Week #10--Examining and Rewriting History

Both Illusions and Daughters of the Dust demonstrate that Julie Dash is privileging a presence of Black women onscreen in a historical context that has never been granted. In her writings and interviews that she has given, Dash does not hesitate to acknowledge that much of her content is speculative fiction. She understands that Mignon’s limitations as a studio executive loom much larger than her film presents, but the point of her film is to realize a Black woman within the position and to consider, from the perspective of a Black woman, how she would handle herself in such an environment. I would argue that Dash’s references to Hollywood stock conventions during that period, particularly the aggressively romantic male lead and the White female characters who exist to “beautify” the office, further complicate Mignon’s motives, as well as the presence of Black female subjectivity within this context. As with Daughters of the Dust, Dash’s poetic license is supplemented by her extensive research of the region, its history, and the culture it produced through readings, archival searches, and familial accounts. Dash’s greater purpose extends beyond what she sought to do in Illusions, which is to provide a multiple subjectivity of Black women. She presents them in a variety that ranges amongst ages and cultural perspectives. For Dash and her characters, particularly Yellow Mary, Nana and Eula, knowledge of one’s ancestral history provides a basis of empowering self-identity, and it enables them to confront the pain that they have faced in their lives.

As with Dash, Cheryl Dunye presents herself in The Watermelon Woman as a filmmaker in search of validating her own identity as a Black lesbian. Dunye fictionalizes her journey within a documentary format that combines formal research and interviews with moments of her life that eventually find their way into the project. While some arguments may arise about whether Dunye’s use of documentary conventions undermines the sincerity of her project, the point is not so much about fooling the spectator as it is using strategies with which the spectator is familiar to magnify the absence of Black lesbians in film, whether it is in a fictional or non-fictional context. Her exploration of her fictionalized subject, Fae Richards, looking beyond her designated name, “The Watermelon Woman,” opens up not only a history of the Black lesbian community in Philadelphia, but also responses to interracial romance within the lesbian community. Given that the love interest in the film, Guinevere Turner, co-wrote and appeared in Go Fish, a groundbreaking lesbian-themed film in the early ‘90s, it also references how Black lesbians can find agency in other cinematic representations of lesbian romance. Yet Dunye also raises anxieties as to what role her fictionalized self plays within this dynamic. As Thelma Willis Foote explains, “Cheryl does begin to suspect that Diana desires her because she, Cheryl, is black. If that were so, dating Diana exposes Cheryl to the peril of being the fetishized black object of white racist desire, regardless of Cheryl’s own self-assertive and affirmative identification with racial intentions haunt their relationship” (7). It is important to think about this dilemma Cheryl faces as her own degree of “Blackness” is questioned for pursuing such a relationship.

As you think about The Watermelon Woman in relation to films that we’ve either already seen or will see, think about how Dunye, by making a mockumentary about the marginalization of its subject, privileges other marginalized issues and subjects. As Foote puts it, “Here, the documentary impulse, the desire to recover and to tell the stories of marginalized people, especially those who share her gender and racial identity, motivates Cheryl’s pursuit of a career in documentary filmmaking. In this way, Dunye’s film introduces its thematic concern with identity politics” (2). In respect to this, think about how she subverts the presentation of stereotypes through filmmaking to ultimately offer it as a tool for self-empowerment.