Changing the Subject: Lynn Nottage's By The Way, Meet Vera Stark and the Making of Black Women's Film History

Lynn Nottage’s 2011 satirical play, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood’s golden age. Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, was inspired in part by the career of African American actress, singer, and dancer Theresa Harris. A tale of Black women’s cinematic representation and social erasure, Nottage’s fabrication of film history extends beyond the staged plot to also include a digital archive documenting Vera’s celebrity and career. In this talk, Sheppard examines how Nottage’s play and paratexts 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.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Film and Media Studies, the UCI School of Humanities Black Studies Cluster, the UCI School of Social Sciences, The UCI Humanities Center and the UCI School of Humanities' Departments of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Comparative Literature, and Art History

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