Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations by Toni Cade Bambara

Author:Toni Cade Bambara [Bambara, Toni Cade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cultural, Essays, Feminism, Fiction, Literary, Non-Fiction, Short Stories
ISBN: 0679774076
Google: q0zDaUYgJloC
Amazon: B002MHOCYO
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2009-08-21T23:00:00+00:00

Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust is a historical marker. It’s suggestive of what will hallmark the next stage of development—a more pronounced diasporic and Afrafemcentric orientation. Another marker occurred in the period when DD was in the first stage of production—the September 1989 gathering of independents of the Native American, Latina/o-American, African-American, Asian-American, Pacific Islander-American, Middle Eastern-American, and European-American communities. “Show the Right Thing: A National Multicultural Conference on Film and Video Exhibition” was convened by a committee, predominantly women of color, for and about people of color in the independent sphere. Held at New York University, current base of filmmaker Chris Choy, the two-day series of panels on theoretical and practical concerns were presented by people of color practitioners, critics, and programmers from the U.S. the U.K., Canada, and Mexico. In addition to panels and caucuses, hundreds of tapes of film and video were available for screening. The short subject has advanced greatly since the days of the “chasers,” when theater managers used them to clear the house after the vaudeville show. Interactions among the all-American assembly at “Show” made clear that the conference title was a double injunction: internally, for responsible practice; externally, for a democratized media.

The “Show” conference, the first gathering of its size on record, was in contradistinction of state policy from the days of Cortez through the days of COINTELPRO to current-day cultural brokers manufacturing hype for the upcoming Quincentenary—keep these people separate and under White tutelage. Coming so soon on the heels of the Flaherty Seminar held in upstate New York that August—a predictably mad proceeding in which colonialist anthroethno types collided with “subject people” who’ve already reclaimed their image, history, and culture for culturally specific documentaries, animations, features, experimental videos, and critical theory (the program of lectures and screenings of works primarily drawn from the African diaspora was curated by Pearl Bowser; an unprecedented commandeering of the guest curator’s program time was used to screen post-glasnost works from Eastern Europe, and the highlight of the usurping agenda was a screening of the spare-no-expense-to-restore Flaherty/Korda colonist work Elephant Boy)—“Show the Right Thing” was an opportunity for people of color and their supporters to recognize in each other the power to supplant “mainstream” with “multicultural” in the national consciousness, even as two dozen conglomerates escalate the purchase of the U.S. mind by buying up television stations, radio stations, newspapers, textbook companies, magazines, publishing houses, and film studios that control major production funding, distribution, exhibition, at home and abroad, particularly in neo-colonialist-controlled areas, and continue to exert a profound influence in universities where most filmmakers and critics are trained.

The next stage of development of new U.S. cinema will most certainly be characterized by an increased pluralistic, transcultural, and international sense and by an amplified and indelible presence of women.

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