A Noisy Protrusion: Queer Blackness, Practical Effects, and Cinematic Sound in Jamaa Fanaka’s Welcome Home Brother Charles

This essay theorizes Jamaa Fanaka’s Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975) as a queer black intervention into the cinematic grammar of suture. I argue that, through a subversive mobilization of practical effects and sound design, Fanaka troubles the psychoanalytic paradigm of gender and desire which undergirds both conventional cinema and blaxploitation. Like many early films of the L.A. Rebellion School of Filmmaking, Welcome Home Brother Charles takes up certain idiomatic calling cards of blaxploitation, but does so in a deconstructive movement through which nonnormative notions of blackness are allowed to creep into the frame. Fanaka’s film, then, offers us an example of how what Hortense Spillers calls the “fleshiness” or Fred Moten calls the “thingliness” of blackness might be welcomed onto screens from which it has otherwise banished. Thus, this essay resides at an intersection of Black Studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and structural film theory.