Xiongyue Yu’s Black Arts Journal

  The  Sweet Flypaper of Life   offers a vivid glimpse of the  everyday lives of people in Harlem during the late 1940s and early 1950s.   Artist Roy DeCarava and author Langston Hughes  have  created  a seamless integration of images and text with this  creative  collaboration.   Their work extends beyond providing observations and enhances our understanding of what  is  see n , hear d , and fe lt  in  Harlem’s black community.  The description is given through the perspective of a grandmother, who guides the audience through the sights and sounds of the city.   Photographs taken by DeCarava illustrate the poverty in the Harlem community through filthy, broken sidewalks, as well as the optimism and hope for the future found in newly constructed housing projects.   By providing an intimate reflection of the complex lives of black Americans during a historic time of change, this collaboration provid...

  As people involved in cultural production in 2022, what issues do these works raise for you? I n the past, c ultural production  workshop   was  owned by private entrepreneurs and sometimes the state.  And  the whole process of cultural record and production  were expensive  and most normal people  rarely  had the choices to touch it .  But in the era of communication,  the digital media spaces are not just  for simple  communication; they  can be  record ed anytime and anywhere as a kind of evidence .  Technically,  there are many tools that have been invented to do the  synchronous multimodal communication  like —emails, text messages, voicemails,  video   call  and some so cial platform like  Facebook and  Twitter . The recording is so cheap  a nd  it’d accessible for anyone whether  amateurs or professionals in certain field to spread widely i...

  Through a Lens Darkly W hether negro boys or girls, they undergo the process that is to find the image of himself or herself that is not imposed by other nations. More importantly, it’s not the stereotypes that have been existed long time ago.  Thomas Allen Harris  surprisingly found that many people couldn’t name an exact black photographer and this became part of reasons for the film.  Thi s film has shown in TIME magazine and indicates that it’s a deep, rich dive into the history of African American photography. Based on the information that I have collected, I have known that the filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris put two ideas into the film itself, one is  to narrate the  history  of of African-American photography and  the other one  is  the  stories found in our family albums . As for  the form of film, it also includes the third  aspect , which is the way of representation  that  people how to overcome the d...