The overlooked history of Black cinema, with Jacqueline Stewart
Prof. Jacqueline Stewart is busy. In addition to being a UChicago professor (albeit on sabbatical), Stewart also serves as the host of Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies and is chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Her career has examined the histories of overlooked Black filmmakers and Black audiences.
Last year, the University of Chicago film scholar Stewart won a prestigious MacArthur fellowship for “illuminating the contributions that overlooked Black filmmakers and communities of spectators have made to cinema’s development as an art form.”
Lucky for us, she found time to sit down with UChicago’s Big Brains podcast.
Her interview explores the history of Black cinema and explains how preservation and archiving are not neutral acts, but contribute to how we contextualize and understand Black history.
Listen to the entire episode at UChicago’s Big Brains podcast.