Mississippi Damned showed at Outfest to a sold out audience and took home the 2009 Jury Award for Outstanding US Feature. The emotionally difficult and narratively complex feature film is a compelling contribution to American filmmaking in general and African-American filmmaking and queer filmmaking in particular. Although Mississippi Damned can be characterized as an African-American film, its interest is in framing a version of African America that has not been circulated onscreen, except as stereotypes working in the service of white supremacy. Perhaps Mississippi Damned, like the film Precious (which I have not yet seen but anxiously its November release), marks a recalibration of mainstream African American cinema that allows it to pursue avenues and social issues previously foreclosed by the pressure to produce and promote “positive” images of racial uplift.
I do not understand this recalibration as “post-black” because “black” consistently has marked a dynamic, contested category that indexes nothing but the spatio-temporal aporia it works to dissimulate by pummeling it into something recognizable. Mississippi Damned does point, however, to the increasing inadequacy of “representation” as an operative logic of cinema, as “film” itself is transforming under a variety of different pressures and changes.
