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James Baldwin Review (JBR) is an annual journal that brings together a wide array of peer‐reviewed critical and creative non-fiction on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. In addition to these cutting-edge contributions, each issue contains a review of recent Baldwin scholarship and an award-winning graduate student essay. James Baldwin Review publishes essays that invigorate scholarship on James Baldwin; catalyze explorations of the literary, political, and cultural influence of Baldwin’s writing and political activism; and deepen our understanding and appreciation of this complex and luminary figure.
This article examines the post-millennial popularity of the found footage movie, in particular its engagement with the representational codes of non-fiction media. Whilst the majority of critical writings on found footage identify the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre as a key visual referent, they too often dwell on the literal re-enactment of the event. This article instead suggests that these films evoke fear by mimicking the aesthetic and formal properties of both mainstream news coverage and amateur recording. As such they create both ontological and epistemological confusion as to the reality of the events depicted. Rather than merely replicating the imagery of terror/ism, these films achieve their terrifying effects by mimicking the audiences media spectatorship of such crisis.
There are any number of fiction and non-fiction texts which challenge, articulate or reinterpret many of the central tensions within the documentary form. Of the non-fiction texts, the most significant have perhaps been reflexive documentaries. This book is primarily intended to introduce ideas about mock-documentary to students and academics working within media and documentary studies. It examines those fictional texts which to varying degrees 'look' (and sound) like documentaries. This group of texts have been labelled using a variety of terms; 'faux documentary', 'pseudo-documentary', 'mocumentary', 'cinéma vérité with a wink', 'cinéma un-vérité', 'black comedy presented as in-your-face documentary', 'spoof documentary' and 'quasi-documentary'. The book includes some discussion of the tensions within the genre, in particular where different codes and conventions appeal to competing, often contradictory, cultural understandings of how 'reality' can be represented. It looks to outline the nature of the more recent expansion of textual concerns and representational strategies employed by documentary filmmakers. Mock-documentary represents only one instance of a continuum of fictional texts which are characterised by a blurring of the line between fact and fiction. The book compares these contrasting screen forms, concentrating especially on the nature of the distinctive relationships which they each construct towards the documentary genre. It introduces a schema of three 'degrees' of mock-documentary, in part reflecting the diversity in the nature and extent of these texts' appropriation of documentary aesthetics. A speculative genealogy for the mock-documentary as a distinctive screen form is outlined.
the DRC, a bande dessinée on social mobilisation in North Kivu 3 and a non-fiction book on eastern Congolese fighters 4 ; my contemporaneous work as a ‘media’ journalist for the Arrêt sur images website 5 for which I inventoried and examined the practices of journalists who had worked in the DRC 6 ; my social science
pictures to produce an immersive spectacle, relying on the cinematic realism of non-fiction movies to increase the ‘perceptual experience’ and the ‘aesthetics of astonishment’ of the viewers ( Crawford-Holland, 2018 ). Back in the 1920s, ‘cinema … “virtually” extended human perceptions to events and locations beyond their physical and temporal bounds’ ( Uricchio, 1997 : 119). Humanitarian cinema thus participated in transnational campaigns aiming to mobilize and sensitize national audiences. More specifically, these movies also advocated on behalf of distant
Introduction: The rise of anti-racist non-fiction On 10 June 2020, three days after #BlackLivesMatter protesters toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race topped the UK non-fiction bestseller chart, making her the first
which change shaped non-fiction publishing, but it also offers an opportunity to understand the forces that helped to bring about social, cultural and political change in the post-war period. In order to do this, we might heed the advice of Quentin Skinner, who once wrote that ‘The rise within a given society of new forms of social behaviour will generally be reflected in the development of corresponding vocabularies.’ 31 Skinner was, in essence, claiming that new social practices and ways of thinking are often registered in a society’s language. If we endorse such
, certainly in comparison with British India. While Africa’s relevance to British history lessons may have been in question, there was little doubt that the popular press of the day found the image of Africa a strong selling point. In children’s periodicals and magazines a black figure was frequently found in non-fiction, fiction, comic insets and advertising. The versatility and accessibility of the image
between fiction and non-fiction; crammed with poetic language, anecdotes, and self-reflective inner monologues. As the cultural theorist Mieke Bal argues, all biographical writing is fiction to some extent, whilst Tanning herself reminds us that ‘everything we do is an autobiography’. 4 These autobiographies have come to function as indispensable primary histories and memoirs of the avant-garde cultures she lived and worked through, and are often cited as sources for scholarship on other artists she was connected to
ambivalence about national affiliations – isolates a broader set of issues that are vital, not just for Coupland’s many lonely or alienated characters, but also to the aesthetic and ethical implications of his work. This book – the first full-length study of Coupland’s writing – explores the prolific first decade and a half of his career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction. Since the publication of his debut novel, Coupland has been exploring the