In recent years, film, art, new media, and music video works created by black makers have demonstrated an increasingly “post-black” impulse. The term “post-black” was originally coined in response to innovative practices and works created by a generation of black artists who were shaped by hip-hop culture and Afro-modernist thinking. I use the term as a theoretical tool to discuss what lies beyond the racial character of a work, image, or body. Using a post-black theoretical methodology I examine a range of works by black filmmakers Kathleen Collins Prettyman and Lee Daniels, visual artists Wangechi Mutu and Jean-Michel Basquiat, new media artist Nettrice Gaskins, and music video works of hip-hop artists and performer Erykah Badu. I discuss how black artists and filmmakers have moved through Darby English’s notion of “black representational space” as a sphere where bodies and works are beholden to specific historical and aesthetic expectations and limitations. I posit that black representational space has been challenged by what I describe as “metaphysical space” where bodies produce a new set of possibilities as procreative, fluid, liberated, and otherworldly forces. These bodies are neither positive nor negative; instead they occupy the in-between spaces between life and death, time and space, digital and analog, interiority and exteriority, vulnerability and empowerment. Post-black visual culture displays the capacities of black bodies as creative forces that shape how we see and experience visual culture. My methodology employs textual analysis of visual objects that articulate a post-black impulse, paying close attention to how these works compel viewers to see other dimensions of experience. In three chapters I draw from theoretical work in race and visuality, affect theory, phenomenology, and interiority from the likes of Charles Johnson, Frantz Fanon, Elena del Río, Sara Ahmed, Saidiya Hartman, and Elizabeth Alexander. This study aims to create an interdisciplinary analysis that charts new directions for exploring and re-imaging black bodies as subjects and objects of endless knowledge and creative potential.

In dieser Arbeit werden sowohl afrikanische Charaktere als auch Repräsentationen von Kleidung, Musik, Zeichen oder Symbolen, deren Ästhetik als afrozentrisch beschrieben werden kann, identifiziert und kritisch betrachtet. Zusammenfassend als „afrikanische Elemente“ bezeichnet, dient ihre Präsenz oft der Kontrastierung der in den Vordergrund gestellten afroamerikanischen Charaktere und Geschichten und operiert in dieser Kapazität zwischen der gleichzeitigen Sehnsucht nach und der Ablehnung Afrikas, die sich in den afroamerikanischen Identitäten ablesen lassen. Obwohl in anderen Teildisziplinen der African American Studies - wie etwa den Literatur- oder Theaterwissenschaften - die Beziehungen zu und die Bezugnahme auf Afrika bereits untersucht wurden, sind ähnliche Ansätze auf dem Gebiet der Filmwissenschaften noch deutlich unterrepräsentiert. Die Intention dieser Arbeit liegt deshalb darin, die bestehende Forschung um die Fragestellung zu ergänzen, auf welche Weise diese Elemente dargestellt werden. Wie tragen sie zu den Narrativen bei, in die sie eingeflochten sind und wie spiegelt ihre Einbindung in die ausgewählten Filme die jeweilige Politik, die kulturelle Ästhetik und die sozialen Entwicklungen ihrer Entstehungsära wider? Den konzeptionellen Rahmen der Arbeit bildet eine kumulative Vorgehensweise. Es werden jene Faktoren untersucht, die zur Auswahl, visuellen Umsetzung und Repräsentation der afrikanischen Elemente, auf die Bezug genommen wird, beigetragen haben. Die Arbeit verhandelt dabei auch die Frage, wie und warum bestimmte Auffassungen von Afrika und seinen Bewohnern in den besprochenen Filmen fortbestehen. Schließlich soll mit der Arbeit innerhalb der derzeit bestehenden Forschung ein Grundstein für die differenziertere Betrachtung Schwarzer Erfahrungen in den ausgewählten Filmen gelegt werden. / This study identifies and critically assesses African characters as well as representations of dress, music, signs or symbols, which may be described as Africacentric in their aesthetic, in African American film. Collectively termed as African elements, their presence in the selected films is often distinguished from the foregrounded African American characters and stories, and in this capacity, operates between the concurrent desires and negations of Africa in the assertions of African American identities. Although within other scholarly disciplines in African American studies, such as literature or theatre studies, the relations and references to Africa have been explored, similar explorations in the area of film studies are arguably underrepresented. The specific contribution of this study therefore intends to expand on the existing body of work in its assessment of the ways in which these elements are presented, how they contribute to the narratives they are engaged in and how their inclusion in the selected films reflect the contemporary politics, cultural aesthetic and social trends of the era in which they are produced. The conceptual framework of the thesis follows a cumulative approach where the respective determinants that have contributed to the choice, visualisation, and representations of the referenced African elements are examined. The thesis thereby negotiates questions of how and why particular perceptions of Africa and Africans in the selected films persist. Ultimately, it establishes a premise for why in the current scholarship there should be a place for a more differentiated analysis of black experiences within the discussed films.