Making History: Julie Dash

Abstract

If history is a way of counting time, of measuring change, then feminists, whether white, black, brown, or red, are operating another temporality, questioning the timing of history. In an essay about Claire Johnston,1 Meaghan Morris argues that because feminism is both skeptical (of history) and constructive, it is for most historians: To act (as I believe feminism does) to bring about concrete social changes while at the same time contesting the very bases of modem thinking about what constitutes 'change' is to induce intense strain.2 Feminism is untimely history that is ongoing, never over, or over there, but here and now. For women, history is not something to be recorded or even accepted, but something to be used, something to be changed. But first, history must be remembered. bell hooks so poignantly said, As red and black people decolonize our minds we cease to place value solely on the written document. We give ourselves back memory. We acknowledge that the ancestors speak to us in a place beyond written history.3 Julie Dash calls her history what if, speculative what Laleen Jayamanne, a Sri Lankan/Australian filmmaker, would call virtual history.4 Cultural more than provides the context. (As hooks and many critics have pointed out, the concept of sexual difference at the base of feminist film theory is racialized5.) The local (differences of appearance, custom, law, culture) illuminates the global (our commonalities of family, fiction, thought, feeling). The local, women's history, becomes the ground of the global, feminist theory. Thus, we learn about differences and experience the recognition of sameness. We feel history, as presence, passed on from grandmother to daughters and sons, a living history that is nourishing, not diminishing.