“If the child’s humanity is mirrored initially in the eyes

of its mother, or the maternal function, then we might be able to guess that the social subject grasps the whole dynamic 

of resemblance and kinship by way of

the same source.” 

– Hortense Spillers (1987)

“I am interested in your optical lens of Blackness,” I nervously projected from the audience during the Q&A portion of the event. Clarifying further, I added: how would you describe your viewing sensibilities of Blackness? [1]

In the momentary pause, a spectral presence entered the room where we, the audience, gathered to reflect on “seeing in the way of things”—a presence unseen, yet full and reverberating. The artists, prompting this arrival, recollected and responded—first Kya Lou and then Shawn Peters—that their way of seeing was cultivated by their mother(s). Each reveled warmly in the memories of their matrilineal relationships, sharing with us their re-memory of vivid moments of intimate affection, teaching, nurturing of values. I felt the evocation of the women they were gesturing to. A reunification took place exactly in the way that Opticality, as an aesthetic praxis, is intended to initiate. The evocation was both arrival and return. 

For Lou and Peters, there is a prismatic beauty to be found in the colors, forms, shapes (and shapelessness), bodies, and lives of Blackness and Black folks. Peters doubled down on his reflection and credited his mother for shaping his ability to see the breadth of humanity that Blackness proffers, connecting to an earlier question by Corey Couch about a feeling of aliveness that emerges in both Lou and Peters’ work. Therefore, how do we map the internal and excess of the visual resonances of the Black matrilineal and maternal? I wonder about the inheritances of Black optical sensibilities: Is it in the ways the artists value and scale chromatic and tonal vibrance of Black cinematic bodies and environments? What kinds of potential optical inheritances can camera direction gesture toward? How might compositional fullness of the frame signal aliveness within the context of the embedded black maternal registers? 

If Opticality delineates a method for returning and enacting continuation, then every instantiation of the image, sound, and perhaps, evocation of aliveness, ushers in a conjoining with the matrilineal, or in the words of Spillers, “the whole dynamic of resemblance and kinship.” [2] What then does it mean for artists and viewers to see in their mother’s way of things? Or rather, how do we come to understand the maternal as a developmental function of one’s opticality? Alessandra Raengo and Daren Fowler remind us of this necessary return and suturing that viewing with the ensemble enables. [3] In Lou and Peters’ case, the Black maternal is not only foundational to, but a vital component of, the ensemble. 

Reflecting further, I am exploring what it means to name the matrilineal and maternal as inextricable frames through which Black artists view and thus lens the (im)materiality of Blackness—whether in cinematic form or that which is created as/from memory. Attending to and distinguishing between the frames of the matrilineal and maternal, enables a mode of viewing and listening attuned not only to the ongoing transmission of memory, but the affective registers of inheritance that produce an alternative sensorium of feeling toward Blackness. The structural figuration of the matrilineal offers language to consider perhaps a kind of genealogy of viewing while the maternal captures an aesthetic sensibility—one that modifies dominant racial and gendered ways of seeing Blackness and Black subjects and reattunes itself to the incalculable range of Black aliveness as a visual register. [4]

As a genealogy of viewing and aesthetic sensibility, the matrilineal and maternal therefore necessitates a reading of the cinematic with blackmother(s), as well as their worlds of memory, in mind. For each image bears the imprint of the source, to harken back to Spillers. This is the presence that lingers and reverberates and though for many of us it escapes detection, it is intuited for others in the creative process, awaiting and ready to guide our return. I am eternally transformed by the idea that lensing Blackness is part of a matrilineal viewing structure and tradition. 

Figures

Figure 1. Screenshot of woman holding child from BLKNEWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph, 2025), color by Kya Lou. Frame grab

Figure 2. Screenshot of woman standing amidst company holding child from BLKNEWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph, 2025), color by Kya Lou. Frame grab

Figure 3. Screenshot of woman and man in graduate attire from BLKNEWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph, 2025), color by Kya Lou. Frame grab
Figure 4. Screenshot of photograph in hand (Kya Lou, c. 2011-2024). https://www.kyalou.com/photo.

Figure 5. Screenshot of woman doing child’s hair from Grace (Natalie Jasmine Harris, 2024), color by Kya Lou. Frame grab.

Figure 6. Screenshot of elder woman in yellow placing hands on young children from Swimming in Your Skin Again(Terence Nance, 2014), cinematography by Shawn Peters. Frame grab.

Notes

[1] Kya Lou and Shawn Peters, "Opticality: Seeing in the Way of Things" (screening and conversation, liquid blackness, Atlanta, GA, March 7, 2026).

[2] Spillers, Hortense J. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 64-81.

[3] Liquid Blackness Opticality Research Project (https://liquidblackness.com/opticality-research-project).

[4] Quashie, Kevin. Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).