In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Scholars Who Sat by the Door
  • Jacqueline Stewart (bio)

Fifty years ago, the academic study of African Americans and the cinema was something of a double negative. Before film studies was institutionalized within the academy, issues of black representation, spectatorship, and filmmaking (if considered at all) surely seemed too marginal and sociologically oriented to warrant scholarly consideration alongside efforts to theorize the cinema's aesthetic nature and distinctiveness. And before African American studies was formalized in response to black student activism of the late 1960s, the history of blacks and film must have appeared to be self-evidently trivial, paling in comparison to the foundational work of documenting black social struggle and enumerating black contributions to American society.

As in all early film writing, it was a diverse group of critics, journalists, and artists who penned the first explorations of "the Negro in [End Page 146] Film," laying the groundwork for scholarly studies that would emerge decades later. Beginning in the mid-1910s, sharp critiques of mainstream and black-audience "race movies" were penned by commentators in the African American press; with the coming of sound, optimism about the emergence of a genuinely "Negro cinema" was expressed by contributors to the British journal Close Up; in the wake of World War II, a taxonomy of persistent black stereotypes from stage to screen was outlined by British critic Peter Noble; and the social progress signaled by a late-1940s cycle of "negro tolerance" films was met with skepticism by Ralph Ellison and V. J. Jerome.1 These writers—black and white, on both sides of the Atlantic—spoke from different cultural and professional backgrounds, and with varying degrees of methodological rigor. But in their efforts to address the significance of race in film history and aesthetics, and the significance of the cinema in African American experiences, they shared a concern to speak on behalf of African Americans who had long suffered misrepresentation and marginalization by the dominant film industry.

So by the time the Society of Cinematologists (SOC) was founded in 1959 to "give film study some visibility and dignity," numerous tensions already existed that would continue to test the legitimacy of scholarly inquiries at the intersections of race and cinema over the next half century.2 The tendency to examine the content of "minority" images through lenses of social analysis and political critique (e.g., the negative function of stereotyping), for example, threatens to overshadow medium-specific questions about the cinema as a unique art form. New methodologies are required not only to work within and across multiple fields that are comparatively "new" (African American studies, Latino/Chicano studies, Asian American studies, ethnic studies, comparative race studies, cultural studies, visual culture, media studies, film studies), but also to situate the study of film among other, older lines of inquiry (literary studies, art history, cultural history). And, perhaps thorniest of all, who is "qualified"—by disciplinary training, research experience, and/or racial, cultural, political affiliation—to do such work?

Though it is not clear that the SOC founders ever discussed these matters explicitly, we can see in the organization's more recent history that issues of race strike at the core of questions about how to define and practice film studies as an academic discipline. In this brief look at how principles of social and intellectual pluralism have been linked with aspirations for racial diversity within the Society (a discussion that deserves many more paragraphs and perspectives than I can offer here),3 I want to suggest that "minority" [End Page 147] subjects—human and scholarly—continue to occupy liminal spaces in the field, and productively so. For it is the ways in which race pulls our attention toward the "outside"—to the realms of the social and political, to other disciplines, to extra-academic constituencies—that encourage film studies to examine itself, to inspect and redraw its boundaries, to "mic check" and discover who is listening. To make my own position clear: the recruitment and cultivation of scholars of color and scholarship on race must continue to be an organizational and fieldwide priority. But the success of these efforts should be measured not only by the validation of race...

pdf

Share