While
watching the films today I was particularly struck by the second question on
Dr. Lampert’s response sheet, the one about why Birth of a Nation and other narratives of its type were so popular,
and I thought especially about the film in its particular historical context
and the context of our class. The film is set during the Reconstruction
(mostly) and focuses on the new freedoms that emancipated people were now going
to have not just in the South, but in the whole United States. With the Reconstruction
comes the birth of the “white terror” movement, where whites were forced to
adjust to these new freedoms and policies given to blacks. This resulted in the
formation of leagues like the Klan. The film was released in 1915, which is
significant because this is when the Dunning School began operating, a school
of thought in Columbia University that criticized the Reconstruction and the
freedoms it gave to blacks.
But
this is a sexuality class. To what degree were the white terror and Dunning
School movements hat no doubt inspired Birth
of a Nation really brought about by sexual
problems?
From
what I remember from school, the North enforced very harsh penalties against
the South after the Civil War, forcing them to pay reparations, barring
southerners from Congress, and other things. The Dunning School, too, had more political issues with the Reconstruction,
mostly against the powerful Republican Party. Combine these issues with the
fact that the South was in an economic crisis after the war, rich landowners
now had their lands stripped, and the burgeoning working class now had to
compete with the emancipated people for work, and blacks could be hired much
more cheaply. Where in these policies is there something specifically sexual
that whites feared?
I
think Birth of a Nation and other
works like it use sexual acts like the rape of a white girl to help send a
particular message to the people, for let’s face it, sex is something people
pay attention to. But in history, was the fear and hatred of blacks really
perpetuated by sexual fears? Or did pop culture pieces like Birth of a Nation play them up to mean
much more than they really did historically?
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ReplyDeleteHaley, These are precisely the questions I want to explore with this unit. Have you read the Ida B. Wells excerpt yet? That can help expand your understanding of some of the historical context for discussion of the racial politics of rape and lynching crisis. Yes, the central questions of this course are about how popular culture stages conversations about gender and sexuality -- which is always intersecting with constructions of race, class etc. As the films we watched demonstrate, racialized narratives about sex and desire were central to American popular culture at the turn of the century, and not only in the historical epic _The Birth of a Nation_ (think back to Kasson's arguments from last week's reading). One of the things we're confronting this week (and touched on only briefly last week) is the complicated way popular culture both reflects and shapes its historical moment. I'm going to talk more on Thursday about some of the other social and cultural currents of the early 20th century that may have been in play here.
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