Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-16T13:12:04.228Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Conjuring Caliban's Woman: Moving beyond Cinema's Memory of Man in Praise House (1991)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2021

Ayanna Dozier
Ayanna Dozier*
Affiliation:
Communication and Media Studies Department, Fordham University, 441 East, Bronx, NY10458, USA
*
Corresponding author. adozier2@fordham.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Julie Dash's experimental short film, Praise House (1991), situates conjuring as both a narrative and formal device to invent new memories around Black womanhood that exceed our representation within the epistemes of Man. I view Praise House as an example of conjure-cinema with which we can evaluate how Black feminist filmmakers, primarily working in experimental film, manipulate the poetic structure and aesthetics of film to affect audiences rather than rely on representational narrative alone. Following the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, I use Man to refer to the representational body of the Western episteme that defines value through mass accumulation. It is through Wynter's scholarship that we find the ontological emancipation from Man that is Caliban's woman, who represents discourse beyond our normative, colonial mode of feeling/knowing/being. Through an analysis of Praise House that foregrounds film's ability to generate affect via its aesthetics, this article argues that aesthetics can similarly enact the same power of conjure as found in Praise House's narrative, and as such conjures an epistemological rupture to our normative order that is Caliban's woman.

Type
Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Special Issue 3: Conjure Feminism: Tracing the Genealogy of a Black Women's Intellectual Tradition, Summer 2021 , Summer 2021 , pp. 503 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bobo, Jacqueline. 1995. Black women as cultural readers. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Bobo, Jacqueline. 1998. Black women film and video artists. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Boyce-Davies, Carol. 2018. Occupying the terrain: Reengaging “Beyond Miranda's meanings: Un/silencing the ‘demonic ground’ of Caliban's ‘woman’.” American Quarterly 70 (4): 837–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2014. Toward a black feminist poethics. Black Scholar 44 (2): 81–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dee Das, Joanna. 2017. Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The time-image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Dozier, Ayanna. 2015. Affect and the “fluidity” of the black gendered body in water ritual #1: an urban rite of purification and cycles. Liquid Blackness, Passing through Film: The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble 2 (5): 52–65.Google Scholar
Dozier, Ayanna. 2017. No happy returns: Aesthetics, labor, and affect in Julie Dash's experimental short film, Four Women (1975). Feminist Media Studies 17 (4): 646–29. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2017.1326561.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dozier, Ayanna. 2018. Fucking whiteness: Orientations, desire, and race in Camille Billops's docu-fantasy the KKK boutique ain't just rednecks (1991). Another Gaze 2: 72–76.Google Scholar
Dozier, Ayanna. 2020. Sound garden: Ayanna Dozier on Ja'Tovia Gary's the Giverny document. Artforum, February 3. https://www.artforum.com/film/ayanna-dozier-on-ja-tovia-gary-s-the-giverny-document-2019-82077.Google Scholar
Field, Allyson Nadia. 2016. Rebellious unlearning: UCLA project one films (1967–78). In L.A. rebellion: Creating a new black cinema, ed. Field, Allyson Nadia, Horak, Jan-Christopher, and Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
George-Graves, Nadine. 2010. Urban bush women: Twenty years of African American dance theater, community engagement, and working it out. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Kriz, Kay Dian. 2008. Slavery, sugar, and the culture of refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lepecki, André. 2006. Exhausting dance: Performance and the politics of movement. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lovell, Charles Muir, and Hester, Erwin, eds. 1993. Minnie Evans: Artist. Greenville, N.C.: Wellington B. Gray Gallery, East Carolina University.Google Scholar
Martin, Michael T. 2010. “I do exist”: From “black insurgent” to negotiating the Hollywood divide—a conversation with Julie Dash.” Cinema Journal 49(2): 1-16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Mellencamp, Patricia. 1999. Making history: Julie Dash. In Redirecting the gaze: Gender theory, and cinema in the third world, ed. Robin, Diana and Jaffe, Ira. Albany: State University New York Press.Google Scholar
Praise house. 1991. Directed by Julie Dash. New York: Distributed by Women Make Movies.Google Scholar
Pryse, Marjorie. 1985. Introduction: Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the “ancient power” of black women. In Conjuring: Black women, fiction, and literary tradition, ed. Pryse, Marjorie and Spillers, Hortense. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Raengo, Alessandra. 2016. Encountering the rebellion: Liquid blackness reflects on the expansive possibilities of the L.A. rebellion films. In L.A. rebellion: Creating a new black cinema, ed. Field, Allyson Nadia, Horak, Jan-Christopher, and Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sheppard, Samantha N. 2016. Bruising moments: Affect and the L.A. rebellion. In L.A. rebellion: Creating a new black cinema, ed. Field, Allyson Nadia, Horak, Jan-Christopher, and Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Spillers, Hortense. 1985. Chosen place, timeless people: Some figurations on the new world. In Conjuring: Black women, fiction, and literary tradition, ed. Pryse, Marjorie and Spillers, Hortense. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Thain, Alanna. 2017. Bodies in suspense: Time and affect in cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Wynter, Sylvia. 1990. Afterword: Beyond Miranda's meanings: Un/silencing the “demonic ground” of Caliban's “woman.” In Out of the kumbla: Caribbean women and literature, ed. Boyce-Davies, Carol and Fido, Elaine Savory. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press.Google Scholar
Wynter, Sylvia. 2000. Africa, the west and the analogy of culture: The cinematic text after man. In Symbolic narratives/African cinema: Audiences, theory and the moving image, ed. Givanni, June. London: British Film Institute.Google Scholar