{"id":33,"date":"2014-11-06T15:54:01","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T20:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/?p=33"},"modified":"2014-11-06T15:54:10","modified_gmt":"2014-11-06T20:54:10","slug":"stephanie-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/2014\/11\/stephanie-black\/","title":{"rendered":"Filmmaker Stephanie Black on \u201cLife and Debt\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_35\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-35\" style=\"width: 150px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/cdn-dev.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-my-dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1051\/2014\/11\/stephanie-black-ig.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-35\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn-dev.vanderbilt.edu\/t2-my-dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1051\/2014\/11\/stephanie-black-ig-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-35\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stephanie Black<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>These pieces about Stephanie Black&#8217;s 2001 film provide more context about the director, the film, and her artistic and political intentions.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nitrateonline.com\/2001\/flifedebt.html\">Life and Debt: Interview with Stephanie Black<\/a>&#8221; by Cynthia Fuchs, Nitrate Online, 14 December 2001.<\/li>\n<li>George Sanchez, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/frictionmagazine.com\/artful\/film\/black.asp\">Revealing the Transparent: Stephanie Black Unveils the<br \/>\nJamaican World Beyond Tourism<\/a>,&#8221; Friction Magazine, 2002.<\/li>\n<li>Official film website: http:\/\/www.lifeanddebt.org\/about.html<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Speaking to Fuchs about her motivations for portraying tourism in the film, Black explained:<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #808080\">The genesis of the film came in the 1990s, when I spent time in Jamaica. Every day in the Jamaican Gleaner, the national newspaper, there were front page stories about some payment that wasn&#8217;t being released because Jamaica didn&#8217;t devalue rapidly enough or privatize quickly enough, or do drug-trafficking to the satisfaction of the United States. And these stories were repeated again and again. I was in shock because I had thought the IMF was something like the Red Cross. I didn&#8217;t think they were that controlling, that they would have that kind of impact on the day-to-day running of the country. So I wondered how much autonomy the country had, if the outside forces had such influence on the really important policy-making. As I began to speak to people, and as is articulated in the film, everyone knows what&#8217;s going on, in all classes, and yet, I, as a decently educated American, had no idea that this was going on. And that&#8217;s how the tourist came to be &#8212; I wanted to ask why I had no idea what was happening. The tourist is a metaphor for privilege and lack of understanding. Jamaica needs to reinvent itself to meet the needs of the visitors. Consider the case of dance lessons: it could be that once, you visited a country and would go to a little bar and see people dance, and try out the new moves yourself; now, it&#8217;s all contained in a little area, and spoon-fed in a soulless way.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #808080\">But at the same time, [the use of the tourists] is not just a criticism; I&#8217;m not just making fun of the Americans. I identify with them. I felt that there&#8217;s a certain victimization in lack of knowledge, that I myself am part of. So the tourists are a metaphor for the lack of understanding, of our own policies, imposed in our name. I spoke to Jamaicans who work in hotels about the most absurd questions they get. And there were people would come to the island and\u00a0\u00a0 not even know they were in a foreign country. Very often, the first question they would get is, &#8220;Where&#8217;s the McDonald&#8217;s?&#8221; And along with that, there&#8217;s the adaptation of the Jamaica Kincaid text (A Small Place, written in 1987 about Kincaid&#8217;s own home, Antigua), and she uses a very militant, passionate voice to describe a postcolonial consciousness. I was interested, now that we&#8217;ve all accepted that colonization is wrong, to apply her postcolonial text to a neocolonial situation, and see how accurate it remains.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>These pieces about Stephanie Black&#8217;s 2001 film provide more context about the director, the film, and her artistic and political intentions. &#8220;Life and Debt: Interview with Stephanie Black&#8221; by Cynthia Fuchs, Nitrate Online, 14 December 2001. George Sanchez, &#8220;Revealing the Transparent: Stephanie Black Unveils the Jamaican World Beyond Tourism,&#8221; Friction Magazine, 2002. Official film website:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2052,"featured_media":35,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[8,7,6,9],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a101notes","tag-globalization","tag-life-and-debt","tag-stephanie-black","tag-tourism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2052"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/37"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/cbjorkjames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}