Julie Dash Research Articles

Editor's Introduction: Multicultural and Multilingual Aesthetics of Resistance

Either get out, get white or get along. --George Schuyler, Black No More (11) As George Schuyler sarcastically comments his novel Black No More (1931), US culture seems to offer its multiethnic or non-white citizens few choices: Either get out, get white or get along (11). Exiting the system, whitening, or assimilation are posited as the only viable options for ethnic subjects. Yet this issue of MELUS illustrates that ethnic writers often undermine such simplistic choices through a multicultural and multilingual aesthetics of resistance. As W. Lawrence Hogue points out his essay, for postmodern theorists such as Jacques Derrida, meaning the West is defined terms of binary oppositions, a violent hierarchy which one of the two terms governs the Within the white/ethnic binary opposition the United States, the ethnic subject often becomes defined as an inferior other. However, many of the authors discussed this issue deconstruct this binary through oppositional and resistant aesthetic practices; furthermore, some of these authors take western modes of writing or subjectivity--such as sentimentalism or the persona of the slave--and turn these modes inside out, so they no longer exclusively signify subjugation or abjection. These writers thereby participate the project of reclaiming and repositioning ethnic subjectivities. By turning to multicultural aesthetics or by deforming western tropes, they may undermine or challenge Eurocentric modes of writing, releasing the potential of ethnic subjectivity to transform not only art, but culture itself. In her essay, Property Rights and Possession Daughters of the Dust, Nancy Wright argues that Julie Dash's landmark 1991 film uses specific aesthetic practices--such as visual images and voice-overs--to talk back to Anglo-American political and legal theories of property from the historical period represented the film, which positions the ancestors of enslaved Africans and First Nations people as the dispossessed. Wright argues that the film Gullah and First Nation groups enact a concept of their relationship to the land that is communal and custodial, rather than property based. Two sequences the film associate characters and the landscape with communal property relationships--a montage which Iona Peazant reads aloud a love letter from Saint Julian Last Child, and a sequence of images set the family graveyard, where Nana Peazant explains to her great-grandson Eli Peazant his relationship to his unborn child and ancestors. As Wright astutely notices, in these sequences, visual images locate the themes of family, possession, and property a matrix of historical allusions to property law and legal rights of ownership. They also contest visually and aesthetically the dominant view of the residents of Dawtaw Island (the film's setting) as the dispossessed. These characters may lack individual, exclusive rights to property, but their communal relationship to the land endows them with agency and allows them to retain their culture. Aesthetic practices used by eighteenth-century poet Wheatley--a diasporic presence and the creation of a distinct black slave persona and perspective--also endow her work with agency and cultural identity. In Phillis Wheatley, Diaspora Subjectivity, and the African American Canon, Will Harris argues that few critics have accounted for the uniqueness of Wheatley's contributions to diaspora writing. Wheatley's poetry was recognized England and France as a watershed literary feat and became a focal point for discussion of diasporal literary accomplishment among individuals such as Voltaire, John Paul Jones, and Francois, the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois. To understand the diasporal impact of Wheatley's poetry, Harris argues, her writing must be compared to black writers whose works preceded or paralleled hers and to contemporaneous writers who may have been influenced by her work. …

Property Rights and Possession in Daughters of the Dust

Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust (1991) is rightly regarded as a brilliant exposition of feminine subjectivity (Gourdine, Bambara) and diasporic consciousness (Brouwer, Mckoy, Walters). Less understood are the ways in which the film explains concepts of property and posses sion shared not only by the Peazants, a Gullah family, but also by a First Nations character, Saint Julian Last Child. In voice-overs and dialogue, the characters describe their relationship to the land on which their fam ily has lived for generations not in terms of individual ownership but in terms of cultural identity. For example, they do not conceptualize their relationship to the land within the terrain of Anglo-American property law, which would emphasize the exclusive rights of an individual property owner. Nana, the elderly matriarch of the Peazant family, understands her family's relationship to the land to be that of custodians who care for it; this is particularly true of the land where their ancestors are buried. She teaches her descendants to appreciate the land because it has fostered the family's identity and culture. Her ideas are similar to First Nations' under standings of their relationship to their ancestral lands. The relationship of First Nations people to landed property is not based on legal rights of an individual to assert ownership and exclude others but instead on customs and communal practices identifying an extensive family lineage with the land. Through an intricate network of visual images and voice-overs, the film talks back to Anglo-American political and legal theories of prop erty from the historical period represented in the film, which positioned descendants of enslaved Africans and First Nations people as the dispos sessed. I will analyze two sequences in the film that associate characters and the landscape with communal property relationships that define their per sonhood. The first sequence to be discussed is a montage during which lona Peazant reads aloud a love letter from Saint Julian Last Child. The montage positions Saint Julian Last Child and lona among images of her family members within a variety of interior and exterior settings across

Ordering the facade: photography and contemporary southern women's writing

Proposing a new way to map intersections of photography and American literature, Katherine Henninger demonstrates importance of pinpointing specific cultural and subcultural history. Ordering Facade traces visual and literary cultures of womanhood that have ordered image of the from its plantation past to its postsouthern present. Assessed in light of these visual legacies, contemporary writing by women emerges vividly in Henninger's analysis as both shaped by and shaping these continuously powerful representations. Typically celebrated for their oral traditions, Henninger argues, South and its literature have in fact primarily relied on visual characteristics such as skin color, gender, or dress to mark social place and identity. From postmodern art gallery to family album, photography in culture has both reinforced these cultural prejudices and provided potent counterimages. Henninger analyzes photography's literary functions in memoir, fiction, screenwriting, and poetry by a wide range of contemporary authors including Dorothy Allison, Ann Beattie, Rosemary Daniell, Julie Dash, Ronlyn Domingue, Josephine Humphreys, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker. As each of these writers distinctively re-envisions traditional constructions of womanhood, Henninger shows, she joins others in challenging constrictions of southern woman and so changing meaning of southernness itself.

Transcending the "Dust": African American Filmmakers Preserving the "Glimpse Of the Eternal"

This paper explores Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and Zeinabu irene Davis's Mother of the River. Both films utilize materials obtained from oral tradition, which have been preserved through generations of African Americans whose forebears were forcefully carried away from Africa due to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In these films, we see a reaffirmation of African dignity through a commemoration of African culture and its continuing relevance in the lives of Africans in the Diaspora. The paper examines the stereotype question, and how filmmakers like Julie Dash and Zeinabu irene Davis who belong to the L.A. Rebellion school use their films to combat these stereotypes and engage their viewers in new images.

Weaving the Web Reintegration: Locating Aunt Nancy in Praisesong for the Widow

Myth, of course, plays, a very important part in all of our lives, in everyone's culture. Without myth and tradition, what is there? --Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (29) Links to the memories, myths, and ways of stolen Africans linger in the symbols, tropes, and forms of African American writing. (1) Following in the steps of Pauline Hopkins, who fictionalized an imagined memory of Africa in Of One Blood (1903; see Gruesser), and Zora Neale Hurston, who traveled east from Florida to New Orleans in Mules and Men (1935), (2) Paule Marshall has similarly infused Praisesong for The Widow (1983) with a distinctly African presence by grounding her narrative in West African tricksters and African American myth. In Praisesong, Marshall focuses on the interior life of her protagonist Avey Johnson, paying particular attention to Avey's spiritual and psychological desires. Marshall approaches these concerns in a way that emphasizes the central role of African ways of knowing as an alternative to Western individualist values and modalities--values that, once adopted by Avey, distance her from a rich cultural heritage. The novel's mythic backdrop allows Marshall to reach beyond the material reality of race, class, and gender oppression and delve into the psychological and spiritual desires of black women. Unearthing the remnants of West African myth in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow reveals how mythical traces of the Ghanaian spider-trickster, Kwaku Ananse, emerge and function in the novel as a culturally reconnective force. The first step in understanding Ananse's web-driven presence in Praisesong involves tracing his trans-Atlantic journey from Africa to the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands to determine how this journey altered his name and cultural function. (3) Ananse's trans-Atlantic transformation begins in Ghana, where the Akan and Ashanti peoples view Ananse as the source of life's stories and of life itself. An endearing rogue (Newall 62), lovable but unquestionably wicked in a charming sort of way, Ananse pushes intellectual, social, and linguistic limits and stimulates intercourse between different places, discourses, and ideologies. In weaving his web of life, Ananse mediates the space between heaven and earth, advocates for humans in the presence of god and, in doing so, bridges disparate spaces and ways of knowing. Ananse's cultural function in Ghana is made clear in the oftanthologized tale Trickster Gets Sky-god's Stories (Courlander, Feldman, Rattray). In this account, we learn that there was once a time when all the stories of the world belonged to Sky God. Consequently, the people of the earth had no stories to share. To secure the tales for all to enjoy, Ananse spins a web to the heavens and asks Sky God for his trunk of stories. Sky God agrees to hand over these tales on one condition: Ananse must bring him Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, Mmoatia the fairy, and Mmoboro the hornet (Scheub 67). Frail and weak, a most unlikely contender, Ananse, in classic trickster fashion, uses his intellect and wit, not force or strength, to fulfill Sky God's request. When Ananse ascends with his captives, Sky God, somewhat surprised by his success but more pleased with his new possessions proclaims, No more shall we call them the stories of the sky-god, we shall call them Spider Stories (70). Finally, Ananse returns to earth to share the stories, now named after him, with the entire world. Even though his behavior in this tale is somewhat atypical (Ananse usually uses his abilities to satisfy his seemingly insatiable appetite), the intercessory powers and linguistic skills he displays represent important facets of Ananse's character in Ghana. During the Middle Passage, however, Ghanaian Ananse experienced a sea change that altered not only his name, but also his function in diasporic society (Wilson Harris 156). In Ghana, he was a creative culture hero while in Jamaica (and other parts of the Caribbean) he became a trickster-par-excellence (Tanna 77). …

Outing the Black Feminist Filmmaker in Julie Dash'sIllusions

Outing the Black Feminist Filmmaker in Julie Dash's<i>Illusions</i>

Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes Toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust

Gayl Jones's novel Corregidora (1975) and Julie Dash's feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991) are singular texts that use historical frameworks to comment upon post Civil-Rightsera and gender relations and identity formations.1 Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film written and directed by Dash, was also the first film by an African-American woman to receive widespread theatrical distribution. Daughters is an independent work that resists and contests many aspects of the Hollywood film. Corregidora was the first novel by Gayl Jones, a reclusive figure with a small but striking literary output. Both the novel and the film call attention to understudied aspects of the African diaspora. In Corregidora, Jones creates an unusual migration circuit that links mid-to-late twentieth-century African Americans living in Kentucky to their slave ancestors in Brazil. In Daughters of the Dust, the plot concerns the persistence of African traditions among black people at the turn of the century living on the Sea Islands, located off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Both works also highlight the crucial role of women in maintaining cultural memory for black communities. This essay concerns the ways in which Corregidora and Daughters of the Dust make compelling interventions that transform mulatta characters-racially mixed women of African descent who bear the phenotypical (physical) markers of race mixing-into figures that help us to understand new things about sexual and normativity.2 Both texts effect a surprising deployment of a figure that has been symbolic of repressed histories and regressive discourses. Mulatta characters have long been controversial figures for scholars of AfricanAmerican literature. In novels such as Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States (William Wells Brown, 1867), lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1892), Megda (Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, 1891), and Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Pauline Hopkins, 1900), mulatta characters are symbolic of traumatic histories of enslavement. In novels of the 1920s and 1930s, especially those associated with Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen (Quicksand [1928] and Passing [1929]) and Jessie Fauset (There is Confusion [1924], Plum Bun [1928], The Chinaberry Tree [1931], and Comedy American Style [1933]), mulatta characters represented access to class mobility and the possibility of escaping the stigma of blackness altogether through racial passing. In an essay entitled, If The Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look

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

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. …

The Representation of the Indigenous Other in Daughters of the Dust and The Piano

This article examines two films, Daughters of the Dust, by Julie Dash, and The Piano, by Jane Campion. While both are subversive tales that rely on unconventional narrative techniques to examine and challenge female subordination and ethnocentric ideological systems, they are simultaneously "foundational" epics that mythologize this subordination even as they attempt to resist it. Key to this process is each film's reliance on native Others to both create and sustain a space of individuality and revolt for the female protagonist. Despite significant differences in the structure and perspective of each production, in both, the indigenous characters are silenced in order to permit non-native women the right to speak and affirm themselves and their embattled identities. This article analyzes both the tensions and forms of novel representation arising from this process.

The garden in the machine: a field guide to independent films about place

Introduction 1. The Garden in the Machine Larry Gottheim's Fog Line, Thomas Cole's The Oxbow, J.{ths}J. Murphy's Sky Blue Water Light Sign, Panoramas 2. Voyages of Life Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life, Larry Gottheim's Horizons 3. Avant-Gardens Kenneth Anger's Eaux d'artifice, Marie Menken's Glimpse of the Garden, Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, Stan Brakhage's The Garden of Earthly Delights, Marjorie Keller's The Answering Furrow, Anne Charlotte Robertson's Melon Patches, Or Reasons to Go on Living, Rose Lowder's Ecological Cinema 4. Re-envisioning the American West Babette Mangolte's The Sky on Location, James Benning's North on Evers, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Ellen Spiro's Roam Sweet Home 5. From the Sublime to the Vernacular Jan DeBont's Twister and George Kuchar's Weather Diaries 6. The City as Motion Picture The New York City Symphony: Rudy Burckhardt's New York Films, Weegee's Weegee's New York, Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y., Marie Menken's Go! Go! Go! Hilary Harris's Organism, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing Panorama, the San Francisco City Film: Frank Stauffacher's Sausalito and Notes on the Port of St. Francis, Bruce Baillie's Castro Street, Michael Rudnick's Panorama, Ernie Gehr's Eureka and Side/Walk/Shuttle Coda--Deconstruction/Reconstruction: Pat O'Neill's Water and Power and Eugene Martin's Invisible Cities 7. The Country in the City Central Park, Jonas Mekas's Walden, William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One 8. Rural (and Urban) Hours Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma, Robert Huot's One Year and Rolls 1971, Nathaniel Dorsky's Hours for Jerome, Peter Hutton's Landscape (for Manon) and New York Portrait, Part I 9. Expulsion from the Garden Thomas Cole's The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, Carl Franklin's One False Move, J.{ths}J. Murphy's Print Generation and Horicon 10. Satan's National Park Bruce Conner's Crossroads, Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, James Benning's Deseret and Four Corners 11. Benedictions/New Frontiers Chick Strand's Kristallnacht, Stan Brakhage's Commingled Containers, Andrew Noren's Imaginary Light, Leighton Pierce's 50 Feet of String, David Gatten's What the Water Said, nos. 1-3 Appendix: Distribution Sources for Films and Videos Notes Index

Exiled at Home: Daughters of the Dust and the Many Post-Colonial Conditions

Red-haired, light-skinned African American Trula emerges as a striking image of an exiled and marginalized lesbian woman in Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust. This film tells the story of an African American family's migration from the Georgia Sea Islands to the US mainland in the early 1900s. Some members of the family already live on the mainland and return to the Sea Islands to celebrate the formal migration. Trula, a friend, accompanies family member Yellow Mary Peazant. Trula's abundant and flamboyant hair and her excessive whiteness place her exterior to the predominantly dark-skinned female community of Ibo Landing in the Georgia Sea Islands. Trula's position as outsider emanates not only from these markers of difference or excess, but astonishingly, also from the Ibo belief that [o]n the day of the friends go (qtd. in Pendit and McGuire 6). This belief forges and legitimates her ostracism. Thus at the moment of migration and leave-taking, the women of the Peazant family, the blood relatives, enact an unapologetic exile on Trula while simultaneously confronting varying degrees of self-exile. Trula's overt silence and her refulgent presence signify a gaping wound in the text of the film, a laceration deliberately inflicted by Dash to warn that no unified moment or place of safety exists for all post-colonial African American female figures. Trula, perpetually in exile, is not safe on the Sea Island; she is not welcome; she is not at home. And yet, we argue, so too are all the other women depicted in the film. Dash risks projecting black women as divisive, and in particular, as homophobic when she portrays the variety of womanhoods occupied by individual black women. Making

Out of and Back to Africa: James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain

The Baal Shem Tov is quoted having said that forgetting is a form of and that memory is a path toward return. (1) This paradigm of and return, so central to Jewish history and thought, is relevant to other nations, especially those who, like the Jews, have experienced an extended diaspora. In a lengthy conversation with Margaret Mead, lames Baldwin spoke of ours a century of displaced people and wanderers [in which] everyone is an exile (Rap 62). Global transmigration, crossing borders both literal and figurative, is so commonplace today that the search for better fortune or sheer survival has left an indelible imprint on modern consciousness. Accompanying this movement from one landscape to another is the tension between retaining what was (and remains) one's national and assimilating into new territories and cultures. can be argued that it is in fictional characters' spiritual lives, one of the anchors of self and collective identity, and in their attempts to place themselves within the religious traditions of their that this sought-after reconciliation of impending alienation and threatening assimilation is most pronounced. Hence, it is in literature and in social movements, particularly those of minority communities, that distinctiveness is most stressed. Religious faith and practice in this context provide a viable return through the often unconscious, well culturally constructed, phenomenon of memory. At the end of Baldwin's 1952 novel Go Tell on the Mountain, John Grimes, the young protagonist, has an epiphany or what is more commonly referred to a visionary conversion experience, a staple of American religious life. He embraces Jesus and endures a state of ecstatic mysticism in which he experiences drifting soul ... anchored in the love of God (204). John's rebirth in Christ, his being saved, is an affirmation of one of the strongest bulwarks in the African American during slavery, and especially since its abolition: the black (2) Baldwin has said that in Black history comes out of the church. is a redemptive force but a `bridge across troubled water,' Kalamu ya Salaam interviewing Baldwin responded. It is how we forged our identity (Pratt and Stanley 182). The church is the African American's inheritance. Black writers and the characters they create are not so easily divested of it, nor should they be. Though John Grimes's commitment to Christ is representative of black assimilation into American (white) culture, this adoption of Christian beliefs not only helped the forge a stronger connection to their country and society, but it also enabled slaves and then emancipated Africans to shore up their sense of self-worth and value. Albert J. Raboteau, writing in his classic work Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South, observes that as one institution which freed blacks were allowed to control, the church was the center of social, economic, educational, and political activity. was also a source of continuity and for the black community (320). Here, Raboteau postulates, blacks were able to bridge the chasm between the two continents of Africa and America, between the past and the present (4). is in this space (both the literal church enclosure and the spiritual vault the church created around its congregants) that remembering took place; it is here that expression was given to memory. `Do you believe' Nana Peazant asks her female progeny in Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust, `that hundreds of Africans brought here on this other side would forget everything they once knew?' (96). (3) W. E. B. Du Bois claimed that the double consciousness haunting African Americans, the conflict between African and American points of view, could be both an empowering and a dislocating phenomenon (5). Amid the twin pressures of retention and memory, the cultural drama of the African American slave, and then free person, was played out. …

The mask of art: breaking the aesthetic contract--film and literature

Clyde Taylor exposes the concept of art as a tool of Ethnocentricity and racial ideology. He challenges the history of Aesthetics as a recent invention of privileged Western consumerism, and questions the myth of its ancient Greek origin. Aestheticism, he says, is a party to the establishment of whiteness as cultural norm. The experience is revealed to be the stylistic/structural contribution to the Western master narrative which dominates historical interpretation. Areas such as cinema studies, the avant garde, Marxist and feminist criticism are seen as seriously compromised by this reasoning. Examining various texts including The Birth of a Nation, Taylor demonstrates how rationales of art are used to mask personal, class, and cultural biases. Taylor offers a critique of representation as one alternative to aestheticism. Imitation of Life, The Cotton Club, and The Marrow of Tradition are read as doppelganger discourses where the values of one social group are mobilized as the narrative double of a more powerful group. Taylor's innovative analysis of the semantics of unequal power refers to these doublings as ironies of discourse. Novels and films by Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ousmane Sembene, Spike Lee, Souleymanne Cisse, Victor Masayesva, and Julie Dash, and the Vietnam Memorial design of Maya Lin are scrutinized in terms of resistance to the reign of the dominant system of aesthetics. According to Taylor whatever was once gained through this narcissistic aesthetic gaze has long since been exhausted. Liberation from its narrow assumptions will open richer resources to human imagination and creativity.

Enchanted Memories of Regional Difference in African American Culture

Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust offers a starting point for an exploration of the construction of African American communal memories. Self‐consciousness about such memory making can illuminate the historically generated roles of gender, regionalism, and urbanrural differences in both popular and scholarly understandings of African American culture.This is not just an issue for African American studies, however. A number of key dilemmas in contemporary anthropology are implicated. Most prominent is the rebellion against Enlightenment‐based notions of vision and rationality, which explores the senses, the magical, the uncanny, the haunted, and the subjective.

Women filmmakers of the African and Asian diaspora: decolonizing the gaze, locating subjectivity

An examination of the works of six contemporary black and asian women filmmakers. It also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled Other Voices, documenting the work of other black and asian filmmakers. The book analyzes the key films of Zeinabu Irene Davis, one of a growing number of independent black women filmmakers who are actively constructing an 'oppositional gaze'; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity, cultural displacement, lesbianism and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker; and Mira Nair, a black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.

Afrocentric Ideologies and Gendered Resistance in Daughters of the Dust and Malcolm X: Setting, Scene, and Spectatorship

This study of scenes from the films Daughters of the Dust and Malcolm X, describes images of myth, gender, and resistance familiar to African-American interpretive communities. Key thematic and technical elements of these films are opposed to familiar Hollywood practices, indicating the directors' effort to address resisting spectators. Both filmmakers, Julie Dash and Spike Lee respectively, chose subjects with an ideological resonance in African-American collective memory: Malcolm X, eulogized by Ossie Davis as “our living black manhood”(i) and the women of the Gullah Sea Islands, a site often celebrated for its authentically African cultural survivals. Both films combine images of an African past with an American present using a pattern of historically specific myths and tropes.

Divided Images: Black Female Spectatorship and John Stahl's Imitation of Life

In her discussion of the maternal melodrama, E. Ann Kaplan notes that the mother is usually marginal in traditional cinema. Stories told from the viewpoint of the husband or child displace the mother's perspective, a displacement that Kaplan recognizes in other arenas such as psychoanalysis and the women's movement itself. She ends her essay by stating the necessity for feminists to examine the absent position of the mother and the coding of her negativity in films (Case 126, 135). Melodrama provides a fertile space for such questioning because of its emphasis on the family and its contradictory presentation of the mother. As Linda Williams notes, device of devaluing and debasing the actual figure of the mother while sanctifying the institution of motherhood is typical of 'the woman's film' in general and the sub-genre of the maternal melodrama in particular (138). The importance of the maternal has long been recognized by black feminists. Not only has the mother figure been employed as a means for the discussion of black feminism, but this figure has also been articulated in ways that often differentiate it from conventional paradigms. Patricia Hill Collins, for instance, seeking to illustrate the type of mothering that occurs in black communities in which a network: of women care for children who are not their own, has suggested the term othermothers to incorporate these non-related women into the discussion on black families (119). The space created by these women provides a location for the potential formation of black feminist ideas. The term womanist, used to connote a special kind of feminism among women of color, stresses the mother or maternal figure who acts as a mentor for other, usually younger, women and recognizes the pressures of being a mother in academia (Phillips and McCaskill 1008). Both of these definitions emphasize the respect granted to the black mother. When discussing cinema, black women also turn to a melodramatic film. Imitation of Life provides a unique intersection of feminist film theory and black female spectatorship. In both John Stahl's 1934 film and Douglas Sirk's 1959 film of Fannie Hurst's novel, black women occupy a space closer to the center than in most other Hollywood movies, for Hurst's novel portrays the strained relationship between a black mother and her light-skinned daughter, who wants desperately to be white. Significantly, this drama has been the focus of black feminist discussions on the portrayals and reception of black women in films. Jacqueline Bobo analyzes both movies to discuss black women as cultural interpreters. In particular, she suggests that Nana Peazant, the influential grandmother in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, provides an alternative to the black mothers in Imitation of Life. Several women wash Nana's feet to show respect to her, while both versions of Imitation of Life show black women rubbing the feet of white women, suggesting their subservience (46-50). For bell hooks, Stahl's film initially caused her to stop going to movies, yet as an adult helped her form an oppositional with which to question the imaging practices of Hollywood cinema (121). hooks's term suggests a wide variety of distinctions from the white masculinist gaze described by Laura Mulvey. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey argues that cinema employs two mechanisms to create pleasure in the male viewer. Men in the audience engage in scopophilia, or the pleasure in looking at an object. This pleasure is derived primarily by gazing at the image of a woman, scantily dressed or heavily made up. The second method that creates pleasure combines scopophilia with narcissism in that male viewers find pleasure in looking at the male protagonist of the film. The film's hero is often portrayed as superior to most men. In a cinematic enactment of Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage, the male viewer is fascinated that he looks somewhat like this ideal person on the screen and is pleased in recognizing himself. …

Picturing What If: Julie Dash's Speculative Fiction

Picturing What If: Julie Dash's Speculative Fiction

Close‐up and slow motion in Julie Dash's daughters of the dust

Black feminist independent filmmaker Julie Dash responds to mainstream cinema's marginalization of women of color with her film Daughters of the Dust (1991). Using the ideology of the visible to her advantage, Dash transforms cinematic conventions of slow motion and close‐up into vehicles for audience gaze and “Black looks,”; privileging the image of Black women. Through her use of nonlinear narrative devices and mythic images, Dash undermines the conventions of realist text.

What You See Isn't Always What You Get

Representations of slaves in films appeared in American movies from the beginning of the century. Within the cinematic discourse of slavery, I decided to concentrate exclusively on representations of slaves and people of colour in Hollywood cinema, beginning with W.H. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which represents for many one of the peaks of stereotypical depictions of slaves and African Americans in cinema. It is also important to discuss representations of slaves in non-Hollywood films, however, this area has not been researched to the extent as to which slavery representations in Hollywood have been researched. In this paper I will address three films coming from a counter-Hollywood stance, Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (2005), Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde (1987), and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), all deal with the topic of slavery and have slave characters. The two European films, Manderlay and Cobra Verde are criticized many times for their racist and stereotypical depictions of slaves and slavery, and both films have been accused of disregarding the feelings of the African Diasporic communities and the Ghanaian community (in Cobra Verde).