Geography Written in Lightning: Race, Sexuality, and Regulatory Aesthetics in The Birth of a Nation

Abstract

D. W. Griffith's racist masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation (1915), offers a potent imaginative geography of race, sexuality, and political agency that resonates nearly a century after its production. Prior to national release, the film was reviewed and approved by the National Board of Censorship, but on protest by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Board reviewed its decision and mandated changes. The archival traces of this moment are read through the concept of a “regulatory aesthetic,” which enables a fuller consideration of the aesthetic effects, both representational and affective, of regulatory, governmental, and political projects such as the production and regulatory reception of Birth and the geographies they produce. Through this lens, a reading of the National Board's changes to the film in tandem with the film itself shows that white agency was fractured by region, with the northern reformers staffing the Board claiming racial innocence to resist film director and southerner D. W. Griffith's incitement to historical complicity with racism and to bolster its claim to be a nationally representative yet “disinterested” regulatory body. Simultaneously the Board sought to marginalize African American agency, specifically the protests of the NAACP, through a combination of attenuating the affective links between black characters and white spectators and acquiescing to the film's multiscalar geographies of exclusion from political space. This reading of the National Board's regulatory aesthetic underscores how cultural productions have material, political effects on and off the screen.