Post-Soul Cinema of Kasi Lemmons

In this edited volume, Kasi Lemmons,the first African-American womanauteurto solidly and steadily produce a full body of work in cinema-an oeuvre of quality, of note, of international recognition-will get the full film-studies treatment.This collection offers the first scholarly examination of Lemmons' films through various frameworks of film theory, illuminating her highly personal, unique, and rare vision. In Lemmons' worldview, the spiritualand the supernatural manifest in the natural, corporeal world. She subtly infuses her work with such images and narratives, owning her formalism, her modernist aesthetic, her cinematic preoccupations and her ontological leanings on race. Lemmons holds the varied experiencesofAfrican-American life before her lens-the ambitious bourgeoise, the spiritually lost,the ill and discarded,and the historically erased-and commits to capturing the nuances and differentiations, rather than perpetuating essentializedportrayals. This collection delves into Lemmons' iconoclastic drive and post-soul aesthetic as emanations of her attitudes toward personal agency, social agency, and social justice.