Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences In Film

Notes

Noles The epigraph to the book is from Charles Scruggs, Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 212. Introduction I. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), 167. 2. Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroadand Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 184. 3. M. M. Bakhtin, The Diawgic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1981),425. 4. Ibid., 247. 5. Robert Starn states that the chronotope is "even more appropriate to film than literature, for whereas literature plays itself out within a virtual, lexical space, the cinematic chronotope is quite literal, splayed out concretely across a screen with specific dimensions and unfolding in literal time ... quite apart from the fictive time/space specific films rpight construct." Robert Starn, Su/rversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), II. 6. Ibid. 7. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 253, author's emphasis. 8. Wahneema Lubiano offers a challenging deconstruction of Spike Lee's intermittent insistence on authenticity in "But Compared to What?: Reading Realism , Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse," in Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video, ed. Valerie Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 97-122. While not Bakhtinian in methodology, Lubiano's discussion points to the problematics of Lee's assertion of truth claims, what Kobena Mercer has referred to in another context as a "reality effect," in his cinematic and media discourses. See Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, "Race, Sexual Politics, and Black Masculinity: A Dossier," in Male Order: Unrapping Masculinity, ed. Rowena Chapman andJonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 104. 227 Copyrighted Material 228 Notes to Introduction 9. According to Bakhtin, "We must never confuse-as has been done up to now and as is still often done-the represented world with the world outside the text (naive realism); nor must we confuse the author-creator of a world with the author as a human being (naive biographism); nor confuse the listener or reader of multiple and varied periods, recreating and renewing the text, with the passive listener or reader of one's own time (which leads to dogmatism in interpretation and evaluation)." Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 253. 10. Ella Shohat and Robert Starn, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), 180. 11. Ibid., 80. 12. Starn, Subversive Pleasures, 11. 13. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 252. 14. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation ofa Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 416-17. 15. James Dejongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15. Chapter 1 1. Rudolph Fisher, "City of Refuge," in The New Negro: Voices ofthe Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1992),57-58. 2. "According to the census of 1910, blacks were overwhelmingly rural and Southern; approximately three out of four lived in rural areas and nine out of ten lived in the South. A half century later Negroes were mainly an urban population, almost three fourths ofthem being city dwellers. About half lived outside of the old slave states." August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto, 3rd ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976),232. 3. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the I920s (New York: Noonday, 1995),73. 4. Charles S.Johnson, "The New Frontage on American Life," in The New Negro : Voices ofthe Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 279. 5. Sidney H. Bremer, Urban Intersectiom: Meetings of Life and Literature in United States Cities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 132. 6. James Dejongh, Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990),6. 7. Shirley Ann Moore, "Getting There, Being There: Mrican-American Migration to Richmond, California, 1910-1945," in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimemions ofRace, Class, and Gender, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 117. 8. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998),81-82. 9. Fisher, "City of Refuge," 59. 10. Ibid., 74. 11. Ibid., 61. Copyrighted Material Notes to Chapter 1 229 12. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1981), 225. 13. After Carmen Jones, Hollywood adopted...