Desirée de Jesus

About the curator

Dr. Desirée de Jesus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. She holds a PhD from Concordia University and an MA (with Distinction) from Kings College London. Dr. de Jesus is also a video essayist and moving images curator.

Her videographic work analyzes films centering girls, women, and folks of color. Her previous curatorial work supported the Visual Collections Repository (Concordia University) and the Toronto International Film Festival. Dr. de Jesus’s research and teaching explore the intersections of race, gender, aesthetics, and technology in narrative film and media through traditional, creative, and curatorial methodologies.

Curator's statement

Select film stills from rupture//rapture

The Visual Collections Repository, 2021

It is often said that film curation is a deeply personal endeavor. I believe this statement about curatorial practice is true, but maybe not for the usual reasons that one might think. One standard way of thinking about film curation in relation to the personal is that this creative work is developed from an individual’s vision, particular set of interests, expertise, and research. But for those of us who are from marginalized groups, there is another dimension to “personal” film curation that involves one’s sense of connectedness to a larger community and its practices of looking, being, and knowing.

Still from “Rafiki” a film by Wanuri Kahiu (2018)

The title and themes of this screening series, rupture//rapture, mark these practices and become spaces to think through Black life and the meanings associated with its audiovisual representation, especially since the declaration of the COVID-19 global pandemic. While the selected films feature a range of Black lived experiences from the margins, they all present marginality as a site of resistance accompanied by a practice of looking “both from the outside in and from the inside out” (hooks, 20). The series asks the audience to consider the ways in which these practices of looking (from the outside/in and from inside/out) and film histories are made illegible and denied through dominant systems of representation. My hope is that the archival aspects of this curatorial work for the Visual Collections Repository will also be recognized and experienced as a form of community care.

There’s a story that the historian, philosopher, and sociologist W.E.B. DuBois tells in “The Strivings of the Negro People” (1897) about the ways that Black people experience themselves, as both “self” and “other,” when confronted with covert and explicit antiblack sentiments. Drawing from G.W.F. Hegel, DuBois recalls an elementary school memory of racial discrimination, and by tracing the fault lines of systemic racism through his adulthood he theorizes how the existential rupture underlying Black peoples’ “double-consciousness” alienates them from both the world and themselves.

But the Strivings story that stands out most in my own memory, the scenario that resurfaced repeatedly over the past eighteen months, amidst the overlapping emergencies of COVID-19 and antiblack racism, involves DuBois’s encounters with the “unasked question” behind many white allies’ genteel inquiries and anti-racist sympathies.

Still from “Bande de filles/Girlhood” a film by Céline Sciamma (2017)

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require.

W.E.B. DuBois

Since my childhood, I have heard many unsolicited variations of these late 19th-century claims of interracial sociality, and political and emotional solidarities from non-Black allies, just by virtue of being a Black person moving through white spaces. This cycle was especially the case as the lockdown forced the world to see the violence of systemic racism and the extrajudicial killings of Black people in North America, and to turn a scrutinizing gaze on longstanding societal ruptures and the structures that continue to preserve their effects. And yet, in all of this looking, many failed to see these images of Black life as anything more than a series of teachable moments. As a result, many also failed to see how these myopic ways of public image-making and looking inculcate an antiblack mode of knowledge production that invisibilizes the “fullness of Black life” (Sharpe 2016).

And so, I present this selection of films about Black folks as an invitation for you to extend your thinking about the roles of institutions in the acquisition, conservation, preservation, and accessibility of moving image materials within the context of radical community care. The fullness of Black lives matter and it is time that our moving image collections and teaching resources reflect this vital truth.

References

DuBois, W.E.B. “Strivings of the Negro People.” The Atlantic, August 1897. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/.

hooks, bell. “Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 36 (1989): 15-23.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

Still from “Black Mother Black Daughter” a film by Sylvia Hamilton and Claire Prieto (1989)

Watch the series

Looking for films that support inclusive pedagogy? Check out Dr. de Jesus’ educational playlist for her rupture//rapture series highlighting a selection of titles in the VCR Collection. They are featured in the Black Studies research subject guide at the Concordia Library.

Check out the series at the Concordia Library