The Prophetic Lens: A Missiological Function of Film for Black Social Movement from Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Camera Phone

Through technological advances and its democratization, the camera is found to have dual functionality. It is both a prophetic and a missiological tool used to awaken the collective conscience of a nation apathetic towards the Black experience and to offer a counter-narrative reorienting the US to becoming a more racially just society. This paper considers definitions of gospel, missions, and the prophetic, outlining a framework for how the camera functions in all three. It briefly explores the use of the camera from Martin Luther King, Jr., during the Civil Rights Movement, to the contemporary citizen with a camera phone, all capturing anti-Black violence. As we will see, like the parables of Jesus were to his kingdom message, the content of the camera has proven vital to acquiring justice by exposing the realities of racial injustice, confronting the status quo, and energising viewers to take positive action.

Aspiration and the Violence of Gentrification in Marvel’s Luke Cage

This article analyzes the cultural politics of gentrification as they are deployed in the Netflix series Marvel’s Luke Cage. Based on the comic book character, Luke Cage, who was created in response to the popularity of the 1970s blaxploitation films, and the Black Power movement, the television series portrays a Black superhero who defends contemporary Harlem and its people from crime and exploitation. Critically recognized and widely watched during its first airing from 2016 to 2018, Luke Cage was a breakthrough television series that not only centered a Black superhero but directed itself to Black experience and public dialogue during the time of Black Life Matters. The Harlem portrayed in Luke Cage is both a specific community, and a virtual invocation of Black community aspiration, and the structural violence of gentrification. The violent emotions and displacement of gentrification that are presented in the series represent a form of intramural dialogue between the Black creatives working on the show and the broader Black public that is engaging with the long-time debates around the meaning and future of Harlem.

Revisiting Auburn Avenue: The Construction of an Afrofuturist Counterpublic Space

The black counterpublic, as a space where black people could exercise their discursive contestation and participatory deliberation, has too often served to produce a counter-discourse aiming at defying white hegemonic mode of rule and racialized categorization of members of society. In the same vein, Afrofuturism, as a burgeoning cultural movement in the United States, employs the Afrodiasporic experience as a backdrop against which to contest the white-narrated version of black history and to project a better future for people of African descent. Merging the underlying philosophies of the black counterpublic and Afrofuturism, this paper seeks to advance the notion of the Afrofuturist counterpublic as a more embedded concept that tends to address the past and future of the black experience in a more explicit and overt form. Drawing mainly on Inwood’s representation of the redevelopment project along Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, GA, as a contemporary form of the counterpublic, this article adds to his insights by suggesting that Auburn Avenue as a rehabilitated space is deeply informed by the undergirding tenets of the counterpublic and Afrofuturist theories so as to exalt it to a symbol of an Afrofuturist counterpublic.

The irrevocable pedagogical value of the Bible: Liberation transcends technology

The introduction of the Bible in Africa operated on two major frontiers, firstly, the oral tradition of the missionary who possessed both the Gospel message by word and in the written text (gadget). Conversion occurred through oral ‘manipulation’ that includes an oral negation of the native’s history and worldviews. Secondly, the rise of missionary schools opened the door to the reading of the Bible. However, the black experience has revealed that the reading of the Bible by blacks, slaves and the oppressed gave rise to a new world of interpretation and, in some respects, quietened the oral, historical, political and spiritual disturbance of the missionary voice as the vanguard of the colonial master. It is not the gadget or the written word that is in dispute, even in the digital era, but what the Bible says about oppression, poverty, injustice, dehumanisation, equitable distribution of wealth and politics. Through the paradigms of liberative thought, namely, the hermeneutics of the oppressed, this study firstly will acknowledge the creative and existential interpretation of the Bible for particular goals. While laying out a brief history on Eurocentrism as superseding the Gospel. Secondly, the study seeks to look into Western Christian thought as expansion of the Western Empire. Therefore, arguing that shifts and progress under the guise of development maintain western values. Lastly, the study seeks to argue that despite any platform of biblical transmission, orally, the printing press and the electronic platform, the hermeneutical and epistemological pedagogy of the liberationist lens of the Bible persist; liberation transcends technology.Contribution: This research will contribute in the dialogue between faith and technology within the paradigm of liberation theology. The study seeks to centre the pertinent theme of justice and liberation in the Bible as a critical witness that is relevant for the meaning and relevance of the Bible.

We out here...

We out here...is prose and a creative conversation about the horrors and triumphs of the black experience in America. It explores the practical, mundane, and spiritual ways in which we interact with rivers and our environment.