Black to Ireland: Circum-Atlantic Double Exposure and Racialized Jump Cuts in The Emperor Jones

The Emperor Jones (1933) was a film aimed at critiquing empire while also evoking the black diaspora. Yet the film was created by a team of Irish-American artists (playwright Eugene O'Neill, director Dudley Murphy, and actor Dudley Digges). Their work on The Emperor Jones came from a commitment to the idea that the colonization of Ireland was of a piece with the results of anti-black racism, colonialism and imperialism (although not similar), and as a way of negotiating their own contested relationship with legitimating structures in white, US culture. The film's racial politics, which have been debated since its premiere, repeatedly interlink a range of global and circum-Atlantic legacies of white imperialism. The Emperor Jones abounds with contradictions: it both shattered racial constraints in American film while also articulating racial anxieties. We can see this manifested in two ways. First, the film's anti-imperialist, antiracist ambitions are visible in the director's attempt to overlay different cartographies, memories, and experiences of racial violation with a technique that I call "circum-Atlantic double exposure." The second characteristic, which I call the "racialized jump cut," is the mark of state censors and local projectionists who spliced out potentially inflammatory material from the film. Central to my argument is that double-exposure works together with racialized jump cuts in The Emperor Jones: the cut points to the doubling; the dissolve highlights the (w)hole. These two strikingly divergent and paradoxical features of the film—the director's accretions and the state's depletions—expose the problematics of representing imperial violence.