This article examines Lynn Nottage's 2011 satirical play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood's golden age. Nottage's play is inspired, in part, by the career of African American actress, singer, and dancer Theresa Harris. A tale of Black women's cinematic representation and social erasure, Nottage's fabrication of film history extends beyond the staged plot to also include a digital archive documenting Vera's celebrity and career. This article explores how Nottage's play and paratexts fabulate a speculative fiction and archive about Black women's media histories, staging what I call a phantom cinema, an amalgam of real and imagined film histories that haunt, trouble, and work with and against cinema histories to creatively illuminate archival gaps in visual culture and the public imagination.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Spring 2022
Research Article|
April 01 2022
Changing the Subject: Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and the Making of Black Women’s Film History
Samantha N. Sheppard
Samantha N. Sheppard
Samantha N. Sheppard, Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (University of California Press, 2020). She is currently writing a book, A Black W/hole: Phantom Cinemas and the Reimagining of Black Women's Media Histories, a project for which she was named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Search for other works by this author on:
Feminist Media Histories (2022) 8 (2): 14–42.
Citation
Samantha N. Sheppard; Changing the Subject: Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and the Making of Black Women’s Film History. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2022; 8 (2): 14–42. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.14
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.