Jerome P. Dent, Jr.

Failing to Get Out  (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies) 

This article juxtaposes the film Get Out with visual media ostensibly within and outside of the film’s genre to expand our understanding of horror, the psychoanalytics of spectatorship and identification, and the work of critical race theory. Yoking together horror and the slave narrative, I highlight the moments when identification shifts between the protagonist and the antagonist, a subject split that engenders neither wholesale resistance nor complete identification but an irresistible collusion between both.

Fantasies of Black Final Girls (New Review of Film and Television)

This article endeavors to critically examine the popular and enduring trope of the Final Girl and its intersections with race. Coined almost 35 years ago by Carol Clover in the article ‘Her Body, Himself’, and later explicated in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws, the Final Girl is a figure that Clover theorizes as holding the possibilities of cross-gender identification – possibilities which are conditioned by a combination of narrative and visual cues and desire. This article interrogates the assumptive logics of Clover’s Final Girl and of gender permeability, arguing for an excavation of the racial dynamics that are disavowed in the theory. Analyzing Earnest Dickerson’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight and the character of Jeryline as a/the first Black Final Girl, I examine the impact of race, and more specifically Blackness, on gendered figures, narrative tropes, spectatorship, and the limitations of identificatory possibilities within the film itself and horror in general.

Athazagoraphilia: On The End(s) of Dreaming (InVisible Culture)

In the introductory chapter of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, entitled “When History Sleeps,” scholar and activist Robin D.G. Kelley ties his own political engagement with his mother’s “dream of a new world,” an inherited belief “that the map to a new world is in the imagination.” In the remainder of the text, Kelley delves into the various political and cultural manifestations of this call to map out a social-political paradigm through the conscious act of imagining—a “nowhere” or “different future.” Thinking through what can be called the unconscious of this act of imagining and the dreamwork that is subsequently produced, I reconsider the consequences of this production. What if, as Anthony Paul Farley states, the production of the dream also “does the mental work that keeps the structure from falling apart?” Said another way, what if an end of dreamwork is to keep the dreamers dreaming? Though this may seem to effect a call to end the dreaming, it is rather a call to sit with that which animates it, to “wallow in the contradictions,” to understand that our flights from this context may work to sustain us while also working to sustain the system that creates the conditions of possibility for the dream. In such a context, the call to end the dreaming is also in itself a dream of flight. This essay is, in effect, a meditation on what it might mean to dream more lucid.