Black Women, Romance and the Indiewood Rom Coms of Sanaa Hamri

This chapter explores Sanaa Hamri's innovations on the mainstream genre of the postfeminist romantic comedy in her Indiewood productions Something New (2006) and Just Wright (2010). Compatible with a trend for ‘feel-good’ films about middle-class blacks, Hamri’s films are neither formally innovative nor politically progressive and therefore ignored in studies of contemporary black film and women’s cinema alike. Yet simply in existing, as films about black women made by black female filmmakers who are thereby made visible, Hamri’s films intervene in a pervasively white postfeminist media culture. They also transfigure the black romantic comedy by challenging the dominant stereotype of the middle-class black woman’s negotiation of love and career in which she must give up one to have the other.