Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams
G104 – Representing Black Women
October 7, 2008
Lesson Plan
Set up
Class
1) Mammy and The Black Woman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaUuzVN-
xnA
Gone with the wind
Some movie
Gone with the wind
2 min – aunt jemima pancakes (TV show)
Holy woman (endowed with special gift)
Big mammas house
Diary of a mad black woman
Norbit
Susan Gubar – Racechanges
o Whiteness = power/privilege/masculinity/maturity, blackness =
subordination /dependency/feminization/infantalization
o blackness =masses, whiteness=individuality
o Blackness is “a prisonhouse of epidermal inferiority” (42)
o Black spectators in a sense do not exist (43)
o Blackface
o Obliterates the black body
o Makes difference visible for (white) audiences
o Ensures cast will remain “unsullied by the threat of miscegenation”
o Ex., Griffith applied the one drop rule to actors to ensure the safety
of his cast
o Mimetic and exonerating at the same time
o Spectacle (idea reminiscent of first films)
o Gubar, Susan. Racechanges : White Skin, Black Face in
American Culture, Race and American Culture. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
o Racechanges refers to the ways in which people in films “traverse race boundaries,”
but it also is meant to connote “racial imitation or impersonation” (5). It is in this way
that Gubar first identifies the emergence of blacks in cinema: through the use of
blackface. The book traces the genealogy of the use of blackface from the 19 th
through the 20th century and examines numerous art forms including paintings,
photography, and film. Gubar begins with a discussion of the emergence of
blackface in early minstrel performances, where white performers wore blackface
signifying a “horrific return of the displaced black body—now paradoxically borne on
and reborn in the white body” (56). Gubar claims that blackface is a self
identification tool for whites helping to reaffirm whiteness as normative. Gubar
moves through a feminist analysis of the first film “masterpiece,” Griffith’s Birth of a
Nation, and the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, and although each deploys blackface in
different ways they both perform character assassination on blacks (59, 67). Much
like early film theory, which claims early films relied upon spectacle, “blackface
allowed white audiences to enjoy looking at a black person without actually having to
see one” (76).
Abstract (regarding film as the annotated bib. largely deals with TV):
Just as feminist film theory emerged in the 1970s and 80s as a response to
psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship, so too did critical race theory begin to critique
these same issues. Much of the work that emerged from the 1970s and 1980s dealt
specifically with representation of blacks, but this work did also extend to critiques of the
representations of Latinos/as and also Asians (see the works of Ariel Dorfman,
Schiller/Mattalard, the Friar’s, and Donald Bogle in Shohat and Stam, 2003). With the
establishment of a race taskforce in the Society for Cinema Studies, the 1990s saw a
significant increase in scholarship that theorized about race and ethnicity (see hooks,
Gubar, Diawara, Doane.) Much like early film theory grapples with cinema’s
relationship to theatre, discussions of race in cinema must first grapple with the stage
phenomenon of minstrelsy.
Minstrel shows provided an outlet for whites to make fun of blacks for the sake of
comedy and it was in this way that the use of blackface began. Although this
phenomenon has been argued to have ended by the beginning of the twentieth century,
the tradition continued in film (Gubar, 1997:78). Films grappled with a tension between
mimetic representations of blackness as the butt of a comedic joke; however, blackface
also provided “difference” as spectacle for white spectators. Blackface in film promoted
symbolic violence against blacks. Blackface in film allowed whites to comment on the
state of race relations in numerous ways. It provided a place to play out and justify
“ideologies perpetuating segregation or supremacy,” and it was also a “symbolic form of
punishment, a compulsive admission of guilt, and the figurative payment of debt to the
dead” (Gubar, 1997: 79). Although race and spectatorship has only recently been taken
up in scholarship, issues of race have been present in American films from the first
significant Hollywood film.
D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation has been characterized as a “celluloid monument
to the Ku Klux Klan” (Stam, 2000: 272). Blacks in this film are a threat to the
burgeoning American union. In this film blacks are represented by whites in blackface
Gubar, hooks, and many other scholars have commented on the race relations in this
film and all seem to agree that this movie depends on the “repetitive symbolic lynching
of the black male body” (Gubar, 1997: 57). Griffith used blackface to protect his white
cast from contamination by blacks, but he also wanted to protect his audience (the
American nation) from miscegenation (Gubar, 1997: 65). Black men were seen as the
“seeds of disunion” (from an intertitle card) and Griffith exemplified this with his black
character Gus (played by a white man in blackface) who tried to rape an innocent white
woman who threw herself off a cliff rather than be sullied by black seed (Gubar, 1997:
57,58). Blackness was a threat to white masculinity and white femininity and could only
be rectified through death (Gus was murdered in the film). Blackness, however, always
seems to refer to men.
hooks, in her classic article “The Oppositional Gaze” in Black Looks: Race and
Representation, writes that black women have been invisible in film not only because of
their race but also their gender. Feminist film theory has the tendency of subjugating
the importance of gender over race, thus hooks, responding in large part to Mulvey’s
canonical piece, theorizes the gaze of the black woman (hooks, 1992: 123). Black
women must cultivate an “opposition gaze,” which is one that “politicizes looking
relations”: this is, in other words, a looking that resists (hooks, 1992: 116). Looking
instantiates a relationship of engagement with images and through these images black
spectators could trace the “progress of political movements for racial equality” (hooks,
1992: 117). Black women spectators can reject cinema’s colonizing gaze. The
opposition gaze is one that is constructed as a protective mechanism to assure that
black female spectators will not “be hurt by the absence of the black female presence,
or the insertion of violating representation . . . [and is a way in which to] look past race
and gender for aspects of content, form, and language” (hooks, 1992: 122). Much like
the scholarship of Keller (see annotated bibliography), hooks argues that spectators of
early cinema often did not know that they were looking at black women unless the
movie was specifically “coded as being about blacks” (hooks, 1992: 119); this re-
instantiates the invisibility of black women.
Monique – Fat bitches
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSmT1Fve-BY
Monique Charm School
http://www.vh1.com/video/play.jhtml?id=1562453&vid=157136
