Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex, and Afro-Religiosity by Montré Aza Missouri (review)

Montré Aza Missouri’s Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex, and Afro-Religiosity asks readers “to consider how race, sex, and religion [intersect] in constructing a cultural identity for African Diasporas in the United States” (1), with specific attention to the cinematic transformation of the Tragic Mulatto into the Black Magic Woman. Missouri traces this journey through six chapters that deconstruct Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1991), Eve’s Bayou (dir. Kasi Lemmons, 1997), Sankofa (dir. Haile Gerima, 1993), I Like It Like That (dir. Darnell Martin, 1994), and The Princess and the Frog (dir. Ron Clements and John Musker, 2009), respectively, based on African-based religious images and practices that are embedded in the films and the sociopolitical and cultural issues that shape the black female characters.

While each chapter presents a brief historiography of black films and the ways in which Hollywood has consistently made black women invisible, hypervisible, or grotesque, the real strength of Black Magic Woman is its Afro-religious reading of the five films: Missouri decodes the multilayered meanings of the Yoruba pantheon to demonstrate how knowledge of these codes, embedded by directors and manifested through characters, allows audiences to recognize the transformation of the Tragic Mulatto from her liminal position in history to the Black Magic Woman who is grounded in her African heritage. In addition, Missouri’s integration of a womanist theoretical framework demands that readers and viewers adopt a “womanist gaze,” that is, rewatch and reevaluate films with which they are familiar from the historical, cultural, lived, and spiritual experiences of black women (48).

Chapter 1 introduces Missouri’s theoretical framework and her argument that the qualities of a womanist film include a focus on “spirituality, particularly Afro-religiosity, as it informs the narrative, characterization and/or aesthetic” (29). When these qualities are present, she suggests, the womanist film makes the Black Magic Woman central to the narrative and reveals her power through the female orisas; both are “female warrior[s] battling social injustices and fostering social change” (3).

The exploration of the films in chapters 2 through 6 evolve from Missouri’s chapter 2 analysis of why and how Daughters of the Dust is the “quintessential womanist film” (50): twenty-five years after its initial release, it remains one of the few films in which the power of àjé, the Yoruba collective feminine energy, is visible in all aspects of the narrative. In addition, Missouri argues that the egungun/ancestors, orisas (e.g., Osun and Yemanja), aiye/earth, and òkun/sea manifest through each character as the women resist succumbing to grief and trauma by claiming their diverse heritage and loving the “grotesque” aspects of themselves. It is this resistance that allows the female characters to be a community of Black Magic Women who, even as some embrace Christianity, are capable of healing their wounded bodies, psyches, and spirits.

Although the theme of black women as spiritual healers is central to Eve’s Bayou, in chapter 3 Missouri argues that “murky mysticism” under-cuts this element and that the film utilizes stereotypes of black women, femininity, and the black middle class to progress its narrative (81). In contrast to Daughters of the Dust, whose characters use the àjé, egungun, and orisas to make their wounds visible and to confront their histories, the characters in Eve’s Bayou, according to Missouri, are “motivated by fear of loss” and use voodoo (instead of practicing Vodou) to seek revenge without imagining an alternative community (91). Similarly, in chapter 4 Missouri argues that Sankofa’s Black Nationalist approach leaves little room for a complex rendering of black women and, like Eve’s Bayou, frames its narrative through stereotypes. Furthermore, despite the film’s integration of egungun and orisas, Missouri points out that those manifestations are limited and are accompanied by the continued sacrifice and eventual death of the protagonist, Mona/Shola.

True to Missouri’s objective to explore the...