DARKENING MIRRORS

IMPERIAL REPRESENTATION IN DEPRESSION-ERA AFRICAN AMERICAN PERFORMANCEBy Stephanie Leigh Batiste

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4898-6

Contents

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………………………………..IXPROLOGUE…………………………………………………………………………………………………………XIACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………………………………………………..XIXINTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………………..11 “HARLEM RIDES THE RANGE” Expansion, Modernity, and Negro Success……………………………………………………..272 EPAULETS AND LEAF SKIRTS, WARRIORS AND SUBVERSIVES Exoticism in the Performance of the Haitian Revolution…………………703 PRISMS OF IMPERIAL GAZE Swinging the Negro Mikado…………………………………………………………………..1154 LENS/BODY Anthropology’s Methodologies and Spaces of Reflection in Dunham’s Diaspora……………………………………1655 ETHNOGRAPHIC REFRACTION Exoticism and Diasporic Sisterhood in The Devil’s Daughter……………………………………..2016 NO STORM IN THE WEATHER Domestic Bliss and African American Performance……………………………………………….228EPILOGUE…………………………………………………………………………………………………………256NOTES……………………………………………………………………………………………………………261BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………………………..299INDEX……………………………………………………………………………………………………………317

Chapter One

“HARLEM RIDES THE RANGE” Expansion, Modernity, and Negro Success

Since the American West was white, black manipulation of western representation had to contend with absolute material exclusion and ideological racism. Meanings of modernity, masculinity, and expansion wrapped up in American idealization of the frontier and wilderness required reevaluation for blacks, as they signified both a structural and ideological complicity in imperial projects and also a complicated, culturally resistant representation of cultural desires for inclusion and equality. Given the radical exclusion of African Americans from mainstream society and its dreams of freedom and expansion, it seemed overly hopeful, if not radical, for blacks to participate in imaginative appropriations of open lands, a material process from which they had been excluded in American history except, for the most part, as bound labor. Blacks’ recuperation of an imagined American West in richly visual and narrative ways intervenes in this history of exclusion, participating in nationalist discourses in complicated ways.

Stories that imagine the West tell about American national identity and imperial desire in a relatively bare way, lauding American expansion through impressive shots of wild woods, vast plains, and broad deserts. These illustrations of national abundance justify for the viewer a nostalgic participation in the military conquest and genocidal “glory” inherent in the expansion of U.S. borders and the settlement of the wilderness. The images and narratives celebrate stoic toil and determination, as if the “empty” land itself yearns for human discipline. Imaginative and physical appropriations of the West, open space, and nature stand in as signifiers of cultural and material power. In dominant iconography of the West, the landscape invited the inscription of new lives and desires. A harsh environment served as a reflection of the internal mettle of the men who tamed it, rugged, strong, reliable, and enduring. Everything western opposed eastern industrialized culture, with its teeming crowds, overcivility, alienated labor, and mixed multitudes of immigrants and Negroes. The West was pure and regenerative. Imaginations of the West rebelled against industrialization, thus rejecting the city, yet also mourned the loss of a dying frontier, symbolized in the death and disappearance of native people who were both noble savages and dangerous enemies. The West was quintessentially American, xenophobically so, representing the solidity of white nationhood. The solidification of national identity in western films occurred with the redundant triumph of acquiring land and autonomy in what was already nationally claimed space. Repeating conquest and domestication in film enacted a commemorative celebration of national expansion. Notions of the frontier have continued to serve as fertile ground for the imagination of American identities in cultural production.

In films produced in the 1930s African Americans imagine a fruitful, tamed, accessible West. Like other Americans imagining the frontier, African Americans sought opportunity, self-definition, and a sense of spatial, economic, and national power. Through a performative consent to the idea of expansion, African Americans expressed concerns about the constitution of nation and community and also posited the fact and the terms of their own inclusion. Through participation in the imperial structures of imagining the West, African Americans readily avowed the acquisition of property and capital as part of a national project, albeit their own, as opposed to a reflection of the natural order. In this way the films unabashedly manifest the economic stakes and cultural consequences of imperialism and its imaginings.

In this chapter I look at three very different African American films produced over a ten-year period during the Depression era: a travel film, a drama, and a western. They demonstrate an ongoing and diverse African American engagement with this major symbolic discourse of American identity. African Americans’ assertions and representations of westward motion show a clear identification with a peculiarly American romanticizing of open space, untamed nature, rugged manhood, and individual wealth. Enacting a particular change on these concepts, these representations idealize natural space and the West to establish a sense of black community—rather than individualism—characterized by sophistication, technological modernity, and constant cultural trade with black urban life. African American representations of western domestication are distinctive in their maintenance of a constant balance between “closed” urban spaces and “open” westerly ones. Urban performance styles, bodies, technologies, and identities emphasize the constant exchange and geographical interconnectedness of black culture. These films visualize a geography of African American national belonging that reorients black life in the United States from trajectories of south-to-north and rural-to-urban to a relationship between urban and west, forcing typical meanings of expansion to reverberate in the construction of black national identity.

The promotional film for an African American resort titled A Pictorial View of Idlewild, Michigan (1927) uses the impulse to travel to promote black cultural normativity and fluency in national symbols and values. Images of the West in Oscar Micheaux’s first talkie, The Exile, dramatize the American dream of landownership and upward mobility while also positing racial equality as part of an ideal community. The musical western Two-Gun Man from Harlem, one of four formulaic westerns produced in the late 1930s and starring the singer Herbert Jeffrey, performs these themes as well as a compulsive cross-germination between city and frontier communities. In the first film, A Pictorial View of Idlewild, Michigan, the visual inducement to travel positions the Midwest, the original western frontier, as open space outside of the city that is available for domestication and discovery. In all the films the experience of seeing becomes part of the journey of transformation for the viewer as much as the journey west transforms the characters. All of the films imagine great prosperity in a time of national deprivation. The films discussed in this chapter are not all westerns with the familiar plot structure of “good versus evil” and the character of the gun-toting savior. They all, however, enact visual and spatial movement away from the city, toward nature, imagining settlement in an idealized nonurban natural space. In these ways, the production of black images of westward motion and settlement portray an already existing nationalistic expansive spirit as well as a proactive desire to become fully part of the nation.

Instead of rejecting the city and demonizing technology as the tool of amorality in the manner of mainstream representations, black films of the 1930s appropriate the city as important to a black western cultural landscape. The relationship between nature and technology is one of the core oppositions of American modernism. Elements of the city and urban life infiltrate and characterize blacks in nature and on the frontier, displaying modernist concerns and laying claim to the sophistication and cultural excitement of the urban- centered Harlem Renaissance. Through their constant invocation of the city, the films affirm and capitalize on the existence of a defining community necessary for the maintenance of a black identity. For the most part, the ideal community in spaces west excludes whites, creating all- black environments peopled by all-black casts. The idea of open space alone becomes insufficient to define and sustain a sense of community or a sense of an ideal future for blacks in the West. Far from spelling out a location or geographical area, “west” was an ephemeral concept for African Americans that included objectives and notions of freedom more than actual places. The West, then, produces a black identity that is indeed expansionist, escapist, and idealistic, but also communal, rooted, and aggressively self-justifying. The films’ imaginative establishment of a black presence in the West asserts an Americanist black national identity on the big screen through discourses of class, urban life, technology, modernism, racial identity, upward mobility, gentility, romance, and gender.

A Pictorial View of Idlewild, Michigan: Modernity, Community, and Middle-Class Civility

In the first moving image of the black-and-white, silent promotional film, A Pictorial View of Idlewild, Michigan, produced by the Chicago Daily News in 1927, a steam engine rolls into an immaculate station, introducing a clean town with broad, even roads and sturdy buildings. These first images celebrating sleek technologies of motion signal a concern for modernity even as the train then transports the viewer away from the city, away from the station town, to an idyllic nature resort, “Idlewild in its rustic infancy.” Not simply a descriptive ad, the visual inducement to travel to open space becomes an expression of modernity through the juxtaposition of civilization, middle- class civility, and technology against nature as a demonstration of national citizenship.

In Pictorial View the Midwest figures as a conquerable frontier. The wilderness becomes livable, its natural resources enhanced through their constructive exploitation for leisure by African Americans. Pictorial View opens with an extended epigraph that introduces the viewer to Idlewild and serves as a prologue for what follows:

A Pictorial View of Idlewild Summer Resort, Michigan showing its beautiful scenic location in the midst of towering pines and stately oaks; fragrant wildflowers and abundant foliage; pearly lakes and winding river; blue skies and golden sunset.

Idlewild is the National Recreation Center of the best class of colored American people and is destined to be one of the cultural seats of its activity.

Its easy accessibility by means of the many broad hard roads leading to it has brought Idlewild within easy reach of every large city and as a consequence, thousands of people visit there yearly.

Pretty summer cottages and expensive mansions are dotted here and there in an irregular picturesque manner.

Idlewild is rightly named “The Beautiful.”

This introduction tantalizes the viewer into spending one day in this spectacular resort, a day ending with a singular “golden sunset.” Certain key terms identify major cultural concerns of the film: Idlewild’s “national” importance, its visitors as the “best class of colored American people,” “broad, hard roads,” “irregular picturesque” beauty, and accessibility from every major urban center. As a space of escape, respite, and renewal, the community offered here is all-black, technologically advanced, and primarily middle class. As an example of Negro accomplishment, Idlewild is a lakefront oasis of health, leisure, convenience, social organization, and hierarchy. The film advertises more than a lovely place for vacationers to visit; it presents an imagined community that serves as a promotion of black advancement and contribution to American society in general. Imbuing the black community with civilized urban origins and with the characteristics of individualist American character, black Americans reimagined black national identity in the performance of western belonging and fluency in modernist concerns.

A brief postscript and extraordinary closing image indicate the film’s capacity as a justifying narrative for black national citizenship: “The American Colored Citizen has worked and sacrifices to the end that his people may possess a proper measure of life’s comforts and enjoyment—Idlewild represents the greatest achievement in this direction that has yet been accomplished and more than justifies Abraham Lincoln’s famous proclamation.” A portrait of Lincoln fades up and lingers as the film’s final image.

The film becomes a message to blacks, boasting of black accomplishments and the availability of leisure, as well as a message to the world. Pictorial View proclaims racial pride as if to assert that black people deserve the kind of pleasure Idlewild offers. The great accomplishment of “American Colored Citizens” is the attainment of middle- class standing and a concomitant civilized outlet for leisure. The name of the resort combines two stereotypes often applied to Negroes, “idle” and “wild.” It operates both symbolically and ironically, literally communicating the experiential duality offered by the resort. It names a place where vacationers can relax and play, be “idle” and “wild” without the stigma of lacking civility. The closing montage argues for African American inclusion in the body politic. The caption capitalizes “The American Colored Citizen” and names a racialized national citizen as the subject of the film in place of the resort. Holding up work and sacrifice as means of uplift and achievement, African Americans insist upon a strong work ethic and middle- class aspirations. The community offers these qualities as a justification, proof of the rightness of the “famous proclamation” issued by Lincoln in the previous century, freeing enslaved black Americans. The film invokes not only black accomplishment, but also the iconic authority of the martyred president, a symbol of black freedom and enfranchisement as a proclamation of belonging. Pictorial View makes the development of Idlewild, a symbol of modernity, labor, “comfort and enjoyment,” a “justification” for citizenship and national inclusion established by the Emancipation Proclamation.

The display of taming a vibrant and burgeoning nature accompanies a demonstration of the discipline of the individual and collective body as a further justification of national worth and belonging. The dialectical relationship between technology and nature bespeaks the very essence of modernity’s discontents and inherent contradictions. In Pictorial View technological advances promote accessibility and achieve the regulation of the wilderness needed for settlement and civilization. Early on, the film inventories various modes of transportation to emphasize accessibility for Idlewild’s “thousands of visitors” from “every large city.” Positioning the viewer as a virtual visitor and certainly as a potential tourist, the film begins not with the resort itself, but with three shots of a train speeding down the tracks toward, past, and away from the viewer, through forests and over a scenic lake. A caption announcing “Some come by train” is followed by views of the Pacific Railroad line heading steadily toward busy “Baldwin Railroad Station and Gateway to Idlewild.” The film figuratively shuttles the visitor through space and time into the world of the film and vacation space of Idlewild, Michigan. Images of transportation technology emphasize the role of film technology in providing a mental vacation. The film is the speeding train. The camera invites, inventories, and transports. Once transported, well-dressed women and children vacationers detrain and walk toward the camera. Fancy new black Fords drive along hard, dry roads to the resort’s entrance. The modern roads and cars become part of the resort’s appeal: “The wonderful roads encourage many to come by auto.” The camerawork throughout is comprehensive and lingering, taking multiple shots of the same person or object for emphasis. A caravan of three cars appears in multiple, repetitive views: entering and leaving town, traversing long roads that set them against a wild country environment, and stopped at Idlewild’s fairly elaborate gate of stone and brick pillars. Mental and physical travel becomes quick, exciting, and possible. The obsession with technological modernity resonates in the film’s concern with controlled space, physical discipline, social organization, and environmental order.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from DARKENING MIRRORSby Stephanie Leigh Batiste Copyright © 2011 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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