 This first of all the colloquium for those who don't know or who are attending for the first time. It's a weekly event hosted at CMS as part of the grad program. That's how we see our dear graduate students here today. And I just want to plug next week's colloquium is going to be a talk about non-binary binaries and Unreal MetaHumans by Eric Friedman who is a professor at Columbia College Chicago. Today's speaker is Samantha Shepherd who is an associate professor of cinema and media studies in the department of performing and media arts at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness, Race, Embodiment and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen and co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul, Theorizing Tyler Perry and Sporting Realities, Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary. Professor Shepherd has published on film and media and academic and popular venues such as Film Quarterly, The Atlantic, Flash Art, International and Los Angeles Review of Books and she was named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. In today's talk, Professor Shepherd examines how Lynn Mottage's satirical play, by the way, meet very stark and the paratex produce a speculative fiction and archive about Black women's media histories staging what she calls a phantom cinema, an amalgam of real and imagined film histories that haunt trouble and work with and against cinema histories to creatively illuminate archival gaps in visual culture and the public imagination. So this is really our talk scroll about 50 minutes and then we'll have about 30 minutes for Q&A. So I'll see you for Q&A and now I pass the mic to Professor Shepherd. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that generous introduction as well as this very kind invitation to join you all virtually. It's wonderful to be with you while also being separate from you. And also to speak here at a part of this great colloquium series and I wanted to say thank you even though she's not able to be here to Heather Hendershot for the very generous invitation in the beginning to join you all today. I am going to PowerPoint the hell out of this talk so be ready for some visuals. So one second as we do that awkward thing where I say don't remember how to share a screen. I'm on sabbatical. So I got real sabbatical energy here. How do I tell me I really should probably just double check at the end before we started. Share screen. Yeah. With all panelists. Yes. Okay, let's go to slide show. Okay. So here we go. This talk today is derived from a new book project called a black hole phantom cinemas and the reimagining of black women's media histories, which attempts to critically and creatively address the narrative voids in cinema and the scholarship about black women's creative presence practices histories traditions and discourses. So this is one of the critical black hole and film studies about black women and media in general. I take heart and direction from scholar and critic Michelle Wallace, who suggests that the cosmic trope of the black hole, however, is useful for examining black women's cultural production, denoting that black holes are not empty celestial or phenomenon but rather dense and accumulative spaces. And walls explicitly states, quote, it is still difficult to apprehend black feminist creativity as continuous and as a continuous incoherent discourse, because of the failure to read the gaps. The location from which black women do not speak as part of a whole spelled w h o l e and h o l e. Now my work with my book, a black hole searches for black women's film and media narratives and counter narratives in the glare and gaps of film and television scholarship, physical and digital archives, and screen and stage performances. And so my talk today is, as you can see, changing the subject. Lynn notages by the way meet very stark in the making of black women's film history. Lynn notages 2011 satirical play by the way meet very stark stages the life and legacy of the fictional very stark a black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood schooled in age. Notage is a two time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and screenwriter who was inspired in part by the career of African American actress singer and dancer Teresa Harris. When the maid of Hollywood on a 1952 cover of jet magazine. Harris share the screen alongside white leading ladies such as Barbara Stanwick, Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow and bet Davis in dozens of credited and uncredited roles from the 1930s through the 1950s. In the middle of black women's cinematic representation and social erasure by the way meet very stark examines racism in the film industry and contemplate the concerns of black actresses like Harris, as well as others like Daniel, but if I'm a queen and those who were cast into stereotypical servant roles. The play explores the impact of the actresses' professional choices on their personal lives and their legacies in popular culture. In her research on Harris, knowledge observed, quote, For a lot of black actresses, the trail ends cold. They just sort of disappeared from Hollywood, and you can't find out. The trail for others is that they ended up destitute and forgotten, end quote. The play's incidental title, by the way, not only gestures towards these careers and lives seen as an afterthought, the title also captures a figure of speech's varied meanings. It introduces a new subject into a conversation, signals to events along a journey, and suggests a methodology or process. It is in this multifaceted design that Nottage fashions her forgotten black actress from cinema's historical threads, weaving a patchwork persona that is, as she notes, a composite of a lot of actresses on and off-screen experiences. Inspired by their circumstances and their stories, Vera's turbulent life and career are the subject of Nottage's two-act play set in Hollywood over the course of 70 years. In imagining Vera's life, by the way, meet Vera Stark, entwines fact and myth into a recombinant historical fiction about black actresses to borrow a phrase from Miriam Petty, limited and limiting stardom in 1930s American cinema. As I will discuss with you today, Nottage's fabrication of film history extends beyond the stage plot to also include a digital archive documenting Vera's celebrity and career, comprised of websites dedicated to rediscovering Vera Stark and finding Vera Stark. The websites are maintained by the play's characters, Herb Forester and Carmen Levy Green. Now Forester is described as a filmmaker, entrepreneur and musician from Oakland, and Levy Green is characterized as a stout and stylish academic, which I can obviously see the resemblances, and the author of a book on Vera called Hollywood Dreams. The site's digital contents include a short documentary titled A Leading Lady in a Maid's Uniform, A Closer Look at the Bell of New Orleans, that explores Vera's first and career defining film. It also includes a trailer for a 1933 film, for that 1933 film. It includes an excerpt from the documentary Lost and Found, refinding Vera Stark, a robust filmography of 57 films that starred Vera, and an excerpt from her autobiography it reigned on her parade. As well as a theme rep on her final performances and select images and fragmented narratives about her life, her controversial career and her mysterious disappearance in 1973. And I'll highlight these aspects in greater detail later in the talk. Nautage's play in paratex produce a speculative fiction and archive about Black women's media histories, staging what I call a phantom cinema. An amalgam of real and imagined film histories that haunt, trouble and work with and against cinema histories to creatively illuminate archival gaps in visual culture and the public imagination. Using a film and media studies approach to engage the trans media play, I consider how Nautage narrates film history and materializes archival absences in order to make meaning of and with Black women stunted stardom in Hollywood. And while I consider the play's plot in Nautage's phantom cinema, I closely attend to her theatrical and digital tabulation, as well as the Black feminist in Black film studies historiographic metrics that undergird her creative practice. In the end, I analyze the motives and the historical consequences of Nautage's extant digital archive, which is rediscovering Bear Stark, which I argue does not recover nor repair Black film history through additive inventory, but calculates losses through invention. This website come phantom cinema manifests an archival apparition that prompts consideration of lost material and material evidence documenting major and minor Black figures subtracted from American cinema history and our popular memory. Also, these speculative digital artifacts offer phantasmic possibilities where Black women's contribution to film haunt both the erasure of cinema's past and the public imagination with what could have been and what never was. As a counter narrative and shadow archive of Black women's film history, I argue that Nautage's intermediate play and trans media paratext are a Black feminist film origination, an intervention that, in Terry Simone Francis' terms, quote, is responsive to the idea of Black women as both consumers and producers of cultural text. And at the center of this vestidious film history is the figure of Bear Stark, a creative commodity, Bear's extensive multimedia and intertextual star image is given elusive form through the place casting, obviously, but also the website's visual paratext. And so I want to put this character's intervention in conversation with a positive media text, specifically Cheryl Dane and Zoe Leonard's documentation of fictional film, The Fictional Faith or Faye Richards in the Watermelon Woman from 1996, as well as the Faye Richards photo archive that was created alongside, as well as Turner classic movie short video, Teresa Harris, a forgotten and overlooked star from 2020. In doing so, I want to suggest that Nautage's play in paratext foreground the specific textual archival and speculative strategies for historicizing and reimagining Black women's presence and absence, both on and off screen. So by the way, Meet Bear Stark. And as an aside, this is and is not about Teresa Harris, just so you know. Lynn Nautage's, by the way, Meet Bear Stark premiered on May 9th, 2011 at Second Stage Theater in New York City with film and television stars Nalaethan, originating the eponymous role of a 28-year-old budding Black actress living in Hollywood in 1933. And Bear works as a maid for Gloria Mitchell, a white starlet known as America's Little Sweetie Pie. The audience meets both women as they rehearse a scene from the upcoming Southern epic melodrama The Bell of New Orleans. Now Gloria plans to audition for the lead role of Marie and Octorune, stricken with scarlet fever, who falls in love with a white merchant whom she must burn in order to protect him from the truth of her racial identity, obviously. After reading the script for the film, Vera covets the part of the enslaved character Tilly, a minor but meaningful role that she desperately wants because the film includes slaves with lines, honey. So by the way, Meet Bear Stark is a biting satire about film industry stereotypes and the paradoxical nature of Black celebrity. That also includes Vera's two friends and fellow aspiring Black actresses, Lottie McBride, a once slender performer who made herself plus sides to fit Hollywood's Mammy ideal, as well as Anna Mae Simkins, a very light-skinned Black woman who successfully tries to pass as Brazilian to get her big movie break. You can see them in the bottom screen, see the bottom image. Now, just to give you a crash course on the entire play, the first act, which Lampoon's Hollywood's casting and marginalization of Black actresses concludes with the farcical scene of Gloria hosting a gathering to convince Lasvik, who is the chief of the Bell of New Orleans studio Celestial Pictures, to cast her in the film. Vera, working as a maid with Lottie at the party, comically attempts to secure the role of Tilly once the film's director, Maximilian von Oster, arrives. And to make the plot summary a bit quick, let's jump just to the second act, which begins with the Bell of New Orleans final scene, because Vera did get the role of Tilly, where Tilly utters the equivocal last line of the film, stay awake, and together we'll face a new day. Now, to give you a sense of what this film looks like, let's take a good look at the trailer. As the lights go up, the audience finds itself in 2003 Hollywood at the Academic Colloquium, rediscovering Vera Stark. Facilitated by filmmaker and critic Herb Forrester, the events to Black panelists include Carmen Levy Green, a professor of media and gender studies, and Afusa Asada Ajobo, a journalist, poet, and performer. And the didactic Herb, who you see in center here, moderates the colloquium as the panelists passionately debate and wildly speculate about Vera's life and career choices, in particular whether or not she was reproducing or subverting painful Black stereotypes in her career defining role as Tilly. The play then shifts between that colloquium and archival footage of Vera's last television interview on The Brad Donovan Show in 1973, which is reenacted center stage. The scenes from the interview detail Vera's dissatisfaction with how she remains tethered to the controversial slave and made character of Tilly. Exacerbated, Vera states, but it's funny. I play the role of Tilly, a slave woman bound to her mistress and here, all of these years later, I find myself bound to Tilly, a slave woman. I wish I could shake that silly little winch out of me. But here we are nearly 40 years later, still answering questions about that picture. I've lived a lifetime since I made it, but Tilly, Tilly is my shame and my glory. She birthed me into a career. Perhaps I had to play her to get where I am. I don't know. During the interview, Vera is surprised to find out Donovan special guest is Gloria, who unlike Vera has had a long and celebrated career following her role as Marie in the Bell of New Orleans. And their strained and clipped exchange on the talk show underscores their complicated professional and personal relationship, leading the colloquium panelists to speculate whether they were employer, employee, cousins, or even possibly lovers. And in the end, the panelists debate the cinematic social and personal forces that shaped Vera's truncated career. The staged archival footage is continually paused as the panelists discussed and attempt to recuperate Vera's career choices. And so you could digs Colbert argues, quote, the scholars resist the incursion of the television archive and their speculation about what happened to Vera, but the structure of the play both acts in with Vera on screen and the television footage situates the production of Vera's identity as intimately related to film projection, end quote. And the play concludes with behind-the-scenes footage from the filming of the Bell of New Orleans' final scene. The stage directions describe Vera as thinking, preparing, questioning. And the last image of the close-up of Vera's face on the verge as someone off-screen yells sound, camera, action. Now that plot summary, which may seem a little long-winded, but needed. It's to get us to think about the concept of phantom cinemas, which can reconstruct, critique, revise and create film historical imagination and practice. Now phantom cinemas are metahistorical and there are artistic interpretations that can open up conditions of possibility for engaging black film history and criticism, both in and as cultural production. Phantom cinemas screened and staged, call on and intervene in cinematic past, presence and futures that have been lost, overlooked, disregarded or forgotten. The events and conjure evidence of black women's presence even as they are partial and complete and unable to be empirically verified. And so doing phantom cinemas reshape the depictions and imaginings of black women specifically in American popular culture. And with her play in its iterative reproductions on stage and screen, I claim that knowledge stages of phantom cinema, a meld of factual and fictional film histories to creatively explore black actresses done to stardom and obscured legacy in Hollywood. Knowledge implots black film histories into a satire about black actresses starring in subservient roles popularized in the 1930s. Now the play dramatizes this domestic guise, Vera works as a maid for Gloria and plays one opposite her in the Bell of New Orleans. This double act gestures towards Hollywood's hyper-stereotyping and Vera's meta-experiences of the maid also correlates the material realities of masses of black women artists in America's Jim Crow era. While Hattie McDaniel famously quipped, I'd rather play a maid than be one. Hollywood's most successful black movie actress of her time had in fact also been a maid in real life at one time. By positioning Vera as a real life and real life maid, Nottage situates her cinematic fantasia and a materialist critique of the servant such served in race-to-labor relations. Vera's dual roles, like McDaniel's as Mammy, are layered pompom sets upon which the contradictions and fictions of identity categories have been written and rewritten onscreen and in American society. Vera as the real and movie-made disrupts singular readings of the iconicity of the servant image. Moreover, the play's general screwball tone captures the subversive ways that black maids give lip, meaning biting criticism, sardonic stairs, dismissive demeanor or flip and wise pracks to their white female employers on and off-screen that challenge Hollywood conventions, narrative strictures, and popular memory about these archetypes as the dutiful help. By the way, meet Vera Starks Hollywood semi-lacra not only reconstructs how mainstream cinema marginalizes black actresses, but it also debates the discourses surrounding their films and cinematic performances. During the comically veracity colloquium dedicated to Vera's iconic film, Herb rhetorically questions, excuse me, Herb rhetorically questions, quote, why are we still talking about it in a manner that resonates similarly with other sentiments about controversial classics, including, say, Gone with the Wind. As historians, Jacqueline Stewart, Mary and Petty and others have demonstrated, Gone with the Wind is replete with racial stereotypes and racist tropes, and yet the film is also a valuable document of and testimony to black performance during an era when substantial roles for black talent were extremely rare in Hollywood films. And as Petty carefully argues, McDaniel's signature performance as Mammy and her unprecedented promotion of the film can be read as an attempt to reframe, complicate, and also refute the character's iconographic power. Noges Play affirms these nuanced readings of black actresses' performances in stereotypical roles with the characters of Herb commenting that Vera is at once in the role of Tilly and commenting on it, even as he conceives that the images are still problematic and cannot be apologized away. Vera and her inspired real-life black film counterparts as Petty perceptively describes, create performances that are bounded by the strictures of American racism yet that resonate in signifying ways that exceed these same boundaries. And the play's historical references and character palpinsets intersect with its classical Hollywood era setting and Noges' own synafilia. For example, the faux film, The Bell of New Orleans derives its name from Renee Clare's 1941 comedy, The Flame of New Orleans, which co-starred Theresa Harris in a small role as a maid to Marlene Dietrich's character. Additionally, we can even read Anna May or Anna Maria's character and The Bell of New Orleans' passing narrative as resonating with John Sol's 1934 film, Imitation of Life, and the character of Piola, who was played by African-American actress, Freddie Washington. Along with the screwball comedic sensibilities that Noges appreciates of 1930s films, by the way, meet Vera Stark also engages the more audacious production moment prior to the motion picture production code in 1934. Using the air is afforded into more controversial topics to script the miscegenation period picture at the center of the play's storyline. And it's to this point, as I previously intimated, Noges' inspiration for the play came from viewing Alfred E. Green's Babyface from 1933, a pre-coached film starring Barbara Stanwyck as seducturously powers, a woman who used her beauty and sexuality to gain success in a male-dominated world. Noges recalls being surprised by how progressive the film was, how it showed a relationship between a black woman and a white woman that seemed somewhat authentic. She was struck by the friendship and conspiratal dynamic between Lily and the character Chico, played by Harris, whose magnetic and strong performance stole the show in Noges' view. Noges, in fact, recounts, the first time I saw Theresa Harris, I immediately began asking questions. Who was she? What was her life like? Where did she come from? What were her dreams? What were her desires? When I sat down to write the play, it was to answer all those questions I had, not just about Theresa Harris, but about a whole generation of African-American actresses like her. The questions Noges' posits about Harris and black women's historical omission underscores the play's lasting query, which is what happened to Verstarck. In response to this refrain, the character and colloquium facilitator, her forester, obliquely answers that, quote, history is a question constantly being rephrased, end quote. Likewise, the play and its paratex are Noges' intermediate strategy of revisiting her original question about Harris via the eighth, excuse me, I'm gonna hydrate. Let's take that from the top, okay. Likewise, the play and its paratex are Noges' intermediate strategy of revisiting her own imaginary, excuse me, her own original questions about Harris via the enigmatic Vera and the confabulation of a theatrical spectacle and phantom cinema. Herb's riddle, reply as riddle, destabilizes historical authority in fixed genealogies. History is not an answer. It is a method of seeking and an approach to the lacuna within records of black actresses cinematic and lived histories. By rephrasing these and other historiographic questions, the who, what, where, when, and why, from a black feminist perspective, a legion of new questions are generated, invoking Harris and a whole generation of African-American actresses like her. Noges' phantom cinema multiplies historical inquiries about figures at the margins in the footnotes and a race from Eurocentric and patriarchal film histories, thereby producing alternative ways to review and engage black women's cinematic past by way of speculation, interrogation, and fabulation. And by the way, meet Vera Stark, Noges fabulates a black film history and thusly transforms spectatorship into an intermedia and transmedia act of theatrical, cinematic, and archival reimagination. This process emerges from Noges' desire to learn about Teresa Harris, yes, her life and career, but also finding scant material evidence of her life outside of her film roles. And so Harris' on-screen image and off-screen mystery engenders Noges' aesthetic reimagining of the actress through the character of Vera, a proxy for her and a host of other black actresses whose careers and lives are forgotten or only partially documented in black and mainstream press, creative nonfiction, meaning memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, and personal or institutional archives. And as Noges details, quote, the thing that always bothered me is that you'd always have these very talented African-American actresses who would pop it up in these bit roles for two minutes, literally, and then disappear. Noges further fabulates black women's media histories writing Vera into or out of cinema history, where the fact and possibility of her life and career exists but has gone missing. She materializes a historical record that is both emblematic and spectral. Silwetting the formability of a black actress's talent and interrogating the there but not there materiality of their archival records or lack thereof. Reimagining history and its figures from fact and fiction, Noges draws from the black feminist historiographical practice of troubling what qualifies as historical by recuperating and reformulating black women's media, excuse me, black women's stories from real histories into hypothetical visual scenes and scenarios that can to lean on a phrase from Alice and Nadia Field to stand in for a usable past. The fact that Noges' search for Harris was stalled by a lack of source materials underscored the historical consequences and motivations of her creative process. Her play is not an undoing of film history with a morass of misinformation. Rather, by the way, meet Vera Stark, we authorizes and sutures together count memories and myths into elliptical pasts that are bleak but telling revisions of cinema history. Noges' creative acts can best be understood within a broader critical frame and historiographic method specific to black diasporic scholarship. Within black feminist traditions, scholars such as 20 K. Rambara and Paula Giddings attempt their respective deep sightings and rescue missions to locate when and where black women enter society discourses and the public imagination. Noges' cultural production enacts this process twofold, focusing on African-American women who have been marginalized by circumstance and who are trying to assert their presence on and off screen. And despite vastly different historical and methodological stakes, Noges' work is in conversation with Sylvia Hartman's influential and rigorous advancement of speculative attempts to document captive fugitive and wayward black women's lives via her practice of critical fabulation. Hartman's writing method innovatively attends to archival absence and violence, reading archival documents and the lack thereof at their constitutive limits to reimagine those African-American women's narratives excluded from or obscured by historical record. Even as Noges' in Wallace's terms reads the gaps in film history as part of a whole. Like Hartman, she practices narrative restraint and refuses to describe unrecoverable past completely meaning she respects black noise, particularly the noise that resists legibility. And through the play and its paratext, Vera shifts in and out of focus with more unknown than known about the thumb star because of narrative fragmentation. By the way, Meet Vera Star contemplates a life legacy and mystery of the fictional or actress in a way that resists closure and clarity as it slips offstage and into digital spaces. Sorry. Digital spaces deepening the mysteries and otherwise impossibilities of charting black film genealogies and through archival voids. And of course, scholars of black film history have long incorporated speculative strategies in their work to address partial archives, non-extant films and African-American movie-going experiences. For example, in her study of black film culture in Chicago during the silent era, Jacqueline Stewart uses the novels of Louis Dye and Native Son to engage African-American spectatorial experiences. According to Stewart, the descriptions of black spectatorship in Morrison and Rice novels open up facets of the movie-going experience that tend to be overlooked by academic film criticism and offer imaginative mediations about the realms in which the academic study of spectatorship tends to become fragmented between the analysis of ethnographic on historical facts and psychoanalytic theoretical speculation. As well, Miriam Petty extends Stewart's speculative interventions in her study of black children's movie-going experiences in the 1930s, turning to first-person accounts via autobiography and memoir when faced with a dearth of pertinent primary source materials. And most specific to my reading of Nottage, Alice and Nadia Field examines both non-extant black films prior to 1915 and more contemporary black films that fabricate what she calls a speculative archive of black film history. These latter examples discussed by Field include the works produced by black women film directors like Cheryl Dunye, whose feature, The Watermelon Woman, included the fictional actress Faye Richards archive to highlight the absence of black lesbians in 1930s Hollywood, as well as Julie Dash's short film, Illusions from 1982, which you can also stream on HBO Max just all that today, dramatizes the invisible labor of African-Americans off-screen as executives and talent during the studio era in 1942. Field argues that both Dunye and Dash's films model speculative approaches to archival work through manufacturing historical images in ephemera that get at a set of concerns that are hidden in and by history. As Field explains, both Illusions and The Watermelon Woman instructively offer black film scholars a way to take on archival absences, the limits of evidence, the stakes of visuality and the interpretive possibilities of symbolic substitutes. In her own cinematic babulation, Nottage's play in paratex invites similar considerations about the cultural practices, productions, and politics of film historical re-imagination and its bearing on black women's media histories. With, by the way, Neat Bear Stark, particularly the digital paratex, Nottage attempts in Hartman's terms to tell an impossible story about the circumstances and contributions of black women in American cinema and to amplify the impossibility of its telling through an experimental and fragmented archive dedicated to the fictional film star. Now, this play is a transmedia production, as I've stated, that includes websites, The Finding Bear Stark and Rediscovering Bear Stark. These digital archives are fictions of film history that replicate familiar lost and found archival narrative shaping preservation practices and popular reception of black film history, which Jacqueline Stewart goes through in depth in her study of the Tyler Texas black film collection. Now, with Nottage's play, the media paratex include nonlinear visual materials and recollective histories that resemble the objects and data, as well as the authoritative form and artifice of many archives, special collections, and digital humanities initiatives. Intended to be a storytelling tool, Nottage's paratex are integral to interpreting the play and specifically bears narrative through the appeal and limits of factual evidence. Simultaneously illuminating and aestheticizing Bear's story, these paratex paradoxically materialize the emptiness of archives, and that's to borrow from Catherine Groom, as well as the cultural histories documenting major and minor black figures in American cinema. In other words, the digital repository does not solve issues of black actresses mute archival presence, but instead it makes archival silences even louder. Nottage's speculative archive exists on two web domains, www.meatbearstar.com and www.findingbearstar.com. Now, currently only the former domain, which is the website title of rediscovering Bear Stark on the screen here is still accessible and is maintained by the character Herb Forrester, who is on social media, but still currently will not accept my friend request despite my many attempts, perhaps because he's not real, I don't know, but all jokes aside, the loss of the latter site underscores how archives, even digital ones, are not fathomless and timeless places in which nothing goes away, especially if you do not renew the internet domain name. The artifacts presented in the digital archive are distinctly fragmented and the remaining collection of images, ephemera, narratives and histories work against chronology and wholeness through disjointed snapshots of Vera's life and career. Eschewing biographical data, the home page of rediscovering Bear Stark, and hopefully you can see this on your screen, describes the actress in declarative, speculative and high graphic prose. Vera Stark, the actress, the singer, the lover, the civil rights activist, the maid, the housewife, the teacher, the femme fatale, the comic, the tragedine, the murderer, the murder, the missing, the performer, the legend. She wore cascaded faces, it says. With its repetitus, perhaps is, the site is designed as a possibility, an imaginable way to celebrate the life of one of the greatest actresses being Stark, while also functioning as a beacon that represents the hope that Vera Stark is still out there alive and well and willing to tell her story. The page requests that any viewers or Stark herself contact Forester at his listed email address should they stumble onto the site. In fact, rediscovering Vera Stark reconciles the task of archiving as a search party, where film traces, fragments and black subjects can be retrieved if lost and or found. The website, like all selective, incomplete and growing archives, is a contrived collection and a collective enterprise. Now I wanna attend to these paratextual contents a bit more closely. First, the homepage, which includes a short documentary, A Leading Lady in a Maid's Uniform, A Closer Look at the Bell of New Orleans, was created and narrated by Forester and it examines Vera's first film in her most famous role. The documentary is in Alexandra Juhas, Juhas's terms, a productive fake, reminiscent of Dany's The Watermelon Woman film, which imitates the documentary form to make many related claims about history, that history is untrue, that true history is irretrievable and fake histories can be real. Now A Leading Lady includes footage from the Bell of New Orleans that airs during the play, as well as distinguished talking heads, discussing Vera and the film, including the late director and writer, Peter Bogdanovich, Academy Award-winning cinematographer, Stuart Dryberg and film scholar and professor Mia Mas. Now let's take a look really in just a short clip from this nine-minute excerpt. The Bell of New Orleans, a film which in its inception, Mia bankrupted celestial pictures, overcame its rocky beginnings to catapult the studio and its starlets to immortal fame. It's essentially a picture of now an outside, but was the film an artful masterpiece or a lucky confluence of Mesopotamans? Three artists are widely credited with its success, director Maximilian von Oster, who's sort of almost by desire, not quite in the main script. Cinema photographer Mo Talbenschalk. Talbenschalk started out as a, what was it called, second year, regular photography. And actress Vera Stark, a leading lady in a maid's uniform. In the early days of American cinema, black actors weren't even cast in films. You'd often have white actors in black face, and so a film like Birth of a Nation comes to mind, or even some of the early versions of Uncle Tom's cabin. It was the accident that the Bell of New Orleans was produced on the cusp of the implementation of the Hayes production code, which enforced certain traditional moral standards on the movies, such as banning extra marital sex and miscegenation, the mixing of the races on screen. But my blood isn't pure. But it carries a drop of shame and misery from an act to ruin this year. The whole idea of miscegenation and the fact that the leading character had black blood, that was not something that code dealt with afterwards. The fact that the black and white characters mingle with quite modern sense of the narrative is again, would have been very acceptable. Many scholars point to this film as the straw that broke the camel's back and got the code put into place. While cinematographers sum up to the present day, few there are a lot of issues involved in lighting black and white characters in the same scene. Tell us why. Maybe because he was Brazilian by birth, the fact he came from a little background, it never seemed to him as conflict. The Bell of New Orleans, which was out of the periodic fire, emerged in Vera Stark, one of the brightest African-American stars of the 20th century. She really went the way among the actresses like Edward Waters or Eddie McDaniel, Nina May-McKeeley, Louise Bevers. So being that kind of trailblazer, it opened the doors for those actresses who came after her. Through the 1950s and 60s, she was an ardent civil rights activist, frequently participating in marches and using her stardom to pressure the zeitgeist towards integration. At one point, she's staying at one of the very fancy hotels in California and tries to use the swimming pool and unfortunately created such a stir among the other white patrons staying at the hotel. The workers had to clean the pool and rebuild it. As a victim himself of discrimination in pre-war Europe, Director Barnostar claims to understand the plight of African-Americans and Jim Crow, I asked him to use the breast and the pressure of a force and in Jewish, he felt the oppression from birth, so to speak. So I think he had a sort of sense of human right of dark, sense of human. But the sense of humor was not nearly as legendary as his dictatorial style. Max was very sort of didactic. Go over there and stand, stand there. But Barnostar was different with Vera. With Vera, he would go over in this very period. So in this absolutely insane historically insane, but yet convincing parody, there is a cipher who shape shifts through media, through the media displayed, interview with recollection and scholarly framing and reframing. This website also includes navigation links that are dedicated to different aspects of Vera's life and her career. We've got a detailed filmography. We've also got, which includes 57 films from 1933 to 1966. She's sometimes credited and uncredited. There is a link to Vera's autobiography. It rained on my parade that contains excerpts of two disjointed passages that connects to characters in the play. There's links to Vera in Vegas, which includes a femur from her two-week performance in Phyllis. Virginia at the Hotel Chopricana in Las Vegas, which is very reminiscent of Josephine Baker's career turns. And the reviews program features information about the production and an image of showgirls, including Vera dancing on stage. The photo of course doesn't tell us which one is there exactly. And elsewhere it is explained that Vera inexplicably shook naked during her final performance and was arrested for public indecency. This site also includes an image gallery, including a cover of a Danish magazine featuring an image of a black woman, which we're to assume is Vera. A photo of the cast of Loomis and Larry in which Vera starred. Again, very unclear if she's even in the picture. And a photo of Vera star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Now these ephemeral and incoherent artifacts give substance to Vera's phantom form, reminding us of both the immaterial histories of Harris and other lesser known black actresses and often the material randomness of archival collections. In fact, the digital hodge podge undergirds the material's veracity and import. It's the fact that it is so random that makes everything so important. Demonstrating how sparse, stochastic and significant archives of black film figures are in general. And finally, the link that underscores a place animating question, what happened to Vera chronicles the mystery and legend of Vera following her 1973 disappearance. And in questioning the very truth of Vera's existence, the webpage's citation of film scholar Mia Mast is quote from the documentary, both a vows and disavows a paratexual artifice. Now let Mast just say it herself. I think what's more interesting than the truth is that the question exists in the first place, right? That we don't know what happened to Vera. What an odd thing, but nonetheless, she still says what's more interesting than the truth is the question exists in the first place, that we don't know what happened to Vera. Now with this quizzical paradox, not a descriptive archive resists the impulse to recover and reconstitute black film history, even as it mimics and utilize the tools, the institutions, the forms and the technologies history making in its online repository. Instead, rediscovering Vera Stark is meant to be a proposition of what could have been but never was, or what the play's character herb limits at the colloquium as theories, rumors, conjecture. As a paratexual appendage, a pop-up set where a phantom limb of the play's phantom cinema is layered atop real and imagined film histories, rediscovering Vera Stark is a counter-history, a shadow archive addressing erasures from our collective imagination about absences that are nonetheless present and real. And to point to that reality, knowledge tells of how many theatergoers did not recognize that Vera was even fabricated, even if they had felt acquainted with the idea of her. As she recalls that the fictional herb forester was contacted by the New York Film Academy to lecture on the actress's life, which is just insane, because we did just have that many black films, you have to go to a fictional person. I hope they didn't do it during Black History Month, but nonetheless, I digress. It was to her music. Now, this individual institutional confusion is always already racialized and informed by generic and academic ignorance, and still rediscovering their stark speculative digital archive produces and preserves a counter-imaginary, a fantastic possibility filled with spectral sources and subjects produced within and against film history. And in fact, as a composite of many actresses, Vera is a stand-in and body double for black women's acting labor in Hollywood. And yes, we're almost done, stay with me. Beyond Teresa Harris, Vera's cinematic doppelgangers include unsug talent, such as Nina Mame McKinney, Mildred Washington, and Butterfly McQueen. In her film, Critic Manola Darkus writes, Vera also represents the other women in women's pictures, the black cooks, nurses, and maids, made to breaking out of the margins if only a little joked with Mae West, fretted with Claudette Colbert, instead by white woman after white woman. Vera's fabricated life career and legacy are multi-dimensional and necessitate in analysis of the mythos of her star image. Codifying Richard Dyer's claim that star images have histories, knowledge documents Vera's legacy in her intermedia and transmedia paratext, echoing creative productions that mediate black women into and in film history, such as Cheryl Dunney and Zoe Leonard's film making photographic fabrication of Faye Richards, a fictive black lesbian actress who starred in classic Hollywood and race films. In collaborating and constructing their own phantom cinema via a diagetic documentary and the extra-diagetic Faye Richards photo archive book, Leonard explains that, quote, Faye Richards is fictional, but her life is historically possible. Fragments of Richard's story was taken from the lives of Dorothy Arsner, Butterfly McQueen, Justine Baker, and many others. Faye Richards is a star. This work started out as material for Cheryl's film, The Watermelon Woman, but the project became an artwork unto itself. I think partly because the project got so big, but also because the photographs had had their own kind of logic and completeness independent from the film. Cheryl ended up only using the photographs briefly in the film, but it becomes clear to me that they constituted something on their own. Similarly, notages play in media paratexts connect to the theatrical production but also constitute something on their own about black actresses. Again, a whole and a whole. Notage, like Huey Copeland describes of Dane and Leonard's efforts, attempts to ethically fabulate a history to get at some reality that is otherwise occluded, a reality that opens up something else and gets us to a different set of possibilities that we wouldn't have come upon if we were just hemmed in by what was available to us. That's kind of a really key point. I'm just not interested in what we just have. I'm interested in what we can imagine. Notage gives us Vera a person who, as Leonard explains about her fabricated actress Faye, a person who could have lived, though even if she had, we probably wouldn't have known about her. Notage as Vera makes black women's invisibility visible. Her digital and media archive is a found object of lost media histories. And this makes sense because another media work Notage created was a video titled Lost and Found, a documentary set to be produced by the play's character, Carmen Livy Green. And it contains speculative tragic and celebratory impulses to capture the legacy of Vera. And these impulses are not just examples of Notage's creative fiction, but are endemic in popular historic interventions about marginalized black actresses. Evidence most relevantly in Turner classic movies, Teresa Harris, a forgotten and overlooked star about Vera's real life inspiration. Now this three minute video includes footage of Harris from a range of films, along with the epigraph you may have seen her face, but you, but don't know her name. I'm just gonna play it for like two seconds. So as you saw, it's not a very long video, it's only three minutes. The video's final line is an overt Not to Notage, but this acknowledgement only serves to overlay how differently TCM and the playwright render the influence and impact of their respective lost and found or forgotten and overlooked actresses. In crafting a story about Harris, TCM was in a similar bind as Notage with not much to go on about Harris besides her film roles, which are used as visuals throughout the video. TCM's straightforward video, however demonstrates a historical resignation, unlike Notage's reimagination to the fact that Harris was statically framed within the racialized moving images and racial scripts of Hollywood. TCM's brand of film history, which I now feel responsible for, much like the scholarship on black actresses finds it's forgotten and overlooked star through her filmography. The fixed moving images that show talent, but no parts for Harris despite her scene stealing in studio pictures and star turning abilities and race forms. In contrast, Notage moves Harris to a new stage where she can inhabit a familiar, yet different role as Vera Stark. And just as Harris could not shake the typecast role that dominated her career, Vera struggles to move past her career defining role in the Bell of New Orleans. In the plays archival footage from the Brad Donovan show, Vera tries to talk about something other than her role as Tilly, the maid to which the show's host questions if she's trying to change the subject. You can see it on screen. Vera responds, it's been the subject of my life for the last 40 years. Of course I'm trying to change the subject. Like so many actors who were criticized for their onscreen roles, Vera inherits his image and Notage's imagination. Reminds us that black actresses ambitions and histories are more than their onscreen images. Even if those visages are all we are left to contemplate. In these instances, historicizing and recreating their careers for critical and creative purposes requires changing the subject in more ways than one. And the play does exactly that. It changes the subject of black actresses in and what could too easily be concluded as a recuperative and reparative act of historical reimagination. But I want to caution against reading Notage's Phantom Cinema in romantic terms, even as it advances heartening black feminist and film historiographic methods of finding black women where there was none but also where they always were. Phantom cinemas are meant to be disquieting. And Notage's stage play is a ghost story and her digital media paratex are an archival apparition that collectively trouble our vision of film history more than it clarifies it. In the end, we are not really closer to Harris's true film history, but we are in Vera's shadow haunted by Harris's actual absence from it and our popular memory. By the way, me, Vera Stark and other black feminist cinematic imaginaries take shape in, but do not actually fill the lacuna by remaking film history. And it is this creative and creation process that relies on the inability and refusal to tell a whole story of cinema's past, necessitating both historically grounded and experimental approaches to material and immaterial black film archives. In tandem, these inventive and resourceful efforts reinforce the historiographic methods suggested by the play's character, her forester on his website, Rediscovering Vera Stark. In questioning both what happened to Vera and if we are asking the wrong questions in general about the truth behind her disappearance, forester writes, perhaps we can sift some truth out of the rumor mill's detritus. What a weird sentence. Yet, the incomplete fragmented material and immaterial debris of unverified and creative histories are, by the way, rife with use and value, facts and fantasies about black women's cinematic past. Changing the subject of dominant film histories to be about black women requires and inspires historians, playwrights, scholars and audiences to excavate, experiment, innovate and reimagine their lives, cinema and archives in stark new ways. Thank you. I will be taking questions and I can imagine you're giving me this amount of derogatory hands and energy in response. I'll stop looking at this and it'll just keep going because she's really into it. Perfect. Let me stop sharing. I really love ending on that, Giff. You know, if we were in person, that's exactly what it, what the room would have looked like. So really happy to end on that note. Thank you so much for that. Fascinating talk, Professor Shepard. It's definitely got me thinking about a lot of stuff, but I want to sort of extend the microphone to students and attendees. If anybody has any questions, go ahead, Amar. Hi, Samantha. Thank you so much for your wonderful talk. I have a question actually about your research and how you move from what I understand that you were researching on sports and blackness and how you move or why did you decide to move to cinema, women and blackness? It's a great question. I mean, I think it's kind of important to reframe that. So my training is in cinema and media studies. So I'm not a sports studies scholar. I am a person who is interested in media and sports films is very under theorized and particularly I'm interested in blackness. So that's the larger umbrella frame of all of my work. And so it manifests in sports films in one way. And then as I was reapproaching, granted, I have to know because I talk about sports all the time. And so a healthy ambivalence has created a problem. But now that has sort of shifted because I'm trying to think about sort of questions that animated, interestingly enough, a chapter in the sports film book about black women sports films and their bodies started off with an engagement with Michelle Wallace's idea of a black hole. I thought this is really something. She's like, there are no sports films, et cetera. Like there's no his like, you know, we've got to read the gaps. And I was like, that could describe really a lot of things because that's what it's not even meant to be describing these films. And so it's a fun and now great connection I get to make, which is if you look at that chapter, you use that's the opening, really the opening idea that becomes the literal book title of this work that is much more invested in questions of black women's media history, a question of archive, like many folks taking a speculative turn and also trying to engage with disrupting the idea of having to recreate chronologies to get at genealogies. And I think that's something that this work is trying to do. So thank you for that. Yeah. Also, like, you know, you all are interested in a lot of things. Your dissertation is one thing, but you get tired of that. You have a lot of things you want to talk about. So Rusty. Hi. Thank you for being here and for that lovely talk. Really appreciate it. My question is actually about how you create boundaries in the process of like viewing some of this work that can possibly be traumatizing or cause distress within you as a person. It's something that I think in dealing with really complex histories and film history being so inherently racist, like how do you take care of yourself essentially? Because I think we don't talk about that enough in academia. That's such a really good question. I will say I also going to gravitate to things that I like, but despite the fact that I also don't really care for this play, I did not find it to be that enjoyable to watch. But I gravitate to things that I also find much more interesting. In fact, the sports film stuff taught me because all of those are just like stories of racism. Like they become overcome like you score the winning basket and like racism was solved. But like you were first like, you know, beat down by oppression. So which is to I really try to pick objects that I am that bring me joy into some degree. I really like talking about these paratex. I sort of came across, I saw this play on a date and I was like, it was OK. You know, it's different what it was, but it wasn't all that. I mean, I didn't marry that man, so it's fine. But like so I saw the play. I was like, it was OK. But then I was I was like, I really want. I started writing about something else. I wrote about Leslie Harris's attempt to fund her second film via Kickstarter and how it failed. And I was like, there's something here about all of these Black women ideas that I'm just like trying to navigate. And then when I came back to this, I said, oh, there's an entire website full of fake histories. I am so invested here. So that's so it's not answering partially your question, which is that I kind of just picked things that I find really, really joyful. But also I think in reading all the other stuff that I find less like all of these great Black feminists, so many of them have passed away from the Academy, like literally try to kill you. So also trying to honor that like all of this great knowledge exists, like all of what we have to write these stories. And so I am in a very, very, very good group of people who are very edifying to the work that I do. And I also, it is my month. It is Black History Month. I just don't like dealing with white nonsense when I don't have to. And I now have, I basically can't watch any dramas. I live a light comedy life. Thank you, Abbedelma. Like I basically cannot engage with like, I get that, I think you may have seen it, but like this is my face because, you know, Zoom. And I work as institutions. So like, I'm happy to be here. I don't know, I'm fine. But at the end of the day, I basically have to overly temper in joy to function as a human in this world, which means that I just wish you all love and joy and good comedy and seven seasons in a movie. I love, I wish that was a hard function. Oh, don't rag a major in this world, it's great. I love it. This is awesome. Yeah, I was looking for the reaction too. And I've learned this year to embrace like trashy reality TV, which I've never been super into before. And I feel like that's been a form of like self-care of sorts or like just trying to rebalance, yeah, the hard work that can be, that can take a lot of emotional toll. With something that's like light and that I'm not super invested in. I also, I mean, because it's not to keep answering the same, that same question, so sorry, but yeah. Like I will do this work. It happens less in my work because I take my work to certain places. It happens really mostly, and maybe you all see this as as as educating, you're doing teaching. I'm teaching intro to African-American cinema. It's like, it's the history of racism and also like resistly, but it's difficult. Like you just kind of keep going through. You're like, okay, oh, we get to the groundbreaking film called Do the Rights. Like, you know, we get to the raising of the sun. It's just like, really isn't a happy story. Like Lorraine did a thing, but it is not that kind of, you know, we go, it's just like the 20s, the 30s. We're just talking about all of this stuff that's happening in the world. So it's really telling them to feel their feelings, but also to like laugh. Like just really, if something is funny, that is absolutely just to fill it with, yeah, with laughter. But I find teaching to be the most, because you got to show the stuff, but it's really, really, it can be really, really harmful. I won't send it to myself. Hi. Emily. Thank you. Dr. Shepard, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your work with us. My question is just if you can share a little bit about what future work you're thinking of or already working on, whether it continues along some of these same lines or themes. Perfect. Yeah, no, this is, so this is part of a book and this is technically part of the introduction. I know it became, so it's like a huge as introduction that is trying to explain Phantom Cinemas through this example. And then it goes in nine different, or maybe six chapter directions. So like I said, I'm interested in doing a history of women, of re-imagining women's media histories by re-engaging black women's media histories, but not in a chronology. Like there'll be no, and this person came first and this person came first and next. But while still attending to like peer review and needing a chapter that kind of does the work of in search of our mother's cinemas kind of situation. So that's just like a, this is a big book project. This is part of the Academy. This is the project that I pitched for them. So I'll have to finish that sometime. And I plan on it technically. I will finish, parts of it are written like this, like part of the intro and the part on Leslie Harris have a whole section on speculative archives that are all digital. So what do we do with the Kickstarter and the Indiegogo's and like, where they have like fully conceptualized idea. What do we do with the spec script? What do we do with all of these? Like it's the idea that like, oh, there are no black women media booths. It's like, we have been like creating stuff. It's just like, it's not out there, but it's out there. It has been, it's been narrativized in different, smaller and imagined in a range of ways. So I want to account for that. I think Professor Shepard's screen is chosen. Okay. Let's give her a moment. Oh, you're back. Your screen was frozen for a bit. So we missed like the last, maybe. Oh, okay. Don't worry, I think I just fumbled that bag a little bit. So we'll just drop that one off somewhere. But it's a few different chapters. It's a piece on collections and collectivities. So thinking about the, the formidable of black women film and video makers, which is the book, which everybody, if you're going to teach black women, filmmakers, you have that book. It's a huge collection and things like the collectivities of like the New Negro Film Society that exists. Like, what are the connections between these? And technically, despite my general ambivalence about sports, I am contractually obligated, unfortunately, to write a book on called the basketball film, a cultural and trans media history, which was due last year. So I'm working on that soon. Do soon. The version of this talk will be in feminist media histories. And yeah, and I had just, yeah, I'm just doing, you know, how you all just do like little random things like that chapter on documentary films and so how you got roped into that. Just after a while, you first think, will I have opportunities? And you say, I don't want any more opportunities. Make me like, let's stop. Because I'm booked to 2023 and the future is bleak in terms of, I just want to not, I don't know if it's still recording, I do want to work, but I also want to break. So I'm working on two books, a book on basketball and this women's media histories book and teaching and trying to figure out all the fun things that we want our life and legacy to be and develop new courses and be in conversation and support younger scholars, which is a great way for me to right now do a little plug for JCMS, if any of you all are ever interested in publishing in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, we have a great publishing initiative. So please feel free to also reach out to me and check out the website at www.puttinggoogle is enough key terms. You got it. And you said your own sabbatical. So I see you have a very relaxing sabbatical plan. Yes, I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to write one of those books, hopefully. Is the basketball book focusing on women, on black women in basketball specifically or? No, just the basketball film as a film and media as a genre. So the history, the relationship between the history of the sport and the media around the sport. So I mean, honestly, that sounds really cool. It's, yes, I mean, yeah, it'll be, it'll be something. It'll, it's going to come together. I, it's looking good idea a couple of years ago. Now here. So, but it'll be fun because there's a great, it's part of a screening and sports series and there's a book on the boxing film and a book on the baseball films. And it does a really great job of building out the different changes that happen in terms of technologies, culture and the sport itself and how that shifts our understanding of the media that's created, but also our understanding of the sport itself. And as a person who didn't even make JB basketball, I feel well suited to get into that. OK, we have time for a couple or maybe even a few more questions. As folks are kind of maybe thinking about things, I really feel like the talk was fascinating and touched upon so many different disciplines and so many different subfields. And I want to hear you talk more about all of them. But specifically, I want to ask you about like the archive and sort of how what your construction of the archive is kind of the relationship of this piece to the archive. Like, you know, I think the archive itself can be a place that is sort of determined by dominant culture. In this case, probably white culture and white American history. And so how are you kind of conceiving of the archive? It's a really great question. I mean, part of this has been a trying to engage with what I even mean by the term. So like, you know, you go back and you read your archive fever and you also read your dust by, you know, Carol Stiedman and I was actually reading this different book by Jenny Sharp called Immacurial Archives about African Diaspora Poetics, which I felt was the most that I really felt was what I was trying to get at. Which is, of course, it's for some people it is a physical space, it's a special collection that has particular policies. But I think in reading Stiedman and also reading Sharp is really trying to think about the way in which it's really this sort of contrived collective space. And the things themselves are also highly constructed for us as both meaningful and also as material. Which is why I really was interested in the idea of fabricating digital material proof, especially in the digital age of meeting this kind of evidence. I just thought it enough just to say she existed. You can literally go and see images that are supposed to relate to her and that we could print out or save the webpage and see this, you can watch the video essay which is now its own form of documentary proof. And so for me, thinking about the archive, particularly when it comes to black film figures is to play with the critique that I think was best done and Cheryl Dunne is the watermelon woman when they go visit the clip archive and they're like, where is black lesbians? And she's like, oh, well, we have some photos over here in a box on the side. Like it's where we see these histories are so not memorialized. So if I take that as a conceit, not saying that I don't think that archival practices are key. I'm in love with Jacqueline Stewart's work. I'm in love with Miriam Petty's work. I'm in love with Alice Nadia Fields' work. I'm in love with a lot of the folks coming up who are doing really strong archival work. Like, oh my God, Hailey, where's your last name right now? It's not coming to me. But who's at Iowa? People who are going and doing all this archival work. I am with you in spirit part-time. Just can't be aside of building for too long. And I say that because I think that there's so much important, but if I am just concerned by what exists for people who were not meant to exist, like not meant to really be manifested, then I think it's not the work of black feminist practice, which is about producing the forms of power that will bring you freedom. So that means sometimes also fabricating those things, fabricating material histories. What if I take the assumption that she was there? What if I say Vera is Harris, but obviously not Harris? The things we know about Harris can be something what we find really in the black press about her talking about her relationship to an industry that we already understand to be racist and to be sexist. So is that the most meaningful part of her when we don't mind getting 95 different versions of what was Marilyn Monroe's inner thought of what did she have on a biscuit? Like, I want to just imagine she didn't eat biscuits, right? Like what if we just took that as the, I find that to be useful. So our archive itself is also something that we must make. And therefore it highlights all these issues that we have of the archives. And then when it gets to digital humanities initiatives, which it's all about, we must digitize, we must digitize, we must preserve. What does it mean to preserve a reimagination? What does it mean to me to hold on to this? I finally checked the domain name for this website is good for five more years. But nonetheless, I was, you know, copy, paste, save, save, save, let me create these screen grabs because Laura knows when this book will be done. But because it can be gone, but this existed, this entire fabrication existed. So Vera Stark, the actress, the legend, the comedian, the murder, the murderous was real in a way. And I think that's really important when we think about digital archives more so than physical space archives. And I think it's important we think about immaterial archive, which is that she materializes a kind of immateriality. Like I can print this out, but I'm never going to hold that paper because it's not real anyways. So what does that mean about our understanding of the past? Which is that like, it's gone, baby, it's here, but it's gone. Like, but it's also present. So I'm really interested in the play between those things. And yeah, but I'm definitely interested in fabulation and all the things that we can take from Hartman while also realizing that Hartman has a very different ethical and historical project at stake, very different claims we're making. But we're all invested in the work that Hartman is inspired by, which is Bambara in Giddings and all the people who have gone back and said, where do we exist? Where did we exist? And how do we amplify that existence? That's very powerful. Thank you. We've got time for one more question or amusing a comment. Yes, these are shoes, little shoes on, yes. That's what we were all wondering. So for everything I tell people, oh my God, substance, please, give me a look. Or any general question or any, which is no pressure. The fact that you're even here after hours is nice enough. Well, we really appreciate you giving us some of your time and sharing the spoiler alert of the book to come. Definitely gonna be waiting for that. So no pressure, no pressure. Don't worry, you keep living. Got it, we're coming along piece by piece. Slowly exist in the world. Yeah. All right, well, if there aren't any more questions, then join me in a virtual thank you to Professor Shepherd. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you for attending. Thank you for your questions. And I hope everyone is finding sustained and at the very least sufficient joy during these very, very, very difficult times. And that your work is hopefully very meaningful to you that you're moving along and that we wait for it eagerly. So thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Of course. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye. Thank you.