Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film by Davies Jude; Smith Carol R.;

Author:Davies, Jude; Smith, Carol R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Tensioned and interlocking identities in Daughters of the Dust

Daughters of the Dust has been celebrated by many critics for its innovative constructions of race and space.55 While we have treated Glory as in some limited ways subverting the white-dominated film grammar of Hollywood, Julie Dash's film has been regarded as forging different modes of representation appropriate to histories of people of African descent in America, and of African American female identity in particular. Allied with this project Daughters of the Dust aspires to a more democratic kind of cinema which refuses to fetishise one or two central heroic protagonists. Dash's use of dual narration, multiple points of view, non-linear and layered unfolding, and cinematographer Arthur Jafa (AJ)’s utilisation of techniques such as wide depth of field, nonstandard lighting, and shifting film speed, have all been remarked upon as marking Daughters of the Dust out from Hollywood conventions. Since these have been ably described by Toni Cade Bambara, Ed Guerrero, and by Manthia Diawara in the piece discussed above, we will not be primarily concerned here with these innovations. Instead, we will concentrate on some related achievements of the film: its sustaining of multiple tensioned and antagonistic discourses of identity.

In an interview with bell hooks published in the book Daughters of the Dust, Dash stated that her priority in making the film was to address first black women, the black community second, white women third, ‘and everyone else after that’.56 These priorities have been maintained in the subsequent setting up of the Daughters of the Dust website which includes as well as material directly about the film and the Gullah people, hypertext linked material on black independent cinema, and a series of brief memorialisations of black women entitled ‘Daughters of the Diaspora’.57 Dash's hierarchy of audiences marks out the film as a product of civil rights feminism rather than feminist separatism or middle-class feminism. Black women are its primary audience, but they are seen as part of a heterogeneous viewing public. It is through these terms of reference that the film engages with multiple intertwined discourses of identity. Within an overall context of the historical Gullah people, and myths and narratives of African American history, we concentrate here on unpacking some connections between identity constructed according to geography, psychology, faith and gender.

Coincidentally, Daughters of the Dust is set in very close proximity to the southern action of Glory, around forty years later. By contrast, instead of functioning as battlefield, the South Carolina coast here has a crucial historical function. Daughters of the Dust concerns itself with the Gullah or Geechee people of the sea islands of the South, whose geographical isolation has ensured that the population has developed a distinct culture and dialect, such that customs and speech-patterns connect contemporary Gullah to West African culture. The film follows a Gullah family on the eve of their migration north at around the turn of the last century. This context sets up a series of family discussions, memorialisations, rituals and celebrations, and debates over identity, which are focused via a lengthy family picnic.

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