Boots Riley Archives - Public Seminar

Netflix Revives the Genre of the “Blaxploitation” Film to Attract Black Subscribers

They Cloned Tyrone tries to turn the colonization of Black Americans into a LOL comedy

December 18, 2023 • by Zenzelé Soa-Clarke

As a genre, Blaxploitation films were often morally ambiguous: though made for and by Black filmmakers and audiences, and sometimes depicting a kind of dead-end domestic colonialism, the films often normalized misogynistic treatment of Black women and uncritical ideals of Black capitalism....

Seeking Illumination in Dark Times

On the power of art, race and racism, and the limitations of science and politics

September 7, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Reading our series on the arts, provides some hope in our dark times, on this cloudy and humid Friday afternoon in New York. I have long believed that the key to liberation is illumination, that we have to see the ways things are, and see how things might possibly change, ...

Science Fiction and the Angel of History

A review of, ‘Sorry to Bother You’

August 10, 2018 • by Benjamin Balthaser

"It was 100 years ago… by which I mean last Monday" Brooke Gladstone of NPR's On the Media sighed after Trump's performance in Helsinki. Whatever one thinks about our current president, Gladstone's sigh is the kind of thing one hears a lot these days, as the calamities and once-in-a-century happenings pile up ...