Envisioned communities: African American life and the moving pictures, 1896--1927
Item
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Title
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Envisioned communities: African American life and the moving pictures, 1896--1927
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:5a30ad6e41e8:11604
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identifier
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12152
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Creator
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Caddoo, Cara,
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Contributor
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Stuart Ewen
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Black history | Film studies | African American studies | American history | black church | black institutional life | cinema | leisure | migration | visual culture
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Abstract
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This dissertation investigates the role of cinema in the modern black experience and the generative role that African Americans played in the creation of American modernity. Two questions animate this study. First, how did African Americans consolidate their institutions and social bonds amid the distending forces of turn-of-the-century migration? Second, how and why did cinema---as a location, medium, and set of practices---become so important to the collective articulation of black identity in the early twentieth century?;By mapping the patterns of turn-of-the-century migration with the development of black cinema practices from 1896 to 1927, this project traces black economic, social, and cultural practices across space and time. It begins in the post-Reconstruction period, when African Americans looked inward to fortifying the institutions that stood at the center of black life. Yet at the same time, hundreds of thousands of black migrants were departing the countryside for the urban South and West. At this curious juncture when black life was both turning inward and expanding outward, African Americans used film as a tool for collective racial progress. Black churches, halls, and schools hosted moving picture exhibitions, which brought the race together and raised money for the construction of buildings that conspicuously demonstrated black material progress.;Eventually black film exhibition moved into colored theaters, which became celebrated monuments of black life and public claims to urban space in the Jim Crow city. During this time, African Americans associated race and cinema primarily with tangible, physical locations. Yet when colored theaters started to compete with black religious institutions, middle class blacks were forced to reconsider the ideas of racial uplift, which championed both piety and black-owned businesses. After 1910, a series of events---including Jack Johnson's victory as heavyweight champion of the world---further shifted the focus from the exhibition site to the screen. Black conceptions of freedom and natural rights based on new sensibilities of racial representation informed the first mass protest movement of African Americans in the twentieth century as well as transnational formations of racial identity articulated by the race film industry.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
