The panel examines themes animating Isaac Julien’s 1991 film Young Soul Rebels. In the presentations and the discussion, the panelists explore questions of temporality, memory, Black culture, and film theory.

Rizvana Bradley: Interval of the Abandoned

Over the two decades since Young Soul Rebels and Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask were first screened, Isaac Julien’s practice has continued to renew the conditions for thought within black critical theory and art criticism. So, too, has Fanon’s haunting utterance, “I wait for me,” which deconstructs the presumptive foundations of film spectatorship. This talk gestures to the resonances between Julien’s repertoire and my own work on the intervallic, temporality, and desire as they pertain to an interrogation of film phenomenology and the complex play of dissimulative appearances with which blackness is always entwined.

Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Bradley is the author of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by Frieze.

Donna Jones: Sonic Zeitgeist, Eidatic Knowing: On Film, History and Memory

In this talk, I will reflect on how film interacts with history and experience. I had the great pleasure of watching Young Soul Rebels in the UK, in the year immediately following Thatcher. In retrospect, after many rewatches, I find that film is capable of communicating a sense of history through multiple simultaneities–by simultaneity, I mean how the historical moment of the mise-en-scene transforms and renews itself with each viewing and in engagement with each new historical present.

Donna V. Jones is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism and Modernity (Columbia University Press).

Isaac Julien: Discussant

Isaac Julien is an acclaimed artist and filmmaker, and Distinguished Professor of the Arts and History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. He first gained wide recognition with Looking for Langston (1989), a poetic treatment of the Black poet Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. His 1991 debut feature, Young Soul Rebels, won the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His most recent ten-screen film installation, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025), premiered at Palazzo Te in Mantua, Italy.

 The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM. Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.