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Begone with the Wind

How Hollywood Rewrites Slavery
by Ayanna Dozier (/profile/ayanna-dozier) |
artwork by Andrea Cauthen (https://www.instagram.com/drea_vision/)
Published on September 9, 2020
 “Muse” from the series Antebellum Atelier (Artwork by Andrea Cauthen
(https://www.instagram.com/drea_vision/))

This article was published in Fantasy (/issue/87)

Issue #87 | Summer 2020
SUBSCRIBE » (/SUBSCRIBE/NEW)

(/issue/87)

Since their creation, narrative films have been altering the imaginary landscape of our
past, our current lives, the future, and what we even imagine as possible. Consciously
or not, cinema largely shapes our perception of historical events, so even our
understanding of slavery is influenced directly by a filmmaker’s fantasy. White
subjectivity in films such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Sally Hemings: An American
Scandal (2000), 12 Years a Slave (2013), and Harriet
(https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/harriet-state-of-black-film-criticism-roundtable) (2019),
among others, is criticized not for taking liberties but for its effect on remaking white
identity within our cultural perception of slavery. Plantation dramas are case studies:
The majority of these films have very little to say about Black people or the ways that
Black people have historically survived white supremacy; instead they demonstrate
whiteness’ capacity to embed a positive value in every narrative.

The narrative choices made in these films reveal a troubling use of the plantation as a
space to rewrite white subjectivity as a force complicated by power rather than
produced by it. In her 1997 book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making
in Nineteenth-Century America (https://www.powells.com/book/scenes-of-subjection-
9780195089837), African American literature and history scholar Saidiya V. Hartman
notes that this process of shaping white subjectivity began in the 19th century.
Hartman clarifies that the self-making process was a melodrama on the plantation
because the fields, home, and shacks could become a stage for terror at any moment.
“Melodrama presented blackness as a vehicle of protest and dissent, and minstrelsy
made it the embodiment of unmentionable and transgressive pleasures,” Hartman
writes. “In both instances, the fashioning of blackness aroused pity and fear, desire and
revulsion, and terror and pleasure.”

In other words, the plantation has always been a site of fantasy and romanticized
melodrama where whiteness gained value through the subjection of others. White
people who didn’t own enslaved people, including mistresses, envied and fantasized
about the plantation, and the plantation drama has since supplemented and satiated
white fantastical longing for this era. The theater provides an opportunity to transcend
the screen and fantasize reenactments of human consumption—from rape and torture
to anguish and “heroism.” This recoding of white subjectivity creates a muddled
landscape where slave narratives aim to alter our perception of enslavement as a
system populated with “good” white people helpless to do anything to stop the
institution of slavery. Actual instances of nonwhite slave owners intervening to assist
the enslaved in the South are few and far between.
  “…and we came thru drippin’” from the series Antebellum Atelier (Artwork by Andrea Cauthen
(https://www.instagram.com/drea_vision/))

As Angela Y. Davis’s 1981 book, Women, Race & Class

(https://www.powells.com/book/women-race-and-class-9780394713519), reveals, there have
been repeated attempts to unpack how it felt to own enslaved people rather than trying
to understand the position of the enslaved, including their efforts to fight back and
attempts to escape. Take the framing of Gideon (Joe Alwyn) in Harriet
(https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/movies/a-discussion-of-steve-mcqueens-film-12-years-
a-slave.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&smid=tw-share&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1381602936-
LPJFVWQ2vM2l3prEbjUdvQ), for instance, as someone struggling with his “complicated”
feelings for Harriet Tubman as both her owner and as someone who grew up with her.
While the film doesn’t suggest that Tubman reciprocates Gideon’s feelings, the mere
invention of his character to translate such confusion is troubling. This is reminiscent
of Steve McQueen’s desire to have the audience sympathize with Edwin Epps (Michael
Fassbender) in 12 Years a Slave, someone so troubled by his love for the enslaved
Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) that he repeatedly rapes her. What purpose do these cinematic
portrayals serve, who exactly are they serving, and how do they shape our
interpretation of slavery?

The cinematic fantasy that slave owners were in love with their slaves but were forced
to brutalize them erases the way that brutality was used to constitute one’s whiteness
and romanticizes that power. If these cinematic perceptions of slavery are committed
to memory, then we might accept the plantation as a mere backdrop to terror rather
than the very site of it—and accept that love can exist in tandem with brutality and
subjection. Perhaps most damagingly, we might accept that the enslaved made no effort
toward self-determination. There are far more plantation dramas about white
individuals denying the power gained from ownership or lusting after it than there are
about the experiences of the actual enslaved. Ultimately, this is a risk that overlooks the
enslaved who endured and survived the first dramatization of the plantation: terror.
We cannot afford to commit these cinematic narratives to memory as though they are
the truth, for they not only disregard the experiences of the enslaved, but they
encourage us to misremember slavery at the expense of those who lived it.
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Read this Next: End All, Be All (/article/harriet-state-of-black- lm-criticism-roundtable)

by Gloria Oladipo
December 20, 2019

We need to give critics space to ply their craft without pitting

them against the films, the audiences, and/or each other.

BY AYANNA DOZIER
View profile » (/user/311905)
Ayanna Dozier is an artist, lecturer, writer, and curator. Her
dissertation, “Mnemonic Aberrations,” examines the formal and
narrative aesthetics in Black feminist experimental short films in the
United Kingdom and the United States. She’s the author of the
forthcoming 33/13 book on Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope. She
resides in Brooklyn, New York.

(/profile/ayanna-
dozier)

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