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Notes
1 Ibo Island stands for the Sea Islands that, according to Dash, are synonymous with the Ellis Island as far as African Americans are concerned (6). As a result, they “became the region with the strongest retention of African culture.” The film’s setting, then, can function as a point of reference for thousands of contemporary African Americans who can trace their origins back to these islands.
2 All of Dash’s films such as Four Women (1975), Illusions (1983), Praise House (1991), Incognito (1999), Rosa Parks (2002) as well as various shorts and music videos, show a strong interest in the past and cultural memory and an even stronger emphasis on women’s perspectives.
3 Thomas, “Filmmakers Unique View of the Black,” F15–F16.
4 Smith, “A Daughters Tale,” B33-B35. See also Rhines (1996) who describes Dash’s endeavors through the “festival circuit,” Black Film/White Money (96–97).
5 See Ebert “Daughters of the Dust.” Review.
6 Holden “Review/Film.”
7 Alexander, Why we Make Movies, 232.
8 See Mellencamp, “Making History: Julie Dash,” 76; Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers; Hudson-Gibson, “The Ties That Bind,” 43–67; Yearwood, 2000; Silva, “Daughters and Sons of the Dust.”
9 Bambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye,” 118–141.
10 Mellencamp, “Making History,” 76.
11 Gourdine, “Fashioning the Body (as) Politic,” 499–511.
12 Silva, “Daughters and Sons of the Dust.” 247–267
13 Appadurai, The Social Life of Things.
14 Brown, “Thing Theory,” 1–22.
15 Brown, “Objects, Others, and Us,” 183–217.
16 Ibid.
17 See, for instance, Shiffer and Miller, The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior and Communication (1999), and Bjørnar , ”Material Culture After Things: Remembering Things” (2003).
18 Ezra, The Cinema of Things.
19 Latour, Reassembling the Social.
20 See, for instance, Bruno We Have Never Been Modern.
21 Brown, Things.
22 See note 16 above, 4
23 Ibid., 16.
24 In actuality, discussions on the power imparted on cinematic objects started as early as the nineteenth century. See Rachel O’Moore, Savage Theory. This is approximately the same time that the influential work of Franz Boas made an unquestionable turn to the material world.
25 Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,” 316–317.
26 Other representatives of the LA school are Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Ben Caldwell, and Alile Sharon Larkin.
27 For a more detailed discussion see Diawara, “Black American Cinema.”
28 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling.
29 See note 16 above, 6.
30 Navaro-Yassin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects,” 1–18.
31 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical. See also Deleuze, Cinema: The Movement Image. Cinema where he provides a rather extensive discussion of affectivity as an entity.
32 Shing, Feeling Film.
33 See note 16 above, 4.
34 For a discussion on the film’s Afrocentrism see Machiorlatti’s “Revisiting Julie Dash's ‘Daughters of the Dust,’”pp. 100–101.
35 Quoted in Mellencamp, “Making History,” 11 (pdf).
36 As Bambara explains, in this film Africans will not be seen “scrambling in the dust for Bogie’s tossed away stogie…. Nor fleeing a big…., white, nightmare only to be crushed underfoot…. Nor being a mute backdrop for White folks’ action in the foreground” (129).
37 See note 16 above.
38 Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 4–18.
39 Shohat and Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism.
40 It appears, then, that Dash’s techniques privilege the community over the individual over a single story through group mis-en-scene. As Dash explains, “the emphasis is on shared space…in which no one becomes the backdrop to anyone else’s drama…rather than dominated space.” (“The Making” xiii)
41 See note 41 above.
42 Cixous, “Sonia Rykiel in Translation,” 95–99.
43 Boyd, “Daughters of the Dust,” 46–48.
44 Women Make Movies. “Julie Dash.” https://www.wmm.com/filmmaker/Julie+Dash/
45 Similar to Stern, Tarje Laine discusses the effect of film images on the viewer who is caught “in a state of prereflective, bodily affect” (qtd. in Shing 22). Laine’s view influenced by Shaviro while it provides an apt example of how affect can escape the screen, nevertheless, as Shing also points out (22), it seems to reduce the spectatorial experience into a state of passivity that precludes reflection. Following Shing, I also argue for a more dynamic relationship between the viewer and the film which is premised on reciprocity similar to the reciprocity between objects and human actors that Daughters is premised on. Such an approach obviously maps out the significance of a critical refocusing on affectivity.
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Chrysavgi Papagianni
Dr. Chrysavgi Papagianni, holds a PhD on film and literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB), USA. She has taught film, literature and writing at the State University of New York at Buffalo, at Athens University, Greece, and in Zayed University, UAE. Dr. Papagianni is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Zayed University, UAE. Her research focuses primarily on women’s literature and cinema with a specific interest on issues of memory, history and identity. Her latest work focuses on Emirati women filmmakers. She is concurrently working on a funded (RIF grant) project on contemporary American film and fiction.