Race and Ethnicity

Race and ethnicity are social constructions—"scripts" for human actions and experiences—that have serious consequences. Though there is no scientific basis for racial distinctions, the discredited idea of "biological determinism," or a hierarchical taxonomy based on physical differentiation continues to influence discourses about human classification and racial characteristics. Categories of race and ethnicity have been fluid over time and across groups, so that in some cases a person's ethnic or racial affiliation can change based on location, historical moment, personal presentation, or situational context. Nevertheless, and importantly, racial characteristics are considered legally and biologically immutable from birth.

The concept of ethnicity is especially ambiguous, referring to a group that may or may not share ancestry but that has a sense of common identity based on nationality, religious affiliation, race, or culture—there is no precise agreement on what characteristics constitute ethnicity. Werner Sollors, tracing the etymology of the Greek word ethnikos (meaning "heathen" or "others"), describes "the conflict between contractual and hereditary, self-made and ancestral definitions of American identity—between consent and descent in American culture" (Beyond Ethnicity, pp. 5–6). Debates about the nature and effects of race and ethnicity continue to map the terrain of self-invention versus social compulsion, cultural performance versus heritable physical traits.

Unlike ethnicity, race is almost never a matter of individual choice, and because the idea of race emerged in the context of colonization and systems of oppression, race cannot be separated from racism. Yet like ethnicity, race is an unstable social category. For example, in the United States the definition of African American racial identity that emerged historically from the Jim Crow South depended upon a "one-drop" rule—any African American ancestor, or any fraction of "black blood," made one black. This method classifies as many people as possible as black, thus ensuring the continuation of a system of labor exploitation. On the other hand, Native American identity has been determined through a system of minimum "blood quantum," so that a person must have a certain percentage of documented tribal ancestry to be considered Native American. Through intermarriage with other tribes and other ethnic groups, fewer and fewer people can claim Native American identity and qualify for special rights to lands and services guaranteed by treaty. Unlike any other group in the United States, many Native American people carry government-issued "Certificates of Degree of Indian Blood," often called CDIB cards, or "white cards," which are required for certain scholarships, art markets and fairs, and other programs.

In other parts of the world, race and ethnicity are imagined quite differently. Though the focus here is primarily on representations in American cinema, the national cinemas and "oppositional" cinemas of countries such as Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom—to name a few of many possible examples—present viewers with equally complex and specific racial and ethnic discourses. Cinemas that cross or do not cross national boundaries also highlight the intersections of race and ethnicity with national identities. Due to the power of American distribution systems, Hollywood exported the Indiana Jones films in the 1980s, a series that privileges a white explorer hero over exoticized Arab characters, while Arab American and other spectators in the United States rarely saw commercial releases of films by Arab filmmakers such as the Egyptian director Youssef Chahine. Other filmmakers trace the transnational movements of peoples in diaspora in films such as Gregory Nava's drama El Norte (1983), Deanne Borshay's autobiographical documentary First Person Plural (2000), and Ousmane Sembene's La Noire de … (Black Girl, 1966), drawing attention to the shifting experiences of race and ethnicity in global contexts.

EUROCENTRISM AND EARLY FILM

The visual medium of film produces and reproduces the complex tension between individual agency and social categories—between looking at oneself and being looked at by others. The development of visual technologies such as photography and cinema have intersected powerfully with the social construction of race as both a scientific discourse and a form of cultural fantasy and social control. Studies of human motion by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and Félix-Louis Regnault, using chronophotography (a proto-cinematic technology of rapid photography), contributed to established pseudosciences of racial characteristics, such as craniology, while emphasizing the visual spectacle of racialized bodies as a form of scientific evidence. In this and other ways—including elaborate discourses of "miscegenation" on screen, discussed below—the new medium of film taught viewers to translate the scientific and legal discourses of race into a system of visible codes and stereotypes, a phenomenon that impacted social relations more broadly.

Representations of racial "primitivism" in the earliest nonfiction films also extended to dramatic genres as filmmakers turned to narratives in melodramatic and fantastic modes. Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902) centers on an encounter between scientists and exotic primitives (the "selenites") on the moon, whose costumes, shields, and spears are meant to resemble an African display. The trope of the encounter between a European explorer and awed—or hostile—"natives" continues to have a powerful presence in films such as Black Robe (1991), The Mission (1986), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991), and in the many cinematic depictions of Columbus and even the confrontation between the rebel heroes and the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi (1983). Merian C. Cooper famously translated the narrative of the explorer encountering primitive peoples in an exotic land—a subject that had introduced him to filmmaking in the first place, with Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925), made with Ernest B. Schoedsack and Marguerite Harrison—in the spectacular drama of King Kong (1933).

In the nascent field of anthropology and documentary cinema, films such as Edward S. Curtis's (1898–1970) In the Land of the Headhunters (1914) and Robert J. Flaherty's (1884–1951) Nanook of the North (1922) actively suppressed signs of contemporary Native American modernity—such as rifles, wristwatches, blue jeans, and signs of written language—in order to present images of precontact, ahistorical indigenous primitives. In Nanook of the North, for example, Nanook (the Inuit actor Allakariallak) is amazed by a trader's gramophone and actually bites the record three times—a gesture that reinforces the pretense that the Inuit were antimodern, both childlike and bestial. The fact that Allakariallak is not listed in the credits as an actor, but rather conflated with the character "Nanook" that he and Flaherty created, presents the image of Nanook's inability to understand Western technology as a document of Inuit life rather than an artistic representation. In fact, as has been documented in the film Nanook Revisited (Clause Massot, 1990), the Inuit cast and film crew were so adept at manipulating Flaherty's machinery that they could take apart and fix his camera in the field. Nearly eighty years after Nanook of the North was released, the Inuit company Isuma Productions released Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner, 2001) to international acclaim. The film, while emphasizing precontact Inuit life, explodes the illusion of the "Eskimo primitive" through its production footage during the credits, which presents the Inuit in Western clothes wielding the tools of film production and controlling the creation of their own images.

The pervasive trope of colonial encounter, with its European focal characters and masses of silenced "others" who signify the unknown, reveals an underlying Eurocentrism in cinema. Eurocentrism is an ideology that privileges European and Euro-American history and culture as the central, dominant, and superior measure of human accomplishment. Films that draw on the mystique of travel, colonial encounters, and the spectacle of cultural difference as primitivism convey powerful racializing tropes that bring the cinematic construction of race in the social sciences to the popular imagination through dramatic narratives and cinematic spectacle.

THE PRODUCTION CODE AND
"MISCEGENATION"

The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPA) Production Code of 1930 (enforced after 1934) dealt explicitly with interracial romance, stating that "miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden." This wording was taken from the pre-Code industry restrictions of 1927, called "The Don'ts and Be Carefuls," but the cultural fascination with—and social prohibition of—interracial romance begins with the hierarchical relations established by European colonizers. Film theorist Ella Shohat argues that even when films do not appear to address race or ethnicity in their content, the constitutive role of race in American society means that issues of racial and ethnic hierarchy are always present. She calls for analyses of "ethnicities-in-relation" rather than isolated minority and mainstream histories (p. 220).

The word "miscegenation" (from the Latin miscere, "to mix," and genus, meaning "race" or "type") first appeared in a pamphlet in 1863, authored by the conservative Democratic reporters George Wakeman and David Goodman Croly as part of an attempt to polarize voters around the issue in the 1864 presidential election. After the turn of the twentieth century, when many of the rights secured for African Americans in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution had been dismantled through Jim Crow laws, outspoken proponents of white supremacy produced intellectual arguments for eugenic control of racial mixing, as in Madison Grant's book, The Passing of the Great Race (1916). At the same time, a competing discourse of cultural relativism emerged in the writing of anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), asserting the primacy of cultural training and linguistic models rather than biological "race" in determining human differences.

The prominence of miscegenation themes in film history reveals not only anxieties about racial mixture but also the profoundly gendered nature of cultural and racial representations onscreen. Prohibited interracial sexual contact underlies the visual joke in an early narrative film, Edwin S. Porter's What Happened in the Tunnel (1903), in which a white man flirts with a white woman on a train, but when he tries to kiss her as the train goes through a tunnel, the woman changes seats with her African American maid, who receives the kiss. This early film models a different kind of "encounter" narrative from the colonial scenario imagined by Mélièsin ATripto the Moon, but its construction of hierarchical, sexualized relations between whites and "others" was similarly foundational and indicative of future narratives, ranging from the horror of interracial mixture in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) to the titillating films of Dorothy Dandridge in the 1950s. Films such as Pinky (1949), Imitation of Life (1934, 1959), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) challenged the Production Code's strictures with their representations of interracial dating and light-skinned African American women "passing" for white. Shortly after the Code was replaced by the Classification and Rating System Administration in 1968, the loosening of both racial and sexual prohibitions led to an explosion of independent African American filmmaking.

While the Production Code and its enforcement through the Hays Office effectively kept representations of "miscegenation" off of Hollywood screens, little objection was raised to the (usually doomed) interracial romances between white and Indian characters in films such as The Last of the Mohicans (1936) and Broken Arrow (1950). The cycle of "pro-Indian" westerns in the 1950s used sympathetic Indian characters to signify other minorities, especially African Americans during the Civil Rights movement and Jews in the wake of radical anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, while at the same time commenting politically upon Native American assimilation and changes in the way the US government handled Indian policy. Non-Native writers, actors, and directors have consistently appropriated images of Indians for the purposes of both nationalist and counterculture messages. That Indian characters onscreen appear to function as metaphors for other ethnic groups is unsurprising, given the variety of non-Native actors who have "played Indian" (in redface), including Italian American actors (Sylvester Stallone), African American actors (Noble Johnson), Jewish actors (Jeff Chandler), and Asian actors (Sessue Hayakawa), yet this practice also suggests the centrality of Native American representations to Hollywood's construction of America on film. John Ford's now-classic western, The Searchers (1956), wavers between condemning and furthering the destructive racism of its main character, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne). Another character—the mixed-blood Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), adopted and raised by white settlers—becomes the focal character for viewers. The trope of rescue in which the men search for a niece captured by Comanches becomes an indictment of racism and destructive patriarchy as Ethan himself vacillates between rescuing Debbie (Natalie Wood) and killing her.

While the word "miscegenation" has roots in a specific US context, the Spanish word mestizaje refers more broadly to the cultural and racial mixing of indigenous, European, and African peoples in Latin America. It represents highly symbolic female figures of cultural syncretism, such as the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe and La Malinche, the indigenous concubine who is also a translator, have been depicted on film (as in Emilio Fernández's María Candelaria, 1944). Cinematic representations of cross-racial romance such as Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Nelson Pereira Dos Santos's Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, 1971), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974), Stephen Frear and Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), and Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala (1991) resist racial and sexual categorizations with visual and narrative dramas that at once blur and call attention to racial boundaries and social intolerance.

HOLLYWOOD WHITENESS AND STEREOTYPES

Many films that do not seem to address issues of race or ethnicity are in fact doing the work of defining and fortifying such categories. Richard Dyer has argued that "whiteness" is a category that seems invisible because it gives the impression of being nothing; the power and domination of images of whiteness on screen are in the appearance of pervasive normality. Scholars studying these representations ask what has to be suppressed and what has to be controlled in production in order to make such images seem effortless and natural. Dyer has argued that if "blackness" in Hollywood studio films represents physical expressiveness, emotion, sexuality, and proximity to nature, then "whiteness" signifies the opposite through controlled, cerebral, even deathlike images. Jezebel (1938), for example, was one of a series of plantation films from the 1930s—including Gone with the Wind (1939), Dixiana (1930), and Mississippi (1935)—that simultaneously masked and displayed the capitalist exploitation of African American labor through images of lavish plantations and dazzlingly wealthy white Southern families. In these films, the rigidity of whiteness is maintained through interracial relations—whites dominate but are dependent upon blacks, to the point that the actions of African American characters onscreen function to express the emotions of white characters, so as to preserve the restrained vision of whiteness.

Blackface minstrelsy—both the visual practice of "blacking up" and the musical work of sound and song—was one of the most important American popular culture forms of the nineteenth century. The term "Jim Crow" as a description of the segregation laws of the South originated with the name of a popular early-nineteenth-century blackface character performed by the white actor Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice (1808–1860). In the twentieth century, popular forms such as vaudeville and cinema drew heavily from this tradition of racial masquerade. In the midst of prohibitions regulating the representation of miscegenation on screen and the segregated viewing spaces and practices in the South and elsewhere, the extraordinary

JAMES YOUNG DEER
PRINCESS RED WING (LILLIAN ST. CYR)
James Young Deer, b. Dakota City, Nebraska, date unknown, d. April 1946
Lillian St. Cyr, b. Winnebago Reservation, Nebraska, 13 February 1873, d. 13 March 1974

This husband-and-wife team, both of the Nebraska Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) tribe, became an influential force in the production of silent one-reel westerns between 1908 and 1913. Though their American film careers were short-lived, they intervened in the industry at a particularly crucial moment in the formation of a genre that would dominate Hollywood production for decades.

Princess Red Wing (the stage name for Lillian St. Cyr) was a graduate of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and a professional actress. A recognizable presence in cinema, she starred in the first feature-length film—Cecil B. DeMille's western, The Squaw Man (1914)—and over thirty-five other films between 1909 and 1921, including Donald Crisp's Ramona (1916) and an early Tom Mix picture, In the Days of the Thundering Herd (1914). When James Young Deer took over the West Coast studio operations for the French-owned film company Pathé Frères, he was already a veteran entertainer. He had performed with the Barnum and Bailey circus and the Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch Wild West Show and had acted, directed, and written scenarios for several film companies including Kalem, Lubin, Vitagraph, and Biograph. He also worked at one of the first independent film companies, the New York Motion Picture Company, under the Bison trademark.

With trade journals calling for more authenticity in westerns and Native American and other moviegoers protesting the inaccuracies and negative stereotypes of Indians onscreen and threatening industrywide censorship, Young Deer and St. Cyr were able to leverage their cultural identity and industry experience. From about 1909 to 1913 they used the early flexibility of the industry to exert unprecedented control over popular images of Indians. Both behind the camera and in front of it, Young Deer and St. Cyr rewrote the racial scripts of the western, commenting on racism, assimilation, racial mixture, and cultural contact. Many of their films revisited and revised the wildly popular "squaw man" plot involving a crossracial romance between an Indian woman and white man. Young Deer and Lillian St. Cyr systematically undermined the "vanishing Indian" trope by giving the plots a new political center of gravity. In films such as For the Papoose (1912) and White Fawn's Devotion (1910), mixed-race families answer to the tribe's justice systems and mixedblood children remain part of their Indian communities rather than being taken away to be raised in adoptive white families or in boarding schools.

As Young Deer and St. Cyr became more successful, the mass production of movies became more established, and the studios more wary of potentially objectionable subject matter, the couple's films became less distinctive. The details of Young Deer's later career are sketchy. After leaving California because of legal troubles in 1913, he worked in France and elsewhere, but little is known about his film work in Europe. Lillian St. Cyr continued to draw on her theatrical experience in vaudeville, was a college lecturer, and served as an activist in Indian affairs.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Falling Arrow (1909), Red Wing's Gratitude (1909), The Mended Lute (1909), White Fawn's Devotion: A Play Acted by a Tribe of Red Indians in America (1910), The Red Girl and the Child (1910), A Cheyenne Brave (1910), The Yaqui Girl (1910), Little Dove's Romance (1911), For the Papoose (1912), The Prospector and the Indian (1912), The Squaw Man's Sweetheart (1912), The Squaw Man (1914), In the Days of the Thundering Herd (1914), Ramona (1916)

FURTHER READING

Aleiss, Angela. Making the White Man's Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.

Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Hearne, Joanna. "'The Cross-Heart People': Race and Inheritance in the Silent Western." Journal of Popular Film and Television 30 (Winter 2003): 181–196.

Simmon, Scott. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre's First Half-Century. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Smith, Andrew Brodie. Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003.

Joanna Hearne

popularity of racial cross-dressing in the form of blackface minstrelsy became an engine that drove the film industry's transition to the sound era. Blackface has marked crucial moments in film history, from The Birth of a Nation to the first sound film and first musical, Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927). In The Birth of a Nation, the figure of Gus, a white actor in blackface, performs "black" desire for white women that, in the South, became the pretext for lynching. By contrast, in The Jazz Singer the drama of the transformation of the Jewish protagonist Jake Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) into Jack Robin through his performance of blackness suggests, as Michael Rogin has argued, that the assimilation and eliding of complex, multiple ethnicities into a consolidated American "white" identity happened through the process of racial caricature that maintained boundaries between black and white. Thus, according to Rogin, Jewish blackface performers modeled Americanization through the ritual of defining themselves as white by playing with blackface performance, redrawing the boundaries of social exclusion along racial rather than ethnic lines, and representing America as polarized by racial dichotomy rather than ethnic pluralism.

Blackface minstrelsy and its translation from stage to cinema at the turn of the twentieth century is only one example of the powerful deployment of stereotypes and their devastating effects. The word "stereotype" originally referred to methods of making identical copies in the printing industry; this idea of an endlessly replicated image of an "other" remains important to the work of stereotypes in shaping expectations. Stereotypes are not simply accidental departures from realism; rather, they function systematically as a form of broad social control, influencing collective perceptions and public memory as well as colonizing individual self-perceptions through internalized racism. Character-based stereotypes seem stable, but in fact they develop and change over time—not as an evolution or development towards more consistently positive representations but rather in response to specific historical situations. Whether stereotypes are "positive" or "negative," they present limited options for action.

Famous examples of stereotypes abound, and minority actors within the parameters of such roles have often given extraordinary performances. Hattie McDaniel (1895–1952) won an Oscar^® for her role as a loyal servant or "mammy" in Gone with the Wind (1939). Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (1878–1949) played a version of "Uncle Tom" opposite Shirley Temple in the 1930s (The Littlest Rebel, 1935; The Little Colonel, 1935; and Just Around the Corner, 1938) and Stepin Fetchit (1902–1985) became a Hollywood star playing "coon" characters, such as his "Jeff Poindexter" in Judge Priest (1934). Indian stereotypes given greater depth by Native American actors include noble savages and savage reactionaries (Eric Schweig as Uncas and Wes Studi as Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, 1992), Indian princesses (Irene Bedard voicing the animated Pocahontas in Disney's Pocahontas, 1995), and wise sages (Chief Dan George as Old Lodge Skins in Little Big Man, 1970). Noriyuki "Pat" Morita (1932–2005) played cryptic, wise, and servile Asian characters on television in Happy Days (1975–1976, 1982–1983) and in films such as The Karate Kid (1984), while images of decadent, seductive, dangerous Asian men and women have appeared in films such as The Cheat (1915), Shanghai Express (1932), and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) and more recently in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004). Certain directors, such as Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola, have become associated with films that explore ethnic identities and issues of assimilation and difference. Italian American and Irish American gangster figures have been humanized on screen in films such as The Godfather (1972) and On the Waterfront (1954), and drawing on the tradition of "social problem" genres, such films have effectively rendered experiences of immigration, although in some cases ethnicity is posited as part of the "problem" documented in the film.

Just as important as identifying stereotypes is thinking through the conditions of their production and reception. Within the restrictions of Hollywood genres and character stereotypes, minority performances can provide a venue resistance both onscreen and offscreen. Actors such as Sessue Hayakawa (1889–1973), Louise Beavers (1902–1962), Dolores del Rio (1905–1983), Princess Red Wing, Jay Silverheels, and many others, though they sometimes played stereotyped roles onscreen, were able to use their position within the industry in a variety of ways—including creating opportunities for other minority actors; providing offscreen role models of professional success for minority youth; advocating for legal and social change; and, within their performances themselves, offering subtle signs of agency and potential for self-representation beyond the scripted lines they were assigned to deliver.

This potential for subversive performance and for off-screen interventions is not possible with the conventions of racial masquerade in which minority presence is rendered only as a caricature. Blackface minstrelsy—and other forms of racial ventriloquism in casting—also excluded African American and other minority performers from the stage and screen, making the "presence" of stereotyped characters in films an indicator of absence. In the "redface" of the western, for example, the common practice of having white actors (such as Rock Hudson, Debra Paget, Charles Bronson, and many others) embody Indian characters contributes, at the level of performance, to the visual trope of the "vanishing Indian." These actors—whose "whiteness" is consolidated through their performance of a racialized Other—provide a point of identification for white viewers but not for people of color. Similarly, many films that explicitly address issues of cultural difference—such as Dances with Wolves (1990)—provide a white protagonist as a focal character whose point of view anchors and guides white viewers. Frequently, no such focal character is available for minority viewers in mainstream Hollywood films.

"Image studies," or the practice of examining stereotypes, is an important form of analysis but it has limitations. Film scholars Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have described the difficulty of comparing stereotypes to an external reality (which is impossible to define without resorting to essentialist notions of the typical) as well as the need to consider broader politics of film style; race-based casting; genre conventions other than realism (such as parody or other modes of address); historical, cultural, and production contexts; and other mediating issues. They suggest considering race and ethnicity as discourse-based, in the sense of competing voices in specific historical and cultural contexts. This "relational" model reveals the functions of race and ethnicity even in films that suppress the constitutive role of race in American culture. Further, it opens our analytic horizons beyond the singular, character-based stereotype, allowing us to study a range of issues related to hybridity and syncretism in film marketing, distribution, exhibition, and spectatorship.

RECEPTION, SPECTATORSHIP, AND OPPOSITIONAL CINEMAS

For more than a half century, segregated theaters pro-foundly affected the participation of African Americans in the film industry as both producers and viewers. The US Supreme Court ruled to allow state-legislated segregation in theaters in 1883, and the earliest nickelodeons inherited the practice of segregation by race from vaudeville theaters. Theaters enforced segregation by time (showing films for African American audiences late at night), by section, entrance (seating African American viewers in the balcony), and by neighborhood, with black-only theaters serving patrons in African American neighborhoods, especially in northern cities. As early as 1909, some theaters were already serving African American patrons only, but overall these viewers remained underserved—for example, there were about one hundred blackonly theaters nationally in that decade, compared to ten thousand theaters for whites. Black-only theaters were more run down than white theaters and usually showed

JULIE DASH
b. New York, New York, 22 October 1952

A major voice in independent filmmaking, Julie Dash was the first African American woman to direct a feature film with national theatrical release, namely Daughters of the Dust (1991). Her films—especially Illusions (1982) and Daughters of the Dust—have remained important texts in the study of American independent film. Her work consistently intervenes in and redirects Hollywood images of African American women, offering aesthetically complex and compelling characters and returning to specific historical moments to recover and revalue the nuances of black women's lives and professional contributions.

Dash's final project for her American Film Institute program, the thirty-four-minute, black-and-white film Illusions, tells the story of two African American women in the Hollywood film industry during World War II. Mignon Dupree (Lonette McKee) is a light-skinned African American studio executive, "passing" for white in the all-white production offices of a major studio; Esther Jeeter (Roseann Katon) is a talented black singer brought in to dub a song for a white screen star. Through its focus on sound, the film comments on the voices of black women that have been hidden, covered over, or gone unseen and unheard.

Dash's best-known film, Daughters of the Dust, isa lyrical, visually lush story of a turn-of-the-century Gullah family from the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast. Gullah is a Creole dialect and culture based on both West African grammatical patterns and Elizabethan English vocabulary. Dash herself is descended from a Gullah family on her father's side and spent time on the Sea Islands as a child. Based on ten years of meticulous research, her film evokes West African oral storytelling through two voiceover narrators—an elderly matriarch and a girl not yet born. Dash struggled enormously to acquire funding for the film, and by piecing together small grants and selling distribution rights, she raised $1 million to finance it. Her artistic control and commitment to Afrocentric storytelling extended to details of production—she cast the film using actors from other black independent films. The film won awards and made a profit, drawing an African American middle-class audience, especially women—a population of viewers often overlooked by Hollywood studios and distributors. This financial success surprised even its distributor, Kino International, which had marketed Daughters as "a foreign film made in America."

Despite the success of Daughters of the Dust, Dash continued to encounter difficulties in financing her projects. In the mid-1990s, she turned to television as a venue, directing programs for Black Entertainment Television and MTV. At Angela Bassett's request, she directed The Rosa Parks Story (2002), about the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s. The production benefited from Dash's habit of careful historical research as well as her interest in the human, emotional aspects of Park's story.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Diary of an African Nun (1977), Illusions (1982), Daughters of the Dust (1991), The Rosa Parks Story (TV, 2002)

FURTHER READING

Bambara, Toni Cade. "Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust and the Black Independent Cinema Movement." Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara, 118–144. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Brouwer, Joel. R. "Repositioning: Center and Margin in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust." African American Review 29:1 (1995): 5–16.

Dash, Julie. Daughters of the Dust. New York: Dutton, 1997.

——Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's Film. New York: New Press, 1992.

Mellencamp, Patricia. "Making History: Julie Dash." In Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World, edited by Diana Robin and Ira Jaffe, 99–126. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Joanna Hearne

final runs of films that had played months earlier in white theaters. When sound came to the movies in the late 1920s, black-only theaters did not always have the where-withal to upgrade their equipment, and some continued to play silent films for several more years. Largely excluded from Hollywood production, distribution, and exhibition, African American viewers saw fewer movies and often turned to other media, such as radio, and alternative venues for social recreation, such as churches and clubs.

Because of the lack of humanizing representations of African Americans onscreen and segregated viewing practices, there emerged in the late 1910s a separate film industry, much of it black-owned, that produced "race films" with all-black casts for African American communities. Through the 1940s, these film companies provided opportunities for African American actors to perform in roles beyond the "mammy" and "Tom" caricatures in Hollywood. The productions were often versions of mainstream genre films, such as the black-cast westerns of singing cowboy Herb Jeffries (b. 1911) (The Bronze Buckaroo, 1939). Though many of the producers and directors of race films were white, prominent African American directors such as Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) and Spencer Williams (1893–1969) established an independent alternative to the Hollywood studio systems and produced a significant oeuvre. (Micheaux directed thirty five films in addition to writing seven novels.) Their films explored issues such as class divisions within African American communities, mixed-race romance, and interracial relations, including narratives of assimilation and "passing." Williams's work included genre films as well as religious epics, and later in his career, a role as Andy Brown in the television show Amos 'n' Andy (1951–1953). His 1941 film, The Blood of Jesus, has been included in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. More rarely, the term "race films" is used to refer to Yiddish-language films, which, like films for African American audiences, were produced independently outside of the Hollywood studio system.

In 1953, seventy years after the 1883 decision to allow theaters to exclude or separate African American patrons, the Supreme Court reversed that trajectory and outlawed segregation in Washington, DC, theaters. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy, in the process of presenting civil rights legislation to Congress, pressured studio executives and theater-chain owners to desegregate in order to avoid violence and picketing from civil rights activists. But another kind of segregation was already in place, and accelerating. As more African Americans came to northern cities, other ethnic groups moved to the suburbs, emptying Italian, German, Polish, and Jewish neighborhoods and the theaters that had catered to these groups. By the early 1970s the downtown movie palaces that had once served white city dwellers were operating at a loss. Then the early examples of what would become the "blaxploitation" film movement drew urban, working-class African American audiences to these theaters, showing films such as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), and Shaft (1971). The opening sequence of Shaft comments tellingly on this situation: in a high angle shot, the camera pans across a series of downtown marquees, showing biker and other genre films, and after the last marquee, the title "SHAFT" appears, inserting itself into the line of titles. This announcement of a new black-oriented presence and mobility in the urban film lineup is followed by the protagonist's emergence from the "underground railroad" of the subway station at Broadway and 42nd Street. Thus both the film and its hero modeled for African American audiences a new presence in multiple social and racialized spaces in the studio industry and in the urban geography of New York. Shaft, which grossed $12 million at the box office, virtually saved the financially troubled MGM, and although white directors and studios produced many of the later blaxploitation films, the profitability of many early, independent blaxploitation films paved the way for the renaissance of independent minority productions of the 1980s (including those by directors such as Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, and Julie Dash).

bell hooks has used the term "oppositional gaze" to describe the way African American women engage cinematic images critically both as spectators and as filmmakers in their own right. Other minority groups have also developed oppositional film practices, working both within the established Hollywood industry and independently to produce films that both counter mainstream stereotypes and convey specific cultural forms and visual styles as part of an alternative aesthetic. These filmmakers face problematic issues of authenticity and hybridity as they work against the essentialist stereotypes perpetuated in the media while striving to maintain political solidarity based in common racial and cultural identity. Contemporary Chicano and Chicana filmmakers (Luis Valdez, Edward James Olmos, Lourdes Portillo), Asian American filmmakers (Wayne Wang, Ang Lee), and indigenous filmmakers (Chris Eyre, Victor Masayesva, Alanis Obomsawin) have spoken both as individual artists and as members of their communities in their films. These filmmakers revisit and revise colonialist history, integrating political and aesthetic strategies for the purposes of decolonization. In representing experiences of displacement, filmmakers must also navigate complex issues of race and nation in the wake of the political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Although space does not allow for a more detailed discussion of specific minority cinema traditions, Third World cinemas, television and radio media, and avant-garde and documentary traditions, representations of race and ethnicity remain central to the study of these areas as well.

SEE ALSO African American Cinema;Arab Cinema;Asian American Cinema;Colonialism and Postcolonialism;Diasporic Cinema;Exhibition;Ideology;National Cinema;Native Americans and Cinema;Spectatorship and Audiences

FURTHER READING

Bernardi, Daniel, ed. The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

——, ed. Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Courtney, Susan. Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Dyer, Richard. White. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Friedman, Lester D., ed. Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Gaines, Jane M. Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Gomery, Douglas. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Framework 36 (1989): 68–81.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.

Prats, Armando José. Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Joanna Hearne