Fashioning the body [as] politic in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust.

Set at the turn of the twentieth century in a mythical port village on a sea island off the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dust features four generations of Peazant women. On the surface, the film's plot is quite simple: the characters struggle to reconcile their history of enslavement and their geographical and cultural isolation with the potential freedom and socioeconomic progress that their immigration from the island to the mainland promises. As Viola Peazant explains to Mr. Snead, the photographer she has hired to document the crossing over, migration represents the family's "first steps toward progress, an engraved invitation to the culture and wealth of the mainland." (1) Among the first uttered in the film, these words direct attention to the historicity of the family's movement. Indeed, critics of the film focus almost exclusively on the historical record Dash revises, arguing that the film repositions African American cultural history from margin to center. (2) Such readings also position the film within a matrix of representations that describe blackwomanhood as a tension between raced and gendered subjectivities. Intellectual and practical consensus on blackwomen's marginalization within discursive systems of both race and gender characterize blackwomen by intersectionality, a false center of the two. (3) Teaching and discussing the film has shown me that some audiences have internalized this conventional notion of intersectionality to such a degree that the film's rejection of conservative representations of blackwomen becomes confusing and problematic for them.

Common academic assumptions about race and gender as disparate categories, as well as blackwomen's representations of distinct standards relative to each of these categories, provide immediate but defective lenses for the film's spectators. However, because Daughters does not conform to established standards, or because it mutes them, viewers' most basic identification with the characters and plot is either generally inhibited or deferred. (4) When I taught the film in an undergraduate course for English majors at Louisiana State University in 1998, for example, male students of all ethnic backgrounds found the film difficult to comprehend, and white students male and female expressed an inability to grasp the "meaning," "follow the story," or "see the point." (5) Dash seems to anticipate such responses to her text, reasoning that

   when a work is so densely seeded within black culture, a lot of
   people who are not from the culture will say they find the film
   inaccessible or they will say they find it not engaging. What
   they are saying is that they do not feel privileged by the
   film, so they choose not to engage or allow themselves to
   become engaged. (qtd. in Bobo, 1995, 133)

Whereas Dash focuses on cultural and historical sensibilities, however, I want to argue here that her film narrates political sensibilities as it consciously refuses to enter the "entanglements of market and visual economies" that have made sociopolitical sense of the blackwoman's body (Collins 103). As Greg Tate indicates, Daughters offers "historical subtext" for blackwomen's surface emotions (70). Daughters challenges commonplace notions of blackwomen's place in the body politic and its relationship to it, and it engages their place in "the marketplace of the flesh" (Spillers 76). I use "body politic" here simultaneously to connote the social, political, and public sphere of the nation state, represented in the film as "North," and to juxtapose that political body with the natural bodies of blackwomen, always sexually and/or economically politicized.

This essay reads Daughters as a visual and verbal narrative that challenges the very concept of intersectionality and the illusory division between race and gender that sustains it. The film challenges the muted politic that woman itself names a subject that inherently excludes the film's subjects. In Daughters, Dash erases the space between blackness and womanness as subject identities. For her, there is no intersection of race and gender as understood in common academic discourse. Her women subjects exist as they are, for she erases white women as the necessary backdrop against which blackwomen make sense. This analysis suggests that both the illusion and the remedy are constructs emanating from a body politic that denies blackwomen presence and subjectivity.

Moreover, the concept of "body politic" underscores the way that the female characters carry the film's politics on their bodies; indeed, they wear their relationships to the political body's blackwoman narratives. Clothing has always been politically significant, creating a visual representation of a person's relationship to the state, and Fashion has always semiotically challenged, reinforced, and/or reconfigured meanings of citizenship. (6) As socially necessary covering for the body, clothing becomes a second skin, or as Charlotte Perkins Gilman offered, "A social skin" through which humans "may express a whole gamut of emotions from personal vanity to class consciousness" (21). I read the women's dress in Daughters as a language through which they articulate a new blackwoman subjectivity, reflecting the presumption in Descartes's second "Meditation" that clothing is a distinct form of consciousness, a mark of being a person (66). (7) Self-identity is interwoven with dress and articulated through Fashion. Clothing signals humanity and incites conceptions of dignity, personhood, and bodily integrity. The sell then, becomes an ideological process, emergent in practices of dramatic performance and socially ritualized behavior. Because "the self is not given to us ... there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art" (Foucault 350-51). Dress in Daughters signals the history of blackwomen's relationship to the body politic and their own awareness that blackwomen have always had two bodies--their natural corporeal one and their political one. Daughters allows its viewers to hear the conversation between these bodies and to see bodily manifestation as a work of art. (8)

Blackwomen's bodies signify a history of conquest, enslavement, lynching, and rape, and this history is marked on the body by contrary figures of triumph and terror, overexposure and invisibility. As a text that engages these tensions with regard to the black female (body) within the political landscape, Daughters is not an exhibition of blackwomen's physicality, yet it projects into contemporary cinematic imagery a history of display that dates back before the 19th-century's Saartjie Baartman, colonially renamed Sarah Bartman, or "the Hottentot Venus." Watching Daughters, cinema audiences ironically purchase the spectacle of blackwomen who confront the paradigmatic exoticized object.

To maintain blackwomen as subjects, Dash must not ignore their objectification, but must render the objectifiers absent. Consequently, both white people and black men fill in the background: they are witnesses compelled to know and understand their lives correlative to the women's experiences. (9) These absences illustrate Daughters's rejection of "previous preoccupations with 'positive images' and 'inclusion' to foreground more important concerns" (Yearwood 216). In this vein the film directs viewers' attention to blackwomen's sights, acts, comprehensions, feelings, and beliefs about themselves and other blackwomen. The women are always known as blackwomen by other blackwomen. (10)

Thus, Daughters engages the racist and misogynist contention that, given her position during and immediately after slavery, the blackwoman had "no abiding sense of personal purity" (Bruce 11-12). In the face of such critiques, blackwomen's only recourse was self-fashioning and an arguably obsessive focus on appearance. In The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916), E. Azalia Hackley's chapter on "Personal Appearance" admonished that "one must be on beauty parade ALL of the time" (74-75), and this performance of objectivity required proper costume. Dress, then, became a sign of value and an articulation of place during the ostensible black nadir. Blackwomen acknowledged that as long as representation begets reality, they must cloak themselves in signs that communicate the social meanings to which they aspire. Making the body a fashioned canvas whereon the second skin gives texture and meaning to the first, Dash's Daughters epitomizes this struggle and uses it to reposition blackwomen onto the political stage of selfhood.

Dressing the Body to Speak as Subject

I am an endangered species, but I sing no victim songs.

I am a woman. I am an artist. I know where my voice belongs (Diane Reeves, "Endangered Species," Art and Survival)

Dash's artistic voice provokes, and the Peazant women "sing no victim songs." Though Daughters is a film for and about blackwomen, its narrative encodes a new form of blackwomanhood that is equally challenging to blacks and non-blacks. Dash "break[s] with cliche, formula and stereotype" and represents blackwomen struggling to narrate a history they possess rather than one impressed upon them (Grayson 40). Dash rhetorically creates alternative blackwomen selves, and her rhetoric is imagistic, her film an apt text for explicating blackwomen's "argument of images" (Fernandez, qtd. in Ewing 265). The film offers a range of image possibilities--personalities, temperaments, creeds, and complexions--all of which fold into and onto each other, in defiance of linear history. The film both trains viewers to see a new way and requires that they do so, and in the process, it becomes a problematic visual and literary text. (11)

Part of the film's viewer re-training is achieved by the Unborn Child, and one of her moments in the film captures the essence of Dash's interrogation and the film's subtle redirection of its spectator toward its fashion narrative. When Mr. Snead gathers the elder Peazant men for a photograph, we see the men in their vested finery positioned with the sea at their backs. As Mr. Snead attempts to focus the image in the lens, the Unborn Child appears in his viewfinder. Only Mr. Snead and film's spectators see her, for, throughout the film, she is invisible to the other characters. Her appearance in the camera, a technological device used to (re)present an image, emphasizes how the photograph Snead attempts promises to create a visual image of the past and to maintain it for future recollection: a visual memory that is theoretically gendered male. That the Unborn Child is dressed in white with a blue ribbon in her hair allows Mr. Snead initially to assume that she is one of the island children who has just run into his frame, but when Mr. Snead moves away from the camera and looks at his assembled subjects, he does not see the girl; though puzzled, he resumes his picture taking The Unborn Child, an image of both present and future, interrupts Mr. Snead's historical record and the maleness of the moment. As Mr. Snead looks into the camera's viewfinder, he serves as a stand-in for the larger film's spectators, seeing only the history of the photographic moment: the elder men, containers of the collective memory of the island, and the sea, a segment of the middle passage-another past, container of another history--behind them. The Unborn Child's appearance, though, reminds us that any photograph, like any contemporary sense of the film's historical narrative, must be focused through a blackfemale body, through the blackwomen whom the Unborn Child sartorially figures.

Her dress alerts viewers that she is connected to the narrative's bodily politics, as her blue ribbon connects her to both Nana and Eula. In a sequence that recalls Eula and Eli as young lovers, Eula wears a royal blue skirt and a white blouse and she and Eli frolic on the beach, teasing the waves. The Unborn Child's ribbon matches Eula's skirt; colloquially put, they are cut from the same cloth. Additionally, Nana prays to the ancestors, and The Unborn Child is their answer; she comes to eradicate the evil spirits that have infected her father and wrought tension in her parents' relationship. The blue ribbon marks her as an image of blackwomen's blues memory, and it portends her continuation of the family legacy into the future, for her royal blue is generations from Nana's indigo. (12) In this metacinematic moment, Dash uses the figure of the camera--her own and Mr. Snead's--to remind viewers of the power of imaging, and the degree to which such a simple albeit constructed detail can recall and reinforce a memory, can inscribe a history that may be recalled, reinscribed, and (re)memoried. That the detail is one of color bespeaks the political undertones of the film's fashioning.

The film begins with a close up dissolve of young Nana's worn hands cupping a pile of dust. This spectacle reflects at once the conventional equation of blackwomen's body with the fertility of the earth and the myth of blackwomen's innate uncleanliness. The creation symbolism powerfully inverts Judeo-Christianity's story of the origins of humanity by inserting blackwomen into that myth. The image of Nana's cupped hands both full of dust and emptying out dust reveals a dismembered body struggling to hold on to the common fiber of humanness. (13) Significantly, the hands also open to the image of a fully clothed older Nana bathing in the river. Like the biblical God, Dash as creative artist constructs blackwomen's emergence from the dust of historically violent representations and connects that emergence to Eve's "original sin" and shame-induced desire to dress herself:

   And the eyes of Adam and Eve were
   opened, and they knew that they were
   naked; and they sewed fig leaves
   together, and made themselves apron.
   (KJV Gen. 3:7)

Thus the Bible explains fashion as camouflage, a means to feign one's true identity. When Adam and Eve confess their collective shame, "I was Afraid because I was naked" (Gen 3:10), God banishes them from Eden, but not before He "made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them" (Gen. 3:21). Here clothing functions as humans' second skin that gives social protection and moral refuge to the first.

Moreover, the film's first blackwoman's image of dusty hands dissolving into a clothed bathing woman, a progression from the dirty to the clean--the dust to the water--comments on the ways in which blackwomen are cloaked and cloak themselves with respect to sexual purity. This subsequent series of images accent blackwomen's desire to shroud their bodies in purity and defend themselves against invasive gazes. Nana's clothing extends her body rather than separates her from it, so at a moment when nakedness seems socially appropriate, even expected, Nana appears clothed. Again, Dash inverts convention to signal nakedness and costume as alternate conditions of shame, that enable characters to confront and navigate the body politic.

Read as an examination of the symbiotic relationship between clothing and the skin, Daughters signifies not only blackwomen's place in American material culture but creates an alternative vehicle for examining the historical moment of the film. Helen Bradley Foster argues that "clothing played a central part in enslaved people's consciousness of self: to them clothing was tactile, visual and metaphoric" (2). Daughters highlights how blackwomen's place in the body politic is recorded in fabric, and offers that "there is continuity between world, body, hand and garment" (Cixous 95). This inference is supported by the film's mise en scene. The composition of a young Nana Peazant's hands focuses them as instruments of nurture and vehicles of labor. Nana literally holds history as physical vessel, explaining, "We carry this history inside of we."

More poignantly, though, Nana wears history on her hands as well. Her hands are visibly stained blue, and the vestiges of the indigo on her hands coincide with the indigo blue dress she wears in the film, contrasting with the pink and white dresses worn by her daughters. (14) Nana's dyed hands emblematize blackwomen's labor under the yoke of slavery, their active participation in the consumer world, as most black women on slave plantations were expert spinners, weavers, knitters, and dressmakers (Pollitzer 179). While Dash acknowledges her imaging of the stain is historically inaccurate, she maintains: "I was using this as a symbol of slavery, to create a new kind of icon around slavery rather than showing the traditional markings of whips and chains" (Daughters of the Dust: The Making 31). This stain is particularly female, for women not only planted the cotton but also crafted the cloth from which they crafted their clothing. Nana's hands, then, reveal blackwomen's participation in the consumer cloth economy, partially enabled by the abundance of trees used for dying cloth on the coastal sea islands. (15) As Helen Bradley Foster notes, "images of weaving cloth and images of clothing permeate" narratives of the black experience in America, and this film continues that legacy (2). Using fashion as a narrative discourse of signs of position and status, Dash makes blackwomen's bodies a template for Fashioned self-design, and Daughters thus provides a space for blackwomen's visual affirmation. It underscores the complex relationship between our own sense of self and our self as seen by others. The film manipulates this tension through the language of dress, erasing black women from the list of endangered species, proclaiming them "good 'omen" and self-scripted subjects of their own historical, social, and political narratives.

Body Ethnography: Fashioning Character Through Costume

My body is fertile. I bring life about.... My husband can beat me. His right they say. Rape isn't rape. You say I like it that way. (Diane Reeves, "Endangered Species," Art and Survival)

Blackwomen have long been cloaked within a narrative that forbids them "the luxury of being simply a woman. [They] had to always be so much more" (Dash, Daughters of the Dust: The Making 50; italics in original). This denial of a racially unmarked womanhood signals blackwomen's status as endangered, as "[beast] of burden" owned by husbands, masters, and children. Daughters's opening sequence of images clearly articulates the utilitarian nature of clothing as an epidermal layer of the social body.

Dash defines Daughters as akin to "speculative fiction, a what if situation on so many levels" (29). One provocative speculation it poses is, "What if we really are what we wear?" This speculative moment yields a metanarrative within the film in which Nana's colored hands and its symbiotic connection to her clothes translate skin, bodies, and costumes. The characters' dress, like Nana's indigo stained hands, offer a narrative of personhood that is historical and performative. All of the actors' dress underscore the symbiosis between the necessity of appropriate costume for accurate period representation and dress as a vehicle for transforming images of blackwomen's character. Costume as concept underlines the conscious choosing of a character's dress as part of Dash's preparing a heritage film, a period piece, if you will. However, the costumes are not solely for dramatic effect, for in the film, clothing moves beyond the technical to become more than prop. Clothing becomes a discursive system--a way of speaking the body, freeing it from silence, a way of situating it on the world's cultural, social, and political stage.

The film's (re)fashioning begins immediately after the prologue with a series of dissolves accompanied by a voice-over. Thus, the images in them do not speak for themselves. As a technique of representation revision, the voice-over affirms that viewers need instruction on how to re(en)vision. Preventing viewers from relying on old assumptions, the voice-over serves as an interpreter, a means through which this newly contextualized or dressed visual form is rendered intelligible. The voice-over begins as Nana bathes in the opening scene:

   I am the first and the last, I am the honored
   one and the scorned one.

Nana is the eldest Peazant elder, which opens her to both honor and scorn, for her kinfolk agree that "she live too much in the pas'." Progressing the sexual implications of the tension between clean/honor and dirty/scorn, the bathing scene dissolves into a bedroom, where gossamer netting covers a bed to suggest the purity and sanctity of acts committed within the matrimonial bed. Still, the voice-over speaks this wife's morally contentious sexual identity:

   I am the whore and the holy one; I am the
   wife and the virgin: I am the barren one
   and many are my daughters.

This image is bound to the first, for Nana has called upon the ancestors to help heal a rupture between Eula and Eli--the couple in the bed--over the paternity of the Unborn Child, whom Eula is carrying. At this point in the narrative, Eula's body is covered by a patterned quilt, symbolizing the complexity of her character. As the film's representational inquiry begins, the image of the sleeping couple dissolves into an image of a majestic woman, wearing an ecru dress and standing in a boat rowed by three men.

At first, the camera wide-angles on the tiny boat in the distance. As the camera zooms in, the woman's face remains obscured, covered by both the wide-brim white hat she wears and the white veil that flows from it:

   I am the silence that you cannot understand;
   I am the utterance of my name.

This image quickly dissolves into an extreme close up of the majestic woman's St. Christopher medal, clutched in her fingers, gloved in white lace. Her costume renders her flamboyant; the large hat is paired with a lattice-patterned blouse. The symbolic white that covers the marriage bed also veils this woman's face. Like Nana's clothed bathing, the veil protects her from invasive gazes. The bedroom curtains part, but the majestic woman's veil does not; thus, we are informed of Eula's vulnerability to gazes upon her face. The woman wears a white hat and veil, but her dress is not as white, marring her bridal purity. Still, the patron saint of travelers, Saint Christopher, safeguards her. The costume underscores the silence that the voice-over articulates; she is veiled, yet the design of her dress invites us to see her body through its covering. Importantly, this final image of the film's opening sequence and the voiceover hearkens back to a time when the very signifier blackwoman was "a term of reproach in American social life" and its signified, "not known and hence ... not believed in," ultimately "lives beneath a shadow of that problem [ideology of white supremacy and subsequent objectification] which envelops and obscures her" (Barrier William 400). The Du Boisian veil reifies the voice-over's binary pairings. The screen fades to black.

As the main narrative begins, Viola Peazant stands on the island's shore. She is the first character to speak and most exemplifies self-writing through dress. Viola has converted to Christianity during her sojourn on the mainland and is a meticulous picture of virtue, dressed in indigo skirt, matching jacket with pagoda shoulders, and white blouse with a high lace collar and a jabot. Her indigo reminder of her identification with the islanders contrasts the white signs of Christian purity that form her defense against the islanders' godlessness. Moreover, the indigo of her skirt connects her to the legacy that Nana embodies, and the intrusion of white indicates Viola's freedom from the sullied ways of "bad" women. The collar forces attention to Viola's face and neck and away from her breasts--concealed behind the jabot, that, centered from the neck to the sternum, gives her a rigidly erect posture. The pagoda sleeves on the jacket broaden her shoulders while the lace collar elongates her neck, which, with the color connection of purity and lace delicacy, shroud her in eurocentric symbols of true womanly dignity, authority, and grace. While these three are virtues commensurate with her Christian status, they are also centuries-old fashion allusions of women's beauty.

Viola's A-line skirt has a taut waistband, which along with the billow of the skirt both accentuates and conceals her body's natural curves. Her tight-fitted apparel betrays Viola's restrained demeanor, for she has suppressed not only the belief of her ancestors--"heathens" whom she says "leave nothing to God," but instead believe that "everything that happens is caused by conjure, magic, or their ancestors." In addition, the constricting clothing displaces her rigid sexuality onto her religious convictions: "Mind now, the Lord is a listenin." Ironically, through Viola's costume Dash subverts the blackwoman subject so prominent in dominant narratives: counter to the hypersexed stereotype, Viola is not sexually, or spiritually, permissive. Instead, Viola exists in a world governed by a paradigmatic god who sees, hears, and knows all, and punishes those who refuse to abide by his accorded rules of physical and spiritual behavior. Her tight-laced dress, along with her equally tight coiffure, underscores her conscious situation against an old narrative of blackwomen's self--definition. That is, Viola's dress illustrates what Darlene Clark Hine calls a "culture of dissemblance," late 19th-century blackwomen's strict adherence to a set of behaviors, attitudes, and strategies they engage to protect themselves against sexual violation and allegations of sexual licentiousness (37-38). Consequently, confining dress enacts a sexual silencing, as Viola performs herself genteel and refined rather than lascivious and loose, as myths would have her.

Unwittingly, Viola sacrificially cloaks herself in the very racist mythologies she aims to undress. Thus, at the film's end, Viola loses her internal struggle for selfhood. The lost battle is accentuated by Mr. Snead's transformation from a voyeur hoping to capture the foreign ways of the island into a believer in the transformative power of those ways. Her desire to bring the island family to "civilization," with Mr. Snead's literal delivery of their story in pictures to the mainland, is defeated, and she is more unnerved still when Mr. Snead grabs her and kisses her on the mouth--symbolically passing on the power of the Peazant "hand" through his lips to hers and into her body/soul. (16) In that gesture, Mr. Snead breaks the obvious sexual tension that has existed between himself and Viola throughout the film. Visibly shaken, perhaps by the overt sexual connotations of the kiss, Viola appears in the next shot with her apparel in disarray: Her blouse hangs loosely, and strands of her hair have slipped free of their binding hairpins. An un(d)rest Viola is moved to tears, her pre-Christian womanhood exposed.

As Viola's and Snead's transformations suggest, self refers to various processes, to attributes of the flow of personal action, the skills, powers, and dispositions that a person must have to act. Thus, self-identity is a signifier of power and self-creation, a conscious act. Viola in particular symbolizes the psychic distress that can accompany blackwomen's attempts to insert themselves into narratives of selfhood which so castigate them that they become mere pretenses of character: she is caught between a belief in appearance as a statement of character, thereby fashioning an appearance that hegemony will deem suitable, and a belief in a fashioned representation of an internal self, that one's image is "the face of [her] soul" (Wilde 117). In such discursive frames, blackwomen subjects like Viola become focused on the social possibilities of attaching/detaching certain attributes and even defying "genetic essentialism," which posits that "certain traits are predictable and permanent, a manifestation of genes" (Dreyfus and Nelkin 317). For Viola, self possibilities present themselves as cross-cultural comparisons, which require the subversion of selfhood rather than the articulation of self: she performs against forces rather than manifests them from within. Through Viola, Daughters offers us a blackwoman subject's attempt to situate herself within existing discursive frames of intersected black-ness and womanness. Simultaneously, though, Viola struggles to represent a blackwoman subject located between the hypersexualized political body of Baartman as gazed-upon object and the desexualized and neutered corporeality of a mammy.

Viola's cousin, Yellow Mary Peazant, speaks the voice-over, the words of which are taken from "Thunder: Perfect Mind," Gnostic scripture in the Nag Hammadi Library. The words concern the presumed duality of blackwomen's being. Mary's life behind the veil is integral to the film's inquiry into blackwomen's economy within the body politic. Through the film's lightest skinned character, Dash addresses the tragedy of colorism.

Color Outside the Lines: The Legacy of 'Blackwoman' Un(d)rest

The film's images critique black people's color phobia. The voiceover's mystical merging of word and image renders blackwomen's bodies sites of narration, and thrusts Yellow Mary into the center of the narrative. Because of Yellow Mary, and Trula, who speaks no lines, Daughters is not exclusively a cast of dark-skinned black women who wear their hair in natural braids, locks, or twists. Yellow Mary became the first Peazant to leave the island when she got pregnant, lost the baby she was carrying, then hired herself out as a domestic servant to a white family on the mainland. When the family moved to Cuba, she moved as well to serve as wet nurse to their baby. However, when the husband made sexual overtures toward her, Yellow Mary tried without success to leave. Only when she "fix the titty," making herself of no further use to the family, is she allowed to leave Cuba. She returns to the mainland, providing for herself, for "she never need nobody to help [her] make money," she says confidently. Yet at the film's conclusion, she is one of the last ones standing on the island's shore. While the film confronts "eight decades of omission of dark-skinned" blackwomen in cinema (Tate 70), the film does not sacrifice or erase light-skinned blackwomen to do so. Nana, Eula, and Yellow Mary stand together on the shore and collectively represent a range of blackwomen's imagistic possibilities.

Dash's choice of a light-skinned woman as the voice-over narrator underscores tense intra-racial relations. We first meet Yellow Mary when Viola uses the formality of the surname to introduce her to Mr. Snead as "Mary Peazant." Mr. Snead focuses immediately on Trula, and Mary speaks, "Yellow ... they call me Yellow Mary." Viola notes, in fact, that while elsewhere Mary would not be considered light-skinned, on the island she is the lightest of their clan. As such, Dash again de-emphasizes the external world of the mainland and its observations and ideals, locating the island and its women at the center of the film, and centering as well its aesthetics. Thus, Dash follows the darkness of the dusty backdrop and Nana's bathing at night with the shot of a light-skinned black woman. She thereby subverts cinema's history of the figure of the privileged mulatta. Like the voice-over that she speaks, "Yellow Mary" herself Is an oxymoron, for she is marked by neither cowardice nor the chastity of the Virgin mother. Moreover, she is held in both contempt and admiration by her kinswomen, who honor her light skin and yet scorn her for not living up to the sociopolitical potential it embodies.

In this context, the symbolism of the Saint Christopher medal becomes especially relevant. Just as the voice over articulates Yellow Mary's corporeal contradictions, legends offer that St. Christopher first served Satan and a ruthless King, in his search for the bravest and strongest master. Convinced to follow God, Christopher accepted the task of carrying people across a raging stream. One day he was carrying a child who grew continually heavier, who made himself known as the Christ, the Redeemer. Yellow Mary's Saint Christopher medal signifies her as one who carries Christ, one whose inner spiritual strength shows itself through courageous worldly struggles. Yellow Mary cannot wear the full white regalia of purity for she has elected herself out of that privileged class, and she is somewhat sullied by her life experiences. Neither wife nor virgin, but barren, she nonetheless mothers Eula and Trula. Yellow Mary's complex sexual history yields a gap in language--there is no space for boths or in-betweens--yet she utters the words that give contour and texture to blackwomen's invisibility.

The paradoxes in Yellow Mary's voice-over attest to the historical problematic of making blackwomen the subject of a cultural text. As the film's narrator, Yellow Mary provides the point of view of the filmic sequence, focuses the inscription of blackwoman as signifier, redresses the obfuscation of blackwomen within the veil. As Saint Christopher carried the faithful across dangerous waters, Yellow Mary traverses the chasm within which blackwomen's image has existed since their landing in this New World (Barrier Williams 401). Ironically, Yellow Mary speaks "over" the hegemonic narratives that would silence her. The ecru of her dress symbolizes her history as a blackwoman touched by the outside world; hers is not a life lived in innocent isolation. Yellow Mary carries her shame in the person of Trula, her companion. Dressed in yellow, Trula embodies the "Yellow" in Mary's character, specifically her fear and reluctance to face her kin alone. But as Yellow Mary gains strength, she and Trula become more distant and share fewer film frames. Yellow Mary's shame becomes pride in her courageous return home; her voice directs us to "the body hidden by the body" (Cixous 96). She explains,

   I need to know I can come back and
   hold on to where I come from. I need
   to know that the people know my
   name. I Yellow Mary Peazant, and I a
   proud 'oman, not a hard 'oman....

She exposes the curse of strength in a world that confuses self pride, which affords one courage to struggle on, with hardness, an ability to endure anything without feeling.

Though she, like Eula, has been sexually compromised, or "ruint," the other Peazant women scorn her. As Nannie Burroughs wrote in 1904, "the fairer some Negroes are the better they think themselves" (277). As the lightest of the Peazant women, Yellow Mary is ostracized and envied by her kinswomen; they hate her because she has survived rape, lived as a prostitute, flirted homosexually with Trula, and most profoundly for them, on her "all that yella" has been "wasted." That is, unlike Eula, who is raped, Yellow Mary had a choice in her sexual fate, and she has not made good use of light-skinned privilege to move forward into a more prosperous and respectable (read eurocentric) life. With this moment, Daughters redresses con tentious intra-racial gendered narratives. The selection of mostly dark skinned actresses to lead this narrative journey retrieves blackwomen from the liminal space created by an exhausted history of the mulatta in cinema. As Chandler Owen noted, the only quality that distinguished chorus girls in early black productions like "Shuffle Along" and "Runnin Wild" from those in Ziegfeld's "Follies" was the use of "white girls" in the latter and in the former "white girls passing for colored," or "voluntary Negroes" (82). There is no racial passing in Daughters. Instead, the relationship between Yellow Mary and Eula interrogates color in relations among blackwomen as well as it questions the degree to which color affects blackwomanness.

Marrying issues of explicit sexual expression to issues of bodily control and dignity, Dash allots to Yellow Mary and Eula a large proportion of the film's frames. This cinematic pairing reflects the social and cultural parameters of their relationship, one also manifest in their dress. Yellow Mary appears veiled in the first sequence. But her veil is soon removed and her full face apparent for the film's duration. The lattice pattern on the front of her blouse, unlike Viola's, draws sensual attention to her bust line. It both exposes her chest and replicates the lashes she has suffered. Eula's dress seems less revealing and gently flows over her stomach. Yet the gauzy fabric cups her belly as it turns with her head, follows the angle of the camera, or shifts in the breeze. Eula and Yellow Mary both wear A-line skirts that indicate their freedom from the strictures of dominant narratives. Eula's collar is open and her dress has no lace. Its design is simple, just as Eula is a simple woman with simple wants. Yellow Mary's skirt is taut at the waist; her lacy petticoat sometimes shows as she sits, unabashed, in a tree or lies along a branch of the tree and converses with Eula and Trula.

Their easy movement connotes the physical security that both Eula and Yellow Mary possess, and their unbustled and un-corseted dress amplifies their freedom. Both women's costumes accentuate their forthright sexuality. Eula equates her own sexual history with Yellow Mary's, and implies they are each other's photographic negative, a relationship that bespeaks the corporeal and political reality of blackwomen. Each frame shared by these women forces the viewer to distinguish the scandalous from the scandalized.

At the film's end, Eula beseeches the women to stop ignoring and ostracizing Yellow Mary: "If you love yo'-selves then love Yellow Mary cause she a part of you. Just like we a part of our mothers." Eula begs the women to embrace Yellow Mary as they have embraced Eula herself, and chides them for following the values of the mainland that locate power in Mary's yellow complexion:

   As far as this place is concerned. We
   never was a pure oman. Deep inside
   we believe they ruin our mothers and
   their mothers what come before them.
   ... And we live our lives always
   expecting the worse, because we feel
   we don't deserve no better. Deep
   inside we believe that even God can't
   heal the wounds of our past or protect
   us from the world that put shackles on
   our feet.

Eula begs the women to discontinue living "in the fold of ol' wounds." Dressed in white, as the other women are, she rejects their apparent internalization of white superiority, their belief that their morphological blackness limits their life possibilities. Like Viola in missionary garb, the women wear white to shroud their inner spirits from a vulnerability written upon their outward flesh. Yellow Mary's ecru reminds viewers that Fashion reveals the connection between inner and private realms of subjectivity with the public crafted codes of conduct. Even as the film ends and Yellow Mary, Eula and Nana Peazant are left behind, Yellow Mary remains in ecru though she has shed her excess and wears only an A-line calico dress; she and Eula return through costume to the island's simplicity.

Breaking cinematic boundaries, Dash teeters these two women on the boundaries of invisibility and exposure, between dignified and scandalized, to meet shamelessly in the territory of political uncertainty. Eula and Yellow Mary are both transgressive figures whose simultaneity disabuses critics, viewers, and scholars of the comfort that intersectionality ostensibly provides. Through a subtle yet powerful series of choices in dress and casting, Dash directs viewers away from traditional(ly) limiting images and ideas of blackwomanhood. Her challenge to the representation of blackwomen is indeed so radical that it confounds some viewers. A careful analysis of Daughters of the Dust, however, shows its creator's integrity and her clear (re)vision of the power of blackwomen's fashioned selves.

Notes

(1.) All references to character lines are transcriptions from the film itself. While a copy of the script is in print (Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's Film, New York, New, 1992), I prefer to cite the language spoken in the film to that written on the published script pages.

(2.) Cf., Bobo, 1995; Brouwer; Gibson-Hudson; Jones; Mellencamp; Yearwood.

(3.) For a discussion of "intersectionality," a term used by Kimberle Crenshaw, see her "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" in The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139-67. I read her idea as suggesting that black women are located at the place where race, gender, and class meet, and in essence this junction is a center, a space equidistant from each of the specified locations, and thus, another location formed by this union. While theoretically a useful conceptualization, I argue, and use the film as evidence, that race as a category of critical inquiry cannot exist or be understood apart from issues of gender or class. That is, there are no raced bodies that are gender- and class-free.

(4) In contrast to my classroom experience, Bobo in her ethnographic study found many black women responded positively to the film's silences, and she does not discuss any discomfort that her subjects might have felt about the absence of white characters or actors in Dash's film. See her Black Women as Cultural Readers, 186-88.

(5.) For a detailed discussion of these responses and their relationship to the viewer's identity, see Patricia Mellencamp's "Making History: Julie Dash."

(6.) I capitalize Fashion to indicate my reference to the industry of cloth making and the social, cultural and sometimes political narratives the industry produces on clothing's meaning. Fashion is a referent for the larger discourse that people deploy to fashion, or make or perform, themselves. Thus, fashion is meant to invoke the infinitive verbs to make and to create as well as to invoke the act of preparing oneself according to the rules of Fashion. In the Biblical reference, then, God fashioned Adam and Eve, and their sin led them to fashion garments to hide their shame, and thereby in the terms of the myth, they gave birth to Fashion.

(7.) Using wax as a stand in for generalized bodies, Descartes suggests that in order to distinguish one body from another, we read its external signs, and devoid of these, see the body "as if having taken its clothes off," in which case bodies are imperceptible by the imagination, only perceived by the mind. However, blackwomen, like the wax in Descartes's example, are never devoid of external markings, for their skin itself functions as an external sign. In my appropriation, I extend his analysis to suggest that clothing and skin, as external markings, are socially contextualized and their meanings socially constructed, thus their significance relies upon processes of association and synthesis.

(8.) Dash has explained that the events of the film take place on Sunday, "the day of rest" on which the mythical people of the island characteristically and ceremoniously "put on [their] nice clothes" and just "sat around" (Daughters of the Dust: The Making 43,45). The film itself, however, does not indicate this specific timing.

(9.) While Dash does focus some attention on Eli's anger, he comes to realize, with Nana's help, that Eula is the subject of the historical and actual rape narrative, and thus his anger is inappropriate and misplaced. I question Sarah Projansky's analysis of Dash's representation of the rape from the perspective of a "masculinist obsession with biological parentage and the possession of women through marriage" by "focusing at least as much attention on Eli's relationship to the rape as it does on Eula's" (192-93). Indeed, Nana directly challenges Eli and reminds him of Eula's independent subjecthood: "Eula never belong to you, she marry you." Here Eli is the object, rather than the central subject of the utterance and its referenced experience.

(10.) However, rather than read the white and male absences as necessary for the film's narrative cogency, during the semester I taught the film, my blackwomen students questioned why, for example, Eula would "protect the white man from Eli." Though the film never explicitly articulates that a white man, presumably a landowner, has raped Eula viewers generally presume as much, and even Yellow Mary articulates this presumption (Dash, Daughters of the Dust: The Making 50). This presumption notwithstanding, the rapist is neither seen nor given substantive corporeality and his name is never uttered.

(11.) For example, Nana Peazant, the matriarch, does not conform visually to the stereotypical figure of "matriarchicar' blackwoman power in that she is not a physically large woman, nor is she cast in terms of temperament in the "mammy" tradition. On this point, Dash says, "1 chose Cora Lee Day for Nana because of her physical appearance, to break with the tradition, the physical image of the mother ..." (Daughters of the Dust." The Making 51). Through this revisionary casting, Dash creates women who defy both simplistic binary representations and their corollary visual expectations.

(12.) Cf. Pollitzer's analysis of the making of quilts in "Quilts as Chronicles," 179-81. His reading of color significance works here as well.

(13.) Of course I am referring to Judeo-Christian reasoning that from dust God created human life and its claim that this origin in dust binds us as a common family. In the opening scene, Dash figures Nana grasping dust in hopes that when the Peazant family members venture north, this divinely authorized essence will sustain them; though their humanity will be tested and challenged: by the blowing wind, they must remain steadfastly committed to retaining it at all cost. This commitment to kin is what she has nurtured into them, and it will heal them when they inevitably suffer on the mainland. 14. Viola's costume forms an exception among Nana's daughters': she wears a blue dress in the film. However, unlike Nana, who is totally clothed in blue, Viola wears a white shirt, with a lace collar.

(15.) Set in Charleston, South Carolina, my hometown, Ntozake Shange entitles her narrative about a weaver and her three daughters Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, and notes that their mother named her daughters after the trees that enabled her craft. Given the proximity between Charleston and the Sea Islands upon which Dash bases her fictitious Ibo Landing, this analogy seems appropriate.

(16.) Dash challenges viewers' impulse to read her film as purely historical, and she questions how such readings render the Peazant women and their lives spectacle. Mr. Snead is also an anthropologist, and his presence codifies a certain gaze upon black life, as an exotic (sodo) scientific subject. She at once represents an historic element and viewers who interpret the film as accurately representing its subjects' lives, spaces, and histories. Dash refutes this perspective lest she herself fall prey to charges of exploiting the Gullah folkways for artistic profit, as nonblack anthropologists have done in other black cultural spaces, theoretically for purposes of scientific research.

Works Cited

Barrier Williams, Fannie. "The Colored Girl." Voice of the Negro 2 (June 1905): 400-03.

Bobo, Jacqueline. Black Women as Cultural Readers. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.

--. "Black Women's Films: Genesis of a Tradition." Black Women Film and Video Artists. New York: Routledge, 1998. 3-19.

Burroughs, Nannie H. "Not Color But Character." Voice of the Negro 1 (June 1904): 277-80.

Brouwer, Joel. "Repositioning: Center and Margin in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust." African American Review 29.1 (1995): 5-17.

Bruce, Phillip. The Plantation Negro as a Freeman: Observations on His Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia. 1889. Williamstown, MA: Corner House P, 1970.

Cixous, Helene. "Sonia Rykiel in Translation." On Fashion. Eds. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988. 95-99.

Clark Hine, Darlene. "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance." Hine Sight: Black Women and the Reconstruction of American History. New York: Carlson, 1994. 37-48.

Crenshaw, Kimberly. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139-67.

Dash, Julie. Daughters of the Dust. Prod. Geechee Girls/American Playhouse. Dir. Julie Dash. 1hr 53 min. KINO, 1996. DVD.

--. Daughters of the Dust: The Making of An African-American Woman's Film. New York: New P, 1992.

Dreyfus, Rochelle, and Dorothy Nelkin. "The Jurisprudence of Genetics." Vanderbilt Law Review 45 (1992): 313-48.

Descartes, Rene. "Meditation Two: Concerning the Nature of the Human Mind: That the Mind is More Known than the Body." Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (Discours de la methode and Meditationes de prima philosophia). 1641. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett P, 1980. 61-77.

Ewing, Katherine. "The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency." Ethos 18 (1990): 251-78.

Foster, Helen Bradley. New Raiments of Self." African American Clothing in the Antebellum South. New York: Berg, 1997.

Foucault, Michel. "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress." Foucault Reader. Ed Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1989. 340-72.

Gibson-Hudson, Gloria J. "The Ties that Bind: Cinematic Representation by Black Women Filmmakers." Black Women Film and Video Artists. Ed Jacqueline Bobo. New York: Routledge, 1998. 43-68.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Dress of Women." Forerunner 6 (1915): 6.

Grayson, Sandra. Symbolizing the Past: Reading Sankofa, Daughters of the Dust, and Eve's Bayou as Histories. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2000.

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Jones, Jacquie. "The Black South in Contemporary Film." African American Review 27.1 (1993): 19-25

Mellencamp, Patricia. "Making History: Julie Dash." Journal of Women Studies 15.1 (1994): 76-101.

Pollitzer, William. The Gullah People and Their African Heritage. Athens: U Georgia P, 1999.

Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York: New York UP, 2001.

Reeves, Diane. "Endangered Species." Art and Survival. Compact disc. EMI, 1994.

Spillers, Hortense. "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words." Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality. Ed Carole S. Vance. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. 73-100.

Tate, Greg. "A Word." Afterword to Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's Film. Ed. Julie Dash. New York: New P, 1992. 69-71.

Wilde, Oscar. "The Picture of Dorian Gray." 1891. The Picture of Dorian Gray" and Other Selected Stories. New York: Signet, 1962. 17-234.

Yearwood, Gladstone L. Black Film as a Signifying Practice; Cinema, Narration and the African American Aesthetic Tradition. Trenton: Africa New World P, 2000.

Angeletta KM Gourdine, Associate Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Louisiana State University, is the author of The Difference Place Makes: Gender Sexuality and Diaspora Identity. She is currently at work on a book examining black women, fashion, and the body. LSU's Council on Research awarded Dr. Gourdine a summer research grant in July 2002, that facilitated the research and writing of this essay. Excerpts of this analysis were presented at the 54th Annual Conference on College Composition and Communication, March 2003, New York City.