Editors’ Introduction: A Certain Defiance: The Filmic Art, Archives, and Activism of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch

Terri Francis is the author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism and Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami. Her scholarship includes multiple edited special issues and an exhibition catalog for her cocurated film installation Rough and Unequal: A Film by Kevin Jerome Everson (2020). She then edited an open-access dossier for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, “Film Programming as Social Justice Work in the Wake of Covid-19,” which features essays from programmers, platform founders, and arts writers about their work during the summer of Black Lives Matter. In 2014, she edited “Unexpected Archives: Seeking More Locations of Caribbean Film,” an interdisciplinary selection of essays for sx salon. Francis had previously published a collection of essays exploring Afrosurrealism in film and video in Black Camera in 2013. Her writing can be found in a range of academic journals and periodicals including Film History, Black Camera, Transition, Feminist Media Histories, and Film Quarterly.

Miriam Petty is Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the Graduate School at Northwestern University, and Associate Professor in Northwestern’s Department of Radio/Television/Film. Petty writes and teaches about race, stardom, and performance and is especially interested in the history of African American representation in Hollywood film. Along with her award-winning book, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (University of California Press, 2016), her writing has been featured in Genders, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the Journal of Popular Musical Studies, among others. She is currently at work on a study that explores Tyler Perry’s cultural impact from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Petty’s public scholarship has included her roles organizing two retrospectives of Billops-Hatch films, one in Atlanta at Emory University in 2014, and another at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center in 2023.