Publicizing Ava DuVernay as Black Feminist Auteur

In September of 2016, VaintyFair.com posted an article by Yohana Desta entitled “Ava DuVernay and Queen Sugar Look Like the Future of Television.” Indeed, since the success of her 2014 feature film Selma, DuVernay has been both rightfully celebrated and aggressively marketed as a rising star in an industry and profession dominated by white men, quickly becoming an icon of Black feminism in popular culture. In an entertainment industry which has generally diversified the opportunities it offers to Black acting talent, Ava DuVernay occupies space not in front of the lens, but behind it; she has achieved the status of auteur in the most culturally distinguished sense of the term. DuVernay's name has become so synonymous not only with Black and female directorial excellence, but with the politics of inclusion in Hollywood representation, that in 2016 New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, riffing on the notion of the Bechdel test, coined the notion of “the DuVernay test, in which African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.”

DuVernay's Netflix documentary 13th was released just a few weeks after Desta's article to almost immediate acclaim.