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Reviewed by:
  • With a Crooked Stick: The Films of Oscar Micheaux
  • David C. Wall
J. Ronald Green, With a Crooked Stick: The Films of Oscar Micheaux. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004.

With a Crooked Stick: The Films of Oscar Micheaux is very much the companion volume to J. Ronald Green’s earlier publication, Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux (2000). Where Straight Lick works as a comprehensive thematic and biographical overview of Micheaux’s life and career, this current work takes much of the first book’s methodology and applies it in an extraordinarily detailed—indeed, exhaustive—assessment of every one of Micheaux’s extant films. Whereas the first book situates Micheaux’s whole output within the broader social contexts of their production, With a Crooked Stick undertakes a sort of microanalysis, engaging only those movies still in existence (and in chronological sequence of their production) through a variety of lenses such as (and amongst much else) plot, racial uplift, class identity, macro- and microediting, narrative sequencing, and mise-en-scène.

The most significant of these critical frameworks, for Green, is that of class. Arguing that the “gambit of racism was of a secondary order in the larger game of class,”1 Green asserts that all of Micheaux’s leading characters were both representatives, and arbiters, of a middle-class sensibility that demonstrated racism to be “a politically prodigious, but philosophically secondary and ultimately manageable, hindrance to the underlying desire for class advancement.”2 This emphasis on class over race is an interesting one (and, again, carried over from Straight Lick) but it seems somewhat undertheorized. Indeed, when he suggests, for instance, that the “middle class … was and is … the vast repository of most citizens in the developed world,”3 Green implies a “common-sense” rendering of class without considering what “class” means, what “the developed world” means, or the criteria by which such assessments could be made. Is he, for instance, thinking of class purely in terms of material conditions in a vulgar Marxist sense or as a broader interlocking of economic and cultural capital in the way that Bourdieu might define it? I suspect the latter, but it needs to be teased out more clearly for concepts of class, of course, differ remarkably according to region, nation, and history. Class as an historical determinant in Europe is structured very differently in the United States, as is the way in which the media determine and articulate class identity, though both make up part of that “developed world” that Green suggests self-identifies in this way. In order to support his broader point—that class is more significant to Micheaux than race—the issue needs to be situated more firmly by way of acknowledging its mutability [End Page 189] and dependence on context, time, and the shifting and contingent factors of social history. There’s certainly a case to be made that within much of Micheaux’s work “classism is a larger paradigm than racism,”4 but is it—or could it ever—always be the case?

Green is on much firmer ground when refuting those accusations that Micheaux’s work, in promoting class mobility rather than class conflict, is inclined to “minimize racism” therefore appearing “politically unprogressive.”5 As he ably demonstrates, Micheaux’s lack of radical or revolutionary left politics in no way undercuts his searing indictments of racism, segregation, prejudice, or intolerance. Similarly, his investment in bourgeois notions of entrepreneurship signals a commitment to economic independence and self-determination as a way of defeating the racist imperative. It is impossible to watch not only, for instance, Within Our Gates (1920) but also later films such as Swing (1938) without being acutely aware of Micheaux’s critique of ideologies of race. That the ending to Swing, for example, is, as Green puts it, “open to several meanings, some of them contradictory”6 serves not to undercut Micheaux’s engagement with the forces of racism, but rather to emphasize both the multivalence of the visual text and to acknowledge Micheaux’s awareness of the constant presence of racism, even within those whites apparently sympathetic to the cause. Similarly, while Micheaux’s belief in an economically determined...

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