“Just because we’re living in dangerous times doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t enjoy the full pleasures of life. You know what I mean?”
These words, spoken by Black women in Zeinabu irene Davis’s A Powerful Thang (1991), resonate deeply. Finding joy amidst chaos, as depicted in Davis’s film about embracing love, feels essential. In today’s world, saturated with negativity, seeking moments of pleasure offers a vital breath of fresh air.
Davis’s film, however, transports us back to 1991, a different era. Engaging with A Powerful Thang is akin to time travel through film history.
The Power of Looking Back: Time Travel Through Cinema
Viewing A Powerful Thang brings to mind bell hooks’s concept of the “oppositional gaze,” the empowering act of “looking and looking back” with agency. Film provides this unique ability to transcend temporal limitations. Even within oppressive structures, hooks argues, the power to control one’s gaze offers agency.
While nostalgia isn’t always the goal, watching Davis’s film evokes a sense of wistful appreciation. It allows us to journey back three decades and witness something increasingly rare today: a meaningful and joyful depiction of the “powerful” desire for, and attainment of, intimate connection and love between Black characters.
Love is profound, not trivial. As bell hooks emphasizes, “Love is our hope and our salvation.” It’s a catalyst for positive social change. Hook’s dedication to writing about love underscores its significance. Yet, media often overshadows nuanced narratives of Black love with images of Black violence and suffering. Love is often portrayed as a limited commodity, accessible only to a privileged few.
Filmmaker Alile Sharon Larkin describes the scarcity of Black love in Hollywood films as “cinematic genocide.” Faced with this cinematic void, Black viewers, particularly Black women, have often employed the “oppositional gaze.” This critical perspective allows viewers to challenge dehumanizing portrayals of Blackness. Black women filmmakers like Zeinabu irene Davis use it to offer transformative images of Black womanhood and Black identity.
A Powerful Thang emphasizes the communal recognition of human connection and love. Yasmine (Asma Feyijinmi), a writer and mother, and Craig (John Earl Jelks), a musician, are dating. Their friends and family encourage them to embrace the “full pleasures” of their evening together. This shared anticipation is palpable as Yasmine writes, rehearses, and talks with her father, and as Craig visits the barbershop and plays his saxophone. Davis masterfully conveys the collective desire for connection and love.
Even though the film is set in 1991 Ohio, watching Yasmine and Craig’s anticipation resonates today. Their hope for something better, something liberating, feels tangible. Bell hooks’s words bridge past, present, and future: “Looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future.”
Still from Something Good—Negro Kiss (1898) depicting a Black couple kissing, showcasing early cinematic representations of Black affection.
Pleasure from the Past: Time Capsules of Love
It’s liberating to realize cinema’s power to transcend the present. Film allows us to journey through time and space, bringing us closer to the fullness of love. We can travel back to 1898 to witness the joy of a Black couple embracing and kissing in the rediscovered short film Something Good—Negro Kiss (William Nicholas Selig, 1898). This silent, roughly thirty-second film is believed to be the first cinematic portrayal of Black affection. It opens with a medium shot of a formally dressed Black woman and man kissing, their hands intertwined. They laugh, kiss again, and radiate joy throughout. Their embodied and emotional connection is evident in their kisses, hugs, eye contact, and playful hand-swinging. Film scholar Allyson Nadia Field calls this historic film “one of the most important films I’ve come across.”
This footage echoes the sentiment of Lorraine Hansberry, who in 1964 reflected on love among Black people, reaching back to a distant past: “Love? Ah, ask the troubadours who come from those who have loved when all reason pointed to the uselessness and foolhardiness of love…Out of the depths of pain we have thought to be our sole heritage in the world – O, we know about love!”
Something Good—Negro Kiss, depicting the unbridled joy of Black affection, is an act of liberation through love. In a society steeped in anti-blackness, Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins argues that love between Black people is inherently rebellious. This film offers a transgressive narrative from an era often defined by the inhumanity of Jim Crow segregation, defiantly proclaiming, “O, we know about love!”
Still from Illusions (1982) showing two Black women in conversation, highlighting the film's focus on Black women's experiences in Hollywood.
Julie Dash’s early short film Illusions (1982) time-travels to WWII-era Hollywood to reimagine possibilities for Black women in the film industry. Illusions critiques the racial and gender structures of 1940s Hollywood, directly challenging and reframing the industry’s history, culture, and practices. Dash reimagines history to empower Black women within Hollywood. The film centers on the burgeoning intimacy between Mignon (Lonette McKee), a Black woman “passing” as white studio executive, and Ester (Rosanne Katon), a Black singer secretly dubbing white starlets.
Mignon’s “passing” highlights the discriminatory practices excluding Black women from Hollywood. Mignon and Ester find connection and visibility in each other’s company, defying Hollywood’s erasure of Black women. In their private moments, they listen, connect, and truly see each other. This “direct unmediated gaze of recognition,” in bell hooks’s words, becomes a source of pleasure, connection, and power between them.
Limitless Love: Transcending Time in Modern and Futuristic Films
Returning to contemporary media, the series Modern Love (2019-) prompts an “oppositional gaze.” Despite its progressive title, “modern” love seems accessible to everyone except women of color. The series, while showcasing diverse experiences of love—young and old, gay and straight, dating and married—fails to offer inclusive visions of love across racial lines.
In “Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am,” Lexi (Anne Hathaway), a white woman with bipolar disorder, experiences shame and isolation, hindering romantic connections. Sylvia (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), Lexi’s Black boss and friend, provides a nonjudgmental space for Lexi to disclose her mental health. Sylvia’s selfless compassion enables Lexi to accept herself and pursue romantic love. Sylvia’s own experience of love, however, remains unexplored and seemingly irrelevant. This episode, emphasizing unconditional love, ironically reinforces the series’ pattern of overlooking love for women of color. Modern Love‘s exclusion becomes a stark reminder of present-day limitations.
The futuristic series Black Mirror contrasts sharply with Modern Love. Its “San Junipero” (2016) episode offers a joyful vision of love that transcends time and space. While Black Mirror often presents dystopian futures, “San Junipero” celebrates love through Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a Black woman who finds and chooses love with Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) for eternity in a simulated afterlife.
San Junipero, the episode’s namesake, is a pleasure-filled virtual beach town free from temporal constraints. The elderly can visit as younger versions of themselves or choose to reside there permanently, selecting their preferred decade. Kelly and Yorkie’s courtship spans decades within San Junipero and bridges the virtual and “real” worlds. Kelly’s choice to remain in San Junipero with Yorkie is a choice for timeless love. The episode’s widespread acclaim as Black Mirror’s “best and most beloved” reflects a contemporary yearning for love’s revolutionary possibilities.
This exploration of time travel to achieve liberation is central to speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. These genres move beyond the present “to imagine alternate possibilities of Blackness that can be lived in safety, creativity, and freedom,” as scholar Hope Wabuke explains.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, pioneering filmmaker Julie Dash employed the transgressive, oppositional gaze through speculative fiction in Daughters of the Dust (1991). This landmark film, the first feature directed by a Black woman to receive theatrical release in the U.S., reimagines the past, centering Black women in African American history. Daughters of the Dust portrays multiple generations of Black women on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, at the turn of the 20th century.
In Daughters of the Dust, Dash envisions alternate realities where love transcends time: “What if we could have an unborn child come and visit her family-to-be and help solve the family’s problems…what if we had a family that had such a fellowship with the ancestors that they helped guide them.” Speculative fiction offers infinite possibilities, experienced across time. Love in its many forms is crucial to Dash’s narrative, exemplified by the newlywed couple whose constant expressions of love are intentionally highlighted.
Embracing the possibility of love and life’s pleasures, anytime and anywhere, is liberating. Recognizing that love from the past can inform the future is empowering. While not advocating for blind nostalgia, nor ignoring present realities, the goal is to expand our understanding of love beyond present limitations. By journeying through time via film, appreciating past and imagining future narratives of love, we can foster more love, liberation, and social transformation in the present. Time travel through film offers a powerful lens for envisioning a more loving future.
[1] bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 131.
[2] hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” 116.
[3] bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love, (NY: HarperCollins, 2001), 225.
[4] Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, Edited by Robert Nemiroff. (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 256.
[5] hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” 129.
[6] The episode entitled “So He Looked Like Dad. It Was Just Dinner, Right?” centers on a young white woman, “Maddy” (Julia Garner), who has ambiguous feelings for an older man. “Tami” (Myha’la Herrold), a friend of Maddy’s, is a Black woman in whom Maddy regularly confides her feelings. Additionally, it is worth noting that there are two Black male characters in the first season of the series who are partnered with and/or dating white characters – one of whom is Lexi’s love interest in “Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am.”
[7] Dash, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film (NY: The New Press, 1992), 29.
[8] Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 55.
