Black Crossroads of Cinema in Afro-Latin America

Undergraduate

Black Crossroads introduces students to key questions in cinema, visual culture, and Afro–Latin American cultural production from the 20th and 21st centuries, emphasizing connections across Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking contexts. The course is grounded in “Exuzilhar,” a concept coined by Afro-Brazilian writer Cidinha da Silva that links the crossroads ( encruzilhada ) with Exu, the Yoruba orisha of mediation, translation, and passage. This framework guides our study of how moving images circulate across linguistic borders in the Afro-Atlantic world—carrying contradictions, generating meaning, and intervening in politics and culture. Treating film as a site where aesthetic form meets social struggle, we will analyze how Afro–Latin American cinemas engage memory, freedom, citizenship, nationhood, systemic racism and sexism, class inequality, and cultural subversion. Students will develop tools for close reading of film form (sound, editing, cinematography, narrative) alongside attention to production, circulation, and reception. Sixteen films—award-winning and experimental—from Brazil, Cuba and across Latin America and the Caribbean anchor the course, supported by literary texts and critical scholarship.