Unexplained Presence

by Tisa Bryant, Margo Jefferson

Overview

***Now with a new afterword by MARGO JEFFERSON***

In Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence, readers are spectators of mis-en-scènes in which black subjectivity has been distorted and denied within various visual narratives. Moving from cultural analysis to cinematic (re)creation, Bryant's prose traverses like a tracking shot through John Schlesinger's Darling, Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park and Virginia Woolf's Orlando, giving voice to characters whom have otherwise been structurally silenced. As Pulitzer–prize winning author Margo Jefferson aptly points out in her afterword, Tisa Bryant doesn't merely write about film; she is an "auteur," a "cultural anthropologist," and a "virtuosic critic-artist." Since its original publication with Leon Works in 2007, Unexplained Presence has been foundational among poets, scholars, and film critics and with this publication, Tisa Bryant's legacy as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary literature is preserved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798891060050
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007; Wave Books, 2024), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles, and a finalist for a 2010 LAMBDA literary award. Her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogs for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Suné Woods and Cauleen Smith, and is forthcoming in the anthology Letters to the Future: Black Experimental Women Writers, and in a catalogue of site-specific art from The New School. She has done numerous presentations of cinema essays, most recently at ALOUD's "School of Prince" event at the Los Angeles Public Library, and at "Speak Nearby," a symposium of text and performance inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Tisa Bryant was a commissioned writer/researcher for Radio Imagination, Clockshop’s year-long Los Angeles celebration of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, in collaboration with the Huntington Library in Pasadena, which houses the Octavia E. Butler Papers. She is working on The Curator, a novel of Black female subjectivity and imagined cinema. Residual, a meditation on grief, longing, desire and archival research, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.

Table of Contents

Preface

Darling

Something in the Air

While London Burns . . . Violet is Blue

California Negroes

Under Cover of Darkness

In Melville’s Jungle

Andre’s Masked Ball

Looking a Mad Dog in the Eyes

Portrait of a Lady

The Head of the Moor

The Problem of Dido

Unexplained Presence

Credits 

Afterword

Editorial Reviews

For this brilliant debut, Bryant narrates the movements of peripheral African-American characters in film and other media—characters who seem to be there innocuously, as in Stephen Frears's Sammy & Rosie Get Laid or François Ozon's 8 Femmes —but end up loaded with multiple, conflicting meanings.”—Publishers Weekly

“Bryant’s essay title also captures the way ‘radical writing’ (not ‘just’ writing) seems to have become, for some poets, a synonym primarily for poetry, eliding a great deal of radical drama, nonfiction, and fiction, to say nothing of cross-genre prose.” —Jacket2

 “What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.” —San Francisco Bay Guardian

From the Publisher

For this brilliant debut, Bryant narrates the movements of peripheral African-American characters in film and other media-characters who seem to be there innocuously, as in Stephen Frears's Sammy & Rosie Get Laid or François Ozon's 8 Femmes-but end up loaded with multiple, conflicting meanings: "Caty's eyes shut in grief, or its double, ecstasy; her eyes shut within the shot. This is the moment, the clichéd ending. Le samouraï is dying. But she does not run to him, calling his name through a veil of tears. Her hand does not reach for eyes, her mouth, or her heart, as she watches, as we watch, him die." (May)

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Publishers Weekly