Allyson Nadia Field - "Acts of Love" - Adrienne Brown

Allyson Nadia Field will discuss her new book Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History. She will be joined in conversation by Adrienne Brown. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op.

RSVP HERE — please note your RSVP is requested but not required. 

About the book: The rediscovery of the first film to depict African American affection revises the history of American cinema.

In 1898, vaudeville actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown joyously embraced in a short silent film titled Something Good—Negro Kiss. The first known film to portray African American affection, it was lost for over a century until its rediscovery inspired contemporary audiences with a powerful and enduring depiction of Black love. More than a missing piece in an untold history of Black cinematic performance, Something Good—and the magnetism of Suttle and Brown—attests to the power of Black performance on stage and screen from the nineteenth century to today.

In Acts of Love, Allyson Nadia Field tells the story of Something Good and recovers the forgotten yet fascinating lives of its performers and their world. Drawing a vivid picture from sparse historical records, Acts of Love examines popular culture's negotiation of blackness to reconsider the intersections of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and cinema in ragtime America. This book not only presents the story of Something Good, its performers, and the drama of its rediscovery; it shows how the rediscovery of this short early film changes our understanding of American film history.

About the author: Allyson Nadia Field is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film & The Possibility of Black Modernity(Duke University Press, 2015). She is also co-editor with Marsha Gordon of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019) and co-editor with Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015). Her most recent book, Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss that Changed Film History (University of California Press, 2026) was supported by a NEH Public Scholars Fellowship, an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences grant, and an ACLS Fellowship. 

About the interlocutor: Adrienne Brown is Professor of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago where she also serves as Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life, a dynamic hub of exploration, expression, and exchange fostering neighborhood vibrancy through the arts on the South Side of Chicago.