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The Sylvia Wynter Graduate Fellowship

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The project I propose for the Sylvia Wynter Graduate Fellowship addresses the area of film theory, especially as it is both challenged and championed by the work of Dr. Sylvia Wynter. Film theory is an academic discipline that aims to explore the essence of cinema and to provide conceptual frameworks for understanding filmic relationships to reality, other arts (such as literature, music, dance, theater, painting, sculpture, and media applications), and their symbiotic relationship to individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not a self-contained field, in that it borrows from the disciplines of philosophy, art theory, social science, cultural theory, psychology, literary theory, linguistics, economics, and political science. …show more content…

Focused on black film theory, the aim of exploring ontological conceptions of “the human,” and the press and direction of whiteness are inseparable. To this end, Wynter’s scholarship marks a crucial point of departure for linking two currents of debate permeating contemporary cinematic theory. The first debate, especially in relation to classical Hollywood, is articulated through challenges to the whiteness of American film and its determined masculine film gaze, in terms of institutional structures, conceptual narratives, auteurship, technological applications, and historical narrowness. The second debate probes the fixed conceptions of what it is to simply be viewed as “the human,” with regard to the normative functions of an unquestioned category of existence, anchoring race, gender, and sexuality, to education, art, philosophy, and global …show more content…

As a way of opening the theory that guides film structures, this project is constructed as a response to educational modes of linking traditional film theory to anticolonial, antiracist, queer, feminist, and neo-ecological narratives. The plan for this project is to develop a multi-page, multi-option interactive website as a tool dedicated to the investigation, scholarly study, and application, of black film theory. With individual pages dedicated to the interrogation of those discrete theories reflected in black film, such as spectatorship, market segregation, narrative cognition, aesthetics, and politics, this project will allow filmic access to the sociogenesis of what Wynter terms “the human” as it pertains to analysis of how cultural and artistic texts shape what it feels like to be human. Intended as an asynchronous web-based open learning resourced environment for the individual film student, this site can also function as a synchronous instructor-facilitated program with options for forums, email, live video conferencing, and options for continuous in-class lecture inclusion. Funding from the Sylvia Wynter Graduate Fellowship will be used to cover the costs of researching and writing content, and to secure necessary copyrights, film and photo rights, as well as the cost of mounting the program on a secure and accessible web

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