This paper discusses the practice of contemporary artist Cauleen Smith as an ongoing exploration of the aesthetic and political possibilities of cinematic space, place, and movement. Drawing upon a range of critical frameworks from cultural geography and Black feminism, it locates in Smith’s work an aesthetics and politics of errantry that favors radically nonnormative forms of relation and mobility. Borrowing the term from Martinican novelist and critic Édouard Glissant, and drawing more broadly from his thoroughgoing elucidations of the spatial dynamics of colonialism, the plantation system, and their afterlives, the text frames Smith’s cinematic errantry both as a formal and technological operation and as a political one grounded in a Black feminist praxis of place.
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Summer 2021
Research Article|
July 01 2021
Space Race: Cauleen Smith’s Cinematic Errantry
Ryan Conrath
Ryan Conrath
Ryan Conrath is an assistant professor of cinema studies at Salisbury University, with a research focus on experimental cinema. His work has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, Film Criticism, and View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture. His current book project, Between Images: Montage and the Poetics of Relation, explores the politics and aesthetics of editing in the work of such contemporary moving image artists as Hito Steyerl, Steve McQueen, Harun Farocki, and Cauleen Smith.
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Feminist Media Histories (2021) 7 (3): 19–52.
Citation
Ryan Conrath; Space Race: Cauleen Smith’s Cinematic Errantry. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2021; 7 (3): 19–52. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.19
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