Week #9--Confronting and Rewriting History

In Daughters of the Dust (1991), Julie Dash seeks to create a historical narrative in which a collective female identity is established. The central conflict in the film is that Nana, the matriarch of the Peazant family has concerns about whether or not they will retain their Gullah roots as they move into the mainland. Two women closely relate to Nana and her efforts to preserve the family. Yellow Mary is the prodigal daughter who returns to Ibo Landing after being sexually violated throughout her travels. Eula has lived in Ibo Landing her entire life, and she faces tremendous conflict with her husband, Eli, after he learns that she was raped. The incident drives him to question the worth of Nana’s traditions if they were not able to protect his wife. For both women, Nana is the only woman who offers love and comfort without any judgment. There are also women who think that it is best to distance themselves from Nana’s traditions as far as possible. Haagar married into the Peazant family, and she sees their entrance into the mainland as an opportunity to dispel many of the rituals she condemns as archaic. Nana’s granddaughter, Viola, has become a born-again Christian since returning from the mainland, and she is responsible for bringing Mr. Snead, a photographer who documents the family’s departure. He serves as the film’s example of self-reflexivity, in which some reference is made to the filmmaking process, albeit a still camera. Within the diegetic world, Snead captures each member of the family and learns more about the history of the Gullah People and Ibo Landing. Outside of the narrative, Dash is very much doing the same way, in which she is challenging the viewer’s orientation not only with the history of African Americans before the 20th century, but with seeing African Americans onscreen as well.

In terms of history, Dash’s uses different kinds of iconography to reflect slavery, such as hands and clothes stained with indigo, to reflect when Nana and other enslaved Africans worked on an indigo plantation. Dash also uses a large wood carving to represent a dismantled slave ship, which holds tremendous resonance when Eli pushes it away to reflect how he has come to terms with what happened with his wife, and his acknowledgment that she is carrying their child. These references to slavery also reinforce why Nana deems it important to keep her family together, because the “peculiar institution” separated families when Africans were brought to America and subjected to enslavement. Eli and Eula’s reconciliation affirms that the Peazant family will remain intact, something that is preserved by the presence of the Unborn Child.

Dash’s film is set at the turn of the century, as the Peazant family departs for the mainland of South Carolina during the summer of 1902. Her engagement with history in this film is preceded by her short film, Illusions (1983), set during World War II. It focuses on Mignon Dupree, a studio executive assistant who is assigned to correct a sync error in an upcoming movie, where she recruits a young Black singer to sing in place of the White actress who stars in the project. Dash’s short, shot in black and white, is a retelling of the passing narrative, in which Mignon is a light-skinned Black woman who (unintentionally) passes for White, which grants her an agency to help make some important decisions at the studio. Like Dash, Cheryl Dunye explores film history to recover and preserve the presence of Black women. In The Watermelon Woman (1996), Dunye portrays herself as an aspiring filmmaker who decides to search for the identity of a Black actress who portrayed mammy characters in Hollywood movies during the 1930s. As you watch the film, how does Cheryl determine that this will be the subject of her film, and how does this relate to her identity as a filmmaker? How does the use of direct address to the camera help reveal about Cheryl’s development as an artist? What other information does she learn about the period in which the Watermelon Woman was a notable figure? How do parts of the Watermelon Woman’s biography parallel with Cheryl’s life? At the film’s conclusion, how does Dunye use documentary conventions, and what revelation is made to question whether or not the non-fiction medium is reliable?