Black Is...Black Is: Study as Celebration of Stories of Identity
In his seminal and final film Black Is…Black Ain’t, the documentarian Marlon Riggs utilizes a pot of gumbo to articulate his thesis that Blackness necessitates an identity built on multiplicity, complication, and depth, a production requiring expansiveness in its sustained attention (Riggs 1995). Such a vision contests and destabilizes narratives depicted within the film that sought to limit Black identities and identifications, and it cuts against the second half of his title, which suggests Blackness in terms of negation, evasion, and minimization. The title to this conference continues a conversation with Riggs and also with Ralph Ellison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Toni Morrison, Stuart Hall, and centuries of international Black thought.
