Aymar Jèan “AJ” Escoffery knows the power of storytelling—so he helps others tell stories that Hollywood and corporate media have largely ignored.
Escoffery (formerly AJ Christian), a professor at Northwestern University and director of its Media and Data Equity Lab, is co-creator of Open Television (OTV), an online platform that carries films and series centering and largely created by Black, Brown, LGBTQ+ and women-identified people. He tells OTV’s story in his latest book, Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture
“So much of our culture, we kind of offload the responsibility of telling our stories and sharing those stories to multinational corporations who don’t necessarily care about us,” Escoffery, a Black queer man, told Windy City Times. “And so for me, the reparative media framework is, how can we care about each other through media and technology? And I just wanted to share what that could be like, both from the perspective of someone who is creating a platform for stories to be shared from the storytellers and from the community members who receive it.”
OTV went live in 2015, and Escoffery ran it until 2020, when he named co-founder Elijah McKinnon executive director.
Escoffery’s book tracks OTV’s evolution during his time at the helm, shares its successes and its mistakes, and aims to inspire similar projects. He was inspired by his Caribbean immigrant family’s storytelling plus the Black voices that came out of Chicago—Oprah Winfrey, Soul Train, Jet and Ebony magazines, the Chicago Defender newspaper, and more. He also gives ample credit to his colleagues, OTV’s supporters and other content creators.
To get their work on OTV, creators initially had to be based in Chicago and telling a story that dealt with multiple forms of systemic harm, including racism, sexism and homophobia. Their stories, Escoffery wrote in the book, are “trauma-informed but not traumatizing,” centering “the mundane, complicated issues people face including and beyond trauma.”
The programs showcase many types of intersectionality, such as friendship and love between people of different cultures, and interactions between those who come from the same culture but differ in various ways.
Chicago proved a fertile ground for storytelling; there are now more than 500 films, series and pilots on OTV. The most popular programs have been Brown Girls and Brujos. Brown Girls, written by Fatimah Asghar and directed by Sam Bailey, tracks the friendship of a Black woman and a queer Muslim woman, and was Emmy-nominated for best short-form comedy or drama series in 2017. Brujos, created by Ricardo Gamboa, is a series about three Latinx witches fighting the white corporatists who endanger people of color. Black, Asian, trans and female witches eventually join the three.
Escoffery noted several other series and films, among then Black Girl Magic, which features performances hosted by Chicago-based queen The Vixen. The series has “some of the best drag that I’ve ever seen” and is great viewing for parties, Escoffery said. Conspiracy Theorist is about a graduate student going through a mental health crisis. Her is a coming-of-age dramedy with a Black bisexual woman as the protagonist. He also recommended rapper Cakes Da Killa’s short film Visibility Sucks.
While Chicago is still a major focus for OTV, the platform now features content from other locales as well. Brave Futures, for instance, is a collection of short films from around the world that OTV either commissioned or produced.
There are a few other streaming platforms similar to OTV, such as Washington, D.C.-based kweliTV, featuring the work of Black creators, and Los Angeles’s Revry, devoted to LGBTQ+ content. As major entertainment companies become more concentrated through mergers—and likely become more conservative about what projects they’ll green-light—there will be more demand for independent platforms that release diverse stories, Escoffery predicted.
Throughout his book, he uses the metaphor of a cookout. “Everyone has had a family gathering where you all collectively contribute to nourishing, serving, and entertaining each other,” he said. “What would it look like if you did that with media … instead of serving food, you tell each other stories in whatever medium you can?”
He added, “How would our culture be if we all did that? We would almost certainly be more connected to each other, more understanding of one another, and better able to mobilize, to actually organize ourselves, and make the other changes that we need in society.”
Now Escoffery is thinking about a new project that will do for social media what OTV did for film and television. “I’m really interested in how can we design social media platforms that amplify those who’ve been most harmed and also connect people across differences much more intentionally,” he said. “And I think that decentralized social media technology is really the path for this. So that’s what I’m interested in exploring next.”