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4. Julie Dash: "I think we need to do more than try to document history"
- Southern Illinois University Press
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4 JULIE DASH "I think we need to do more than try to document history" How HAS HOLLYWOOD filmmaking constructed blackness? Perhaps an even better question is : How has Hollywood filmmaking constructed American whiteness? How do the films of Julie Dash, an African-American woman who is widely regarded as the most successful Black woman filmmaker "working within the system;' question Hollywood constructions of American blackness, whiteness, and multiracedness? Julie Dash is a member of a group of Black independent filmmakers known as the LA Rebellion, a group of UCLA graduate students who were "engaged in interrogating conventions of dominant cinema , screening films of socially conscious cinema, and discussing ways to alter previous significations as they relate to Black people" (Bambara 119). First and foremost, the films of Julie Dash take on constructions of whiteness and blackness against the grain of American cinema. Mark Reid has aptly noted that "film imagery has its roots in slavery;' and that Hollywood studios have "portrayed race relations as a static exchange in which all the villains and victims are Black, and all the saviors are White" (1992, 26). The early short films that Julie Dash directed worked to displace Hollywood imagery and replace it with an oppositional cinema of Afrocentricism. In Diary of an African Nun (1977), Four Women (1978), and Phillis Wheatley (1989), Dash rejects the "Klan mentality" that Mark Reid locates in American films, including D. W. Griffith's Birth ofa Nation (1915) "and its descendants" (1992,28). Julie Dash's work is a direct response to a cinema that seeks to silence her voice, locate her as an exotic threatening Other, and signify her as "lack" or "absence;' both because of her gender and race. Diary ofan African Nun is an adaptation of a short story by Alice Walker, Four Women is an experimental dance film, and the more recent Phillis Wheatley is a celebration of the early African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), who is undergoing a renaissance in feminist and post-colonial literary circles. In 1982, Dash completed Illusions, the first in a series of films that decon43 44 .:. Julie Dash .:. struct images of Black women Hollywood films. Illusions is set in 1940S Hollywood , and concerns a Black woman who is herself working (as producer) "within the system;' though she is "passing" as white. Daughters of the Dust (1990) is set at the turn of the century, and Dash plans to set a futuristic film, Bone, Ash and Rose, in 2050. Charting and mapping new representations of gendered American blackness and whiteness, this project is a far-reaching renarration of that which has not been spoken as much as it is a radical commentary on what has been spoken in Hollywood representational practice. As Julie Watson and Sidonie Smith argue, for the colonial subject, "the process of coming to writing is an articulation through interrogation, a charting of the conditions that have historically placed her identity under erasure" (xx). Illusions interrogates erasure and the political questions around the construction of Blackness and Whiteness in Hollywood films. Illusions places the "passing" Black figure, Mignon Dupree, at the center of a construction within another construction. A film within the film self-reflectively points out this constructedness. Dash underscores the necessity of interrogating American films' constructions of Whiteness and Blackness. Illusions enacts the critical work forwarded by cultural critic Cornel West. West affirms that Black diasporic women's experience demands that we begin to "examine and explain the historically specific ways in which 'whiteness' is a politically constructed parasitic of 'Blackness' " (213). Julie Dash's reconfiguration of the Hollywood construct of "passing" calls attention to the phenomena that Toni Morrison calls "American Africanism" (6), or the construction of American whiteness that depends on the denarration of the presence of African-Americans. Morrison describes the process of American Africanism in her study of American literature, Playing in the Dark. According to Morrison, it is important to study the signs of American Africanism , the "significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, [and] the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence" (6). Julie Dash's Illusions calls attention to a strikingly familiar American Africanist presence in Hollywood cinema. Passing is interrogated in Illusions from the inside of the subjective experience ofa Black actress and a Black woman director. For the first time, passing is presented from an African-American perspective rather than an American Africanist perspective. Passing, according to Mary Ann Doane, "raises hermeneutical problems...