Examining Portrayals

So far in Unit 3, we have thought about how to break down false dichotomies that fragment human identities and divide people from the environment. We have also begun to reconsider what ‘power’ looks like. Something that has a great deal of influence on society – for better or worse – is film and television. Entertainment both reflects and reproduces ideas about the world. As a result, media is a useful ‘gauge’ of the dominant narratives surrounding race, power, and human-environment relations. At the same time, we know that storytelling can be incredibly subversive. We tell stories so we can change them, rewriting the scripts we’ve been given to include all the characters and create more justice-filled endings. 

“When Afro-Cuban artist Harmonia Rosales re-imagined Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam as the Creation of God and painted both God and the first ‘Man’ as black women, it left the world shaking in its Eurocentric narratives...” (review by Lauren Mitchell)

Ever since she began her art career, Harmonia Rosales’ main artistic concern has been focused on Black female empowerment in Western culture.  Her paintings depict and honour the African diaspora. The artist is entirely open to the ebb and flow of contemporary society which she seeks to reimagine in new forms of aesthetic beauty, snuggled somewhere between pure love and ideological counter-hegemony. 

As a young girl, the Renaissance Masters’ impeccable skill and composition fascinated her, but she could never relate because they depicted primarily a white male hierarchy and the idealised subordinated woman immersed in Eurocentric conception of beauty. Much of her work is a response to that combination of appreciation and alienation. Her message is not to create an ideal or to simply copy, but rather to create a sense of harmony, a yin to the yang. The Black female bodies in her paintings is the memory of her ancestors, expressed in a way to heal and promote self-love. 

Nadia Latif is a theatre maker and film director. She trained as a director at RADA under Bill Gaskill. She works exclusively in new writing, and has worked for buildings & companies including the Almeida, Royal Shakespeare Company, National, Bush, Theatre503 and Arcola. 

The BFI funded her first short WHITE GIRL, a horror about white feminism, which is in competition at LFF and is developing two features, one with the BFI/Film4 and Dominic Buchanan, and another with Protagonist. Latif also writes articles, often about the intersections of race, gender and popular culture.

Leila Latif is a writer, broadcaster, chef and culture magpie. She is a regular contributor to Little White Lies, Frieze, Total Film, Radio 4’s Front Row and the BBC World Service’s The Arts Hour. She has appeared in print for many other publications, hosted events for the BFI, and appeared on BBC1 and Lebron James’ Instagram. 

Latif grew up in Khartoum, went to school in Brighton, and currently lives in London with her husband, two children, a thriving sourdough starter, and a prized blu-ray of Ganja & Hess. Leila has started work on a book and now has much more empathy for Jack Torrance.

Andrew Tejada is an NYC native so there’s a 90 percent chance this article was written on the subway. Andrew writes extensively on diversity, the DC and Marvel Cinematic Universes, and visual culture for Tor.com, WatchMojo, and MsMojo. When he’s not writing or consuming movies/TV, Andrew is pitching his Static Shock screenplay to anyone who’ll listen. 

Tejada also writes and publishes as Arete 619, producing content like a video analysis of diversity in the Harry Potter film franchise. More of Andrew’s projects and words can be found on Facebook at “Arete Writes Things”. 

Jasmine Mans is a Black American poet, artist from Newark, New Jersey. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin Madison, with a B.A. in African American Studies. Her debut collection of poetry, Chalk Outlines of Snow Angels, was published in 2012. Mans is the resident poet at the Newark Public Library. She was a member of The Strivers Row Collective.