Repositioning: Center and Margin in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust

Abstract

One of first scenes in Julie Dash's Daughters of Dust shows a woman looking through a kaleidoscope given to her by Mr. Snead, a photographer. As Snead explains way instrument works, she delights in changing images. The kaleidoscope is an apt metaphor for Dash's own project in making film. As she told reporter Kevin Thomas, I wanted to take African-American experience and rephrase it in such a way that, whether or not you understood film on first screening, visuals would be so haunting it would break through with a freshness about we already (F15). By twisting kaleidoscope of what we already about African American experience, Dash has created a way of seeing, and reading, that experience. Daughters of Dust gives a portrait of a particular moment in African American history; it also shows by example how that history needs to be constructed, and reconstructed, from an African American perspective. Dash spent 10 years researching Gullah tradition, poring over papers and books in New York City's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, university libraries and Smithsonian in Washington (Smith B35). Yet Daughters of Dust is not a documentary. Rather, it is lyrical and impressionistic, told, as Dash says, in manner of a West African griot, or storyteller, the way an old relative would retell it, not linear but always coming back around. It's all connected, but how you get to information is different. Dash contrasts her storytelling method with that of television and formula films where you know what's going to happen in first five minutes. With 'Daughters of Dust' you can't apply that formula. You're thrust into world of new (qtd. in Rule C17). Dash's approach to narrative is consciously defamiliarizing: I wanted audience to feel as if it was looking at a foreign film - this was very important to me (qtd. in Thomas F15). By twisting audience's kaleidoscope in this manner, Daughters forces us to see a segment of African American history as if for first time. It serves as a concrete example of kaleidoscopic perspective on history articulated by Hayden White, who suggests that we recognize that there is no such thing as a single correct view of any object under study but that there are many correct views, each requiring its own style of representation. This would allow us to entertain seriously those creative distortions offered by minds capable of looking at past with same seriousness as ourselves but with different affective and intellectual orientations. Then we should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in past correspond to some preexistent body of raw facts. For we should recognize that constitutes facts themselves is problem that historian, like artist, has tried to solve in choice of metaphor by which he orders his world, past, present, and future. (47) The dominant historical perspective on people such as Gullahs, inhabitants of Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina who are descended from enslaved Africans, has been that they are backward and uncultured, marginal people both figuratively and literally. In his 1949 study Africanisms in Gullah Dialect, Lorenzo Dow Turner quotes some of those denigrating dominant views with respect to Gullah speech patterns, including one by editor of several volumes of Gullah folk tales . . . whose interpretation of dialect has been generally accepted as authoritative, A. E. Gonzales: Slovenly and careless of speech, these Gullahs seized upon peasant English used by some of early settlers and by white servants of wealthier colonists, wrapped their clumsy tongues about it as well as they could, and, enriched with certain expressive African words, it issued through their flat noses and thick lips as so workable a form of speech that it was gradually adopted by other slaves and became in time accepted Negro speech of lower districts of South Carolina and Georgia. …