Iconoclastic Readings: Anti/Blackness in Post/Ferguson American Cinema

Chapter 5 “Iconoclastic Readings: Anti/Blackness in Post/Ferguson American Cinema” engages in an iconoclastic reading of four films within the emerging genre of post/Ferguson American cinema: Antebellum (2020), Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), and the two-film Black Panther (2018, 2022) universe. The inter(con)textual connections between these films highlight how they each contain residues of racial icons and Black radical excess in how they imagine Black liberation. In doing so, I show how their diverging yet interconnected narratives upend the idea that iconography and iconoclasm represent a simple dualism by thinking from the liminal vantage point of the twilight where there exist multiple trajectories of Black radical disruption and institutional capture. Here, Black refusal always contains forms of invention that exceed that which they negate. This invention can move beyond the terms of Western Man, or it can mimic its conceptual foundations. Oftentimes, it does both. This does not mean that we are helplessly caught in an endless cycle of iconoclasm leading to new icons. On the contrary, it necessitates a deciphering practice which can discern iconographic residues from Black radical excess.