above, one central inquiry that fuels my work is: 

How can we position joy and pleasure-seeking practices of marginalized folks — specifically those rooted in Black aesthetics and media practice — as a form of liberation and alternative knowledge-making that centers on imaginative and artistic ways of harmonizing theory and practice?  

I ask this question specifically for this Stories of Change project with Imagining America because even with so many interdisciplinary research networks that foreground public arts and humanities like this, there is still not enough attention and institutional resources (in the form of unrestricted grants, mutual aid, administrative support) given to students, faculty, and community affiliates who embody decolonized, anti-racist, feminist, collaborative, and community-based theory and practice. This type of education moves institutions toward and beyond their long-overdue call for institutional and cultural change. For those of us whose presence and full existence as ourselves challenges the comfort zones of the university — often coded covertly under assimilative gatekeeping of what counts as “professionalism,” “tradition,” and even “scholarly” — we push past the limitations of “diversity and inclusion” missions and demand that more space be created for us to do work that isn’t dictated by limitations of the institution. With Black Matter, I have been able to make real a type of knowledge production that allows me to move my creative expression beyond the confines of the universities that I have been affiliated with and to do something more: a type of interdisciplinary work that shows what media expertise entails in the real world. I am grateful for spaces to make and share this work because storytelling as an aspect of theory and practice has given me a sense of belonging as a scholar and has provided a path for my work to exist both in the community and in the university. 

What I desire Black Matter to do (and be part of) is to fuel knowledge production that encourages career scholars, students, and the community members we collaborate with to think deeply, critically, and imaginatively about how we can disseminate knowledge that speaks to the parts of our lives and our identities that have often been suppressed. How can we create scholarship that engages our everyday lives and, in doing so, helps push past the rigid binaries and gatekeeping structures that dictate how knowledge is made, who makes it, and who has access to it? Specifically, I want this film to generate dialogue that builds on the genealogy of Blackademics whose work has made me and others feel a sense of belonging in a place that was not originally created for us and our work to exist and thrive. All of this means embracing the knowledge production that exists outside of respectability politics and other rigid technologies of Whiteness that were designed to silo Black expressions of humanity, joy, pleasure, and resistance — forms of knowledge that change the world by helping us to imagine and sustain a better one.

In closing, I believe that expressions of joy as a form of resistance embedded in the narratives shared in my work show us how alternative knowledge-making can support worlding practices that redistribute resources from the academy to help improve everyday life. Here, the university can do more than serving those who make it in —  it can serve the dreams and aspirations of those who may not get in. Imagining Black Matter is about making the academy work for us by learning from the imaginations of those who are the most marginalized and creating lasting change from these narratives of possibility — narratives that show how learning about Black joy is for everyone. 

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