Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust presents the African American culture of the Gullah, who are living off the South Carolina/ Georgia coast. The film centers on the African American culture and tradition in a unique yet complicated way.
In the beginning and sporadically throughout the film we hear tribal music playing, this allows the audience to adjust themselves to the mood of the film. It is here that we meet four main characters on a boat that seem to be coming back to the Sea Islands. The audience is able to overhear a conversation from two of the women in the boat, Yellow Mary and Viola talking about their past when they used to run along the banks (where the boat dropped them).
The audience is able to gather hints and references
For example, during one particular intense scene, Viola is furious with the members of her community because they accept her mothers “hoodoo” traditions and receive an ancestral blessing from her as they prepare for their journey. However, Viola eventually accepts this blessing as well, so I did not know what to make from this event.
In my belief, this film was powerful in the way it illustrated the hardships that the Gullah community faced. By watching Daughters of the Dust I was able to gather new knowledge that I did not previously have of this secluded community. The filmmakers definitely evoked a response from the audience in the way they demonstrated particular aspects of this community. Although, I do not have any ties to the African American community, it was easy to understand the hardships of the Gullah community from this
The audience is confronted with an African-American family who live on a Southern offshore island, that ultimately depart and all come together to remember the importance of their ancestors and goes to show the past should not be forgotten. While some of the family departs for the North, others stay behind and live on the soil with their
Of the given options of films to watch for the extra credit assignment, I chose to watch HBO’s documentary titled the Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives, a production I thought was excellently put together. I was initially apprehensive of the film, thinking it would be extremely boring, but I rather found it to be quite the accessible medium of history both available and appealing to a broad audience including myself. I found the readings of the many slave’s interviews and firsthand accounts to be such a clever way to understand more about the culture of slavery in an uncanted light and it broadened my knowledge of what slavery entailed. The credibility of this film finds its foundations cemented in the undeniable and indisputable
This documentary not only talks about a significant period in African American and American history; it also gives us a mo...
Narrative is a form of writing used by writers to convey their experiences to an audience. James Baldwin is a renowned author for bringing his experience to literature. He grew up Harlem in the 1940’s and 1950’s, a crucial point in history for America due to the escalading conflict between people of different races marked by the race riots of Harlem and Detroit. This environment that Baldwin grew up in inspires and influences him to write the narrative “Notes of a Native Son,” which is based on his experience with racism and the Jim-Crow Laws. The narrative is about his father and his influence on Baldwin’s life, which he analyzes and compares to his own experiences. When Baldwin comes into contact with the harshness of America, he realizes the problems and conflicts he runs into are the same his father faced, and that they will have the same affect on him as they did his father.
The movie "Roots" by Alex Haley is a powerful and inspiring movie. The movie helped a lot of people understand about the history of how the color of their skin will determine what life style the person will have. The movie showed how black people (slaves) had to struggle to live by the demands of white people (Masters), how white people were harmful to black people, and how black people never stop believing they will have freedom some day.
The twentieth century was a time of tremendous change that commenced with WWI and the Great Depression. While WWI brought countless deaths, the Great Depression affected both urban and rural Americans. Yet, underlying these devastating events was the abuse of black Americans. Both whites and blacks had to cope with the major occurrences of the time, but blacks also faced strife from whites themselves. During the early part of the twentieth century, white Americans Russell Baker and Mildred Armstrong Kalish gained kindred attributes from their families, especially in comparison to that of Richard Wright, a black American. The key differences between the experience of whites and blacks can be found within the mentality of the family, the extent to which they were influenced by their families in their respective lives, and the shielding from the outside world, or lack thereof, by their families. Through the compelling narrations of these three authors, readers can glimpse into this racially divided world from the perspective of individuals who actually lived through it.
This journey begins in a very segregated area of Texas during the 1950s. The Money family and all their African American neighbors are given an ultimatum: leave in twenty-four hours or be killed. The venture starts as the frantic family and their friends gather what they can and leave, traveling to a destination unknown. They abandon their land, their crops, their livestock, and their furniture. The family has no car, so they must travel with their neighbors, limiting what possessions that can be taken along. To make it even more stressful, the family is stuck in a crowded car, unsure of what's next, with very few of their necessary belongings, and a baby on the way. The journey to escape racism and segregation in Texas is a success, but the future that awaits, is in the hands if God.
In something wicked this way comes by Ray Bradbury, Bradbury uses tone to convey a sense of peril and optimism when The Dust Witch encounters her foes. The textual evidence” I don’t want her back to this house”(Bradbury151), “Choking a scream he spun”( 148), and “he nudged his weapons” show the perilous tone. By describing Wills fears as he is about to embark on his dangerous mission to stop the dust witch, he thinks about the fatal events that could happen. This demonstrates the lethality of The Dust Witch as will questions whether he will leave this encounter with the Dust Witch alive. Bradbury does this to demonstrate the seriousness of this encounter as after they occur and Will destroys the Witch’s balloon I changes the course of events
Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. New York: New Press, 2001. Print.
In the documentary, The Black Atlantic, the narrator explores the beginnings of slavery and the impact slavery had on the new world up to 1800. The black Atlantic is the first episode of a series of films called The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in which African American culture is analyzed since slavery up to the election of the first African American president. The purpose of the documentary is to inform viewers of what slavery was like by providing stories of those who lived through slavery. For example, a ten-year-old girl named Priscilla who was taken from Sierra Leone to South Carolina in the mid-18th century. in the documentary, Henry Louis Gates Jr discusses the slave trade after the discovery of America while doing so he incorporates the experiences of certain slaves for example the slaves who arrived at Jamestown, Virginia. Additionally, the narrator talks about the first known African in America, Juan Garrido, who was brought along with Spanish explorers in 1513. The filmmakers reveal the story of another black man, Esteban the moor, who crossed a Texas desert with three other men while taking part in a Spanish expedition. Eventually throughout the documentary the filmmakers discuss and illustrate how slavery transformed from an informal arrangement to a racial system.
The genius of the film is that it synthesizes a multitude of cultural and musical elements and still manages to function rhetorically on separate but parallel levels of communication. The fundamental message for Jamaican audiences was to document, authenticate, and value the Jamaican reality. As Henzel notes in his running commentary, a special feature of the DVD, Jamaicans cheered the film's opening scenes wildly, simply because they recognized themselves and their world in a powerful global medium that had paid them no mind until then. "There is no thrill in moviedom like people seeing themselves on the screen for the first time." The experience and the legacy of colonialism accustoms people who suffer it to literature and film that depicts the lives and perspectives of the colonizers, not the colonized. As Jamaica Kincaid explains in a memoir of a Carribean childhood, all of her reading was from books set in England. Her land and its people were not worthy of literary attention. While finally getting such cinematic attention is a joyful, liberating, and affirming interaction for the Jamaican audience, it has an ironic dimension too in that the downpressed are joyous because at last they see themselves if not through the downpressor's lens, at least on his screen.
This shows us how white people thought of African Americans as inferior, and they just wanted to dominate the society making no place for other races to express themselves. Even though African Americans were citizens of the state of Mississippi they were still discriminated against. This documentary does a great job of showing us the suffering of these people in hopes to remind everyone, especially the government, to not make the same mistakes and discriminate against citizens no matter what their race is because this will only cause a division to our nation when everyone should be
Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" and George Tillman's box-office hit Soul Food explore the hardships and trials of black family life, and through the characters, setting, and theme of both the story and the film, the issue of class and the search for community is discussed.
This movie is a wonderful production starting from 1960 and ending in 1969 covering all the different things that occurred during this unbelievable decade. The movie takes place in many different areas starring two main families; a very suburban, white family who were excepting of blacks, and a very positive black family trying to push black rights in Mississippi. The movie portrayed many historical events while also including the families and how the two were intertwined. These families were very different, yet so much alike, they both portrayed what to me the whole ‘message’ of the movie was. Although everyone was so different they all faced such drastic decisions and issues that affected everyone in so many different ways. It wasn’t like one person’s pain was easier to handle than another is that’s like saying Vietnam was harder on those men than on the men that stood for black rights or vice versa, everyone faced these equally hard issues. So it seemed everyone was very emotionally involved. In fact our whole country was very involved in president elections and campaigns against the war, it seemed everyone really cared.
I have always believed that all races have their good and bad. Their is never going to be the perfect race. This movie definitely set a powerful message that life is not perfect for any race and that even though people are from different cultures, they are all interconnected somehow. The filmmakers did a great job at showing us that individuals should not be based on first impressions such as skin color or the social status.
diversity of this world. The last few minutes of the film we learn that Molly and her two daughters were transported back to the Moore River Native Settlement and made the 1,200 mile trip for a second time. This shows the audience that the racism in Australian did not just end with the movie; there were many more years of oppression against the Aboriginal culture.