Fashioning the Body [as] Politic in Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust"

Abstract

Set at turn of twentieth century in a mythical port village on a sea island off South Carolina and Georgia coasts, Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of Dust features four generations of Peazant women. On surface, film's plot is quite simple: characters struggle to reconcile their history of enslavement and their geographical and cultural isolation with potential freedom and socioeconomic progress that their immigration from island to mainland promises. As Viola Peazant explains to Mr. Snead, photographer she has hired to document crossing over, migration represents family's steps toward progress, an engraved invitation to culture and wealth of mainland. (1) Among first uttered in film, these words direct attention to historicity of family's movement. Indeed, critics of film focus almost exclusively on record Dash revises, arguing that film repositions African American cultural history from margin to center. (2) Such readings also position film within a matrix of representations that describe blackwomanhood as a tension between raced and gendered subjectivities. Intellectual and practical consensus on blackwomen's marginalization within discursive systems of both race and gender characterize blackwomen by intersectionality, a false center of two. (3) Teaching and discussing film has shown me that some audiences have internalized this conventional notion of intersectionality to such a degree that film's rejection of conservative representations of blackwomen becomes confusing and problematic for them. Common academic assumptions about race and gender as disparate categories, as well as blackwomen's representations of distinct standards relative to each of these categories, provide immediate but defective lenses for film's spectators. However, because Daughters does not conform to established standards, or because it mutes them, viewers' most basic identification with characters and plot is either generally inhibited or deferred. (4) When I taught film in an undergraduate course for English majors at Louisiana State University in 1998, for example, male students of all ethnic backgrounds found film difficult to comprehend, and white students male and female expressed an inability to grasp meaning, follow story, or see point. (5) Dash seems to anticipate such responses to her text, reasoning that when a work is so densely seeded within black culture, a lot of people who are not from culture will say they find film inaccessible or they will say they find it not engaging. What they are saying is that they do not feel privileged by film, so they choose not to engage or allow themselves to become engaged. (qtd. in Bobo, 1995, 133) Whereas Dash focuses on cultural and sensibilities, however, I want to argue here that her film narrates political sensibilities as it consciously refuses to enter entanglements of market and visual economies that have made sociopolitical sense of blackwoman's (Collins 103). As Greg Tate indicates, Daughters offers historical subtext for blackwomen's surface emotions (70). Daughters challenges commonplace notions of blackwomen's place in and its relationship to it, and it engages their place in the marketplace of flesh (Spillers 76). I use body politic here simultaneously to connote social, political, and public sphere of nation state, represented in film as North, and to juxtapose that political with natural bodies of blackwomen, always sexually and/or economically politicized. This essay reads Daughters as a visual and verbal narrative that challenges very concept of intersectionality and illusory division between race and gender that sustains it. The film challenges muted that woman itself names a subject that inherently excludes film's subjects. …