Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity by Allyson Nadia Field (review)

Allyson Nadia Field’s book embarks on the mission of recovery at the complicated intersection of two fields, history and film studies, where little of the archival record exists. Working with several African American filmmakers’ nonextant films, Field ambitiously positions African American filmmakers’ use of uplift rhetoric at the beginning of the twentieth century to reframe our understanding of Booker T. Washington’s notion of uplift. Field offers a new narrative of black southern modernity and, most vitally, provides lessons for what visual culture methodology can provide historical inquiry.

The introduction and first chapter of Field’s book describe the visual culture of uplift emanating from Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes at the turn of the twentieth century. Their multimedia rhetorical strategies conveyed a political and social program where “African Americans were modern, economically self-sufficient people and constituents of what Washington called a southern ‘new era of industrial progress’” (p. 29). Field points out that the institutions’ use of film and uplift rhetoric in the South was a deliberate choice in the fight against the perceived antimodernity of African Americans. Film was the most modern means of mass communication at the time. Institute uplift cinema relied on several themes: students as raw material, success as the enactment of labor, education “as a kind of whitening,” and finally, “success in failure” (p. 38). Field offers a new engagement with black southern modernity by illustrating the use of moving pictures to formulate what it meant to be southern, black, and agricultural in uplift’s core antimigration message, and in Washington’s use of motion pictures to convey that message to the world.

Chapters 2 and 3 show that Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, and the African American filmmakers they employed, had difficulty maintaining control of that message. For example, chapter 2 explores the trouble Washington had managing George W. Broome, “probably the first Black filmmaking entrepreneur,” whom Washington asked to produce moving images of Tuskegee’s campus (p. 100). Broome often exhibited the motion pictures for entertainment and associated Tuskegee “with seemingly less uplifting aspects” (p. 85). In chapter 4, Field discusses, among other short films of the era, Hampton’s uplift short The New Era and its controversial use as an epilogue for screenings of The Birth of a Nation. Using archival records from faculty and trustees at Hampton, Field illustrates the decision-making process in adding the short to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film. Hampton’s logic was that it would be the “after” to Griffith’s “before,” meaning that The New Era would publicly reveal the flaws of Griffith’s epic (p. 162). Much to the contrary, juxtaposing these two films showed the limits of uplift in this mission. Field concludes, “Even if uplift cinema was not imagined as a direct response to white racism—a kind of countercinema—it could not escape functioning, or being evaluated, in those terms” (p. 181).

Field’s bottom line is that the visual keeps surprising us, but that historians have not given the visual rhetorics of uplift their fullest consideration. Well known is Booker T. Washington’s narrative and formulation of uplift for Hampton and Tuskegee, but lesser known are the institutions’ films and their visual strategies for uplift. Field’s recovery of this void is no doubt provocative in its method and conclusions; it may leave traditionalists uncomfortable, but the marriage of film and uplift was meant to rouse. Historians’ adoption of the visual, Field asserts, will too.