• Overwhelming Affects: Reading Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 in the Digital Era, MLA Conference Paper 2023, Panel 747

    Author(s):
    Brandy Underwood (see profile)
    Date:
    2023
    Item Type:
    Conference paper
    Conf. Title:
    MLA
    Conf. Org.:
    MLA
    Conf. Loc.:
    San Francisco
    Conf. Date:
    January 2023
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/kjsd-yq63
    Abstract:
    In Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Smith utilizes her own black female body to give voice to the diverse experiences of those who witnessed the Los Angeles Uprising. The voices we hear from Smith are not her own, instead these voices are merely different perspectives about the same event. Smith’s one-woman performance provides a model for how contemporary subjects quickly feel overwhelmed by numerous, sometimes conflicting or inaccurate media representations of crowds and unrest in the digital era. Her work foreshadows how current events are witnessed on social media today. In this paper, I argue that the multiplicity of voices heard in Twilight mimics the way that various points of view are widely dispersed, even fractured, throughout traditional media, as well as, social media such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. From this vantage point, I turn to recent accounts of black crowds such as those in Minneapolis, New York and Los Angeles in 2020. Ultimately, I argue that images of crowds, urban unrest, and social injustice in African American cultural products, like Smith’s Twilight, shed light on how contemporary individuals consume news and media in the digital era.
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    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    2 months ago
    License:
    Attribution
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