Clyde Taylor

lar in speech and music. The writers of that period advanced a fertile
decolonization from Westcrn aesthetic norms. Almost without notice, bell hooks
the contemporary filmmakers have gone further toward decolonization
of a more blatantly colonized medium. They have not only planted a new
body of Afro-American art, they have done this while freeing that art of
colonial imitation, apology, or deference. And although the observations The Oppositional Gaze:
made here fall far short of exhausting the characteristics that give these
films their cultural identity, they might point the way to the realization Black Female Spectators
that the new cinema, unlike any other, is a representative expression of
Afro-American life.

NOTES
- - - - -
1. Charles H. Nichols, ed., Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967
When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being pun-
\New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1980), p. 89.
,-~

2. Ibid., p. 273. ished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children
3. From a brochure in the files of the Schomburg Library, New York City. would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as ges-
4. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 19681, tures of resistance, challenges to authority. The "gaze" has always been
p. 232.
5. Lewis lacobs, The Documentary Tradition [New York: Norton, 1979),p. 187. political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to
6. The Wilmington 10 were defendants in a celebrated case of official misjustice. understand through repeated punishments that one's gaze can be danger-
The 10 North Carolina political activists were charged with firebombing a grocery store ous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when
during a time of racial tension in 1971 and convicted on the basis of pressured testimony,
later recanted by some of t h e supposed witnesses. They were given unusually harsh
necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, "Look at me
sentences. At the time of the film, all but the Reverend Ben Chavis had been released. when I talk to you." Only, the child is afraid to look. Afraid to look, but
Chavis himself is now free. fascinated by the gaze. There is power in loolung.
7. Understanding the NewBlack Poetry (NewYork: Morrow, 1973).By saturation,
Henderson means a density of reference and tone by which the observer can recognize the
Amazed the first time I read in history classes that white slave-
cultural Afro-ness of a work, even in the absence of explicit verbal clues. Hcndcrson finds owners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black people for
saturation, for instance, in Aretha Franklin's "Spirits in the Dark." looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had
8. "Film-Makers Have a Great Responsibility to Our People: An Interview with informed black parenting and black spectatorship. The politics of slavery,
Ousmane Sembene," Cineuste 6:1, (Fall 1975),29.
9. "Interview: Warrington Hudlin," by Oliver Franklin, program brochure for of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their
Black Films and Film Makers, Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Phila- right to gaze. Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by
delphia, Pa. grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was
10. See Clyde Taylor, "Salt Peanuts: Sound and Sense in AfricanJAmerican Oral/
Musical Creativity," Callaloo (rune 1982).
pained to think that there was no absolute difference between whites
who had oppressed black people and ourselves. Years later, reading
m c h e l Foucault, I thought again about these connections, about the
ways power as domination reproduces itself in different locations em-
ploying similar apparatuses, strategies, and mechanisms of control. Since
I knew as a child that the dominating power adults exercised over me

Reprinted, with permission, from Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South
End Press, 1992).
 - - L 8,

bell hooks
The Oppositional Gme

and over m y gaze was never so absolute that I did not dare to look, to When most black people in the United States first had the
sneak a peep, to stare dangerously, I knew that the slaves had looked. opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that
That all a t tempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and
in us a n overwhelming longng to look, a rebellious desire, an opposi- maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream
tional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: "Not only movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black repre-
will I stare. I want my look to change reality." Even in the worse sentation. It was the oppositional black gaze that responded to these
circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the looking relations by developing independent black cinema. Black viewers
face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the of mainstream cinema and television could chart the progress of political
possibility of agency. In much of his work, Michel Foucault insists on movements for racial equality via the construction of images, and did so.
describing domination in terms of "relations of power" as part of an effort Within my family's southern black working-class home, located in a
to challenge the assumption that "power is a system of domination racially segregated neighborhood, watching television was one way to
which controls everything and w h c h leaves no room for freedom." develop critical spectatorship. Unless you went to work in the white
Emphatically stating that in all relations of power "there is necessarily world, across the tracks, you learned to look at white people by staring
the possibility of resistance," he invites the critical thinker to search at them on the screen. Black looks, as they were constituted in the
those margins, gaps, and locations on and through the body where agency context of social movements for racial uplift, were interrogating gazes.
can be found. We laughed at te1evi;ion shows such as Our Gang and Amos 'n' Andy,
Stuart Hall calls for recognition of our agency as black spectators at these white representations of blackness, but we also looked at them
in his essay "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Speaking critically. Before racial integration, black viewers of movies and televi-
against the construction of white representations of blackness as total- sion experienced visual pleasure in a context in which looking was also
izing, Hall says of white presence: about contestation and confrontation.
The error is not to conceptualize this /presence1in terms of power, but Writing about black looking relations in "Black British Cinema:
to locate that power as wholly external to us-as extrinsic force, whose Spectatorship and Identity Formation in Territories," Manthia Diawara
influence can be thrown off like the serpent sheds its slun." What Franz identifies the power of the spectator: "Every narration places the specta-
Fanon reminds us, in Black Skm, W h i t e Masks, is how power is inside tor in a position of agency; and race, class and sexual relations influence
as well as outside: "The movements, the attitudes, the glances of the the way in which this subjecthood is filled by the spectator." Of particular
Other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed concern for him are moments of "rupture" when the spectator resists
by a dye. Iwas indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. "complete identification with the film's discourse." These ruptures
1burst apart.Now the fragments have been put together againby another define the relation between black spectators and dominant cinema prior
self." This "look," from-so to speak-the place of the Other, fixes us, to racial integration. Then, one's enjoyment of a film wherein represen-
not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the a~nbivalence tations of blackness were stereotypically degrading and dehumanizing
of its desire. coexisted with a critical practice that restored presence where it was
negated. Critical discussion of the film while it was in progress or at its
Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate conclusion maintained the distance between spectator and the image.
the gaze of the Other but also look back, andat one another, naming what j Black films were also subject to critical interrogation. Because they came
we see. The "gaze" has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black into being in part as a response to the failure of white-dominated cinema
people globally. Suborhnates in relations of power learn experientially I to represent blackness in a manner that &d not reinforce white suprem-
that there is a critical gaze, one that "looks" to document, one that is ! acy, they too were critiqued to see if images were seen as complicit with
oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert i dominant cinematic practices.
agency by claiming and cultivating "awareness" politicizes "looking" Critical interrogating black looks were mainly concerned with
relations-one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. issues of race and racism, the way racial domination of blacks by whites
 -
L> 1

bell hook The Oppositional Gaze

overdetermined representation. They were rarely concerned with gender. Talking with black women of all ages and classes, in different
As spectators, black men could repudiate the reproduction of racism in areas of the United States, about their filmic looking relations, I hear
I

I cinema and television, the negation of black presence, even as they could again and again ambivalent responses to cinema. Only a few of the black
feel as though they were rebelling against white supremacy by daring to women I talked with remembered the pleasure of race movies, and even
i look, by engaging phallocentric politics of spectatorship. Given the those who did, felt that pleasure interrupted and usurped by Hollywood.
i real-life public circumstances wherein black men were murdered/ Most of the black women I talked with were adamant that they never
lynched for looking at white womanhood, where the blackmale gaze was went to movies expecting to see compelling representations of black
always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white femaleness. They were all acutely aware of cinematic racism-its violent
Other, the private realm of television screens or dark theaters could erasure of black womanhood. In Anne Friedberg's essay "A Denial of
unleash the repressed gaze. There they could "look" at white woman- Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification," she stresses that
hood without a structure of domination overseeing thegaze, interpreting, "identification can only be made through recognition, and all recognition
and punishing. That white supremacist structure that had murdered is itself an implicit confirmation of the ideology of the status quo." Even
Emmet Till after interpreting his look as violation, as "rape" of white when representations of black women were present in film, our bodies
i womanhood, could not control black male responses to screen images. and being were there to serve-to enhance and maintain white woman-

I In their role as spectators, black men could enter an imaginative space hood as object of thc phallocentric gaze.
of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation. This gendered Commenting on Hollywood's characterization of black women
i relation to looking made the experience of the black male spectator in Girls on Film,Julie Burchill describes this absent presence:
I
1 radically different from that of the black female spectator. Major early
Black women have been mothers without children (Mammies-who
black male independent filmmakers represented black women in their can ever forget the sickening spectacle of Hattie McDaniel waiting on
films as objects of male gaze. Whether looking through the camera or as the simpering Vivien Leigh hand and foot and enquiring like a ninny,
spectators watching films, whether mainstream cinema or "race" mov-
"What's ma lamb gonna wear?") . . . Lena Home, the first black
ies such as those made by Oscar Micheaux, the black male gaze had a performer signed to a long term contract with a major (M-G-M),looked
different scope from that of the black female. gutless but was actually quite spirited. She seethed when Tallulah
Black women have written little about black female spectator-
Bankhead complimented her on the paleness of her skin and the non-
ship, about our moviegoing practices. A growing body of film theory
Negroidness of her features.
and criticism by black women has only begun to emerge. The pro-
longed silence of black women as spectators and critics was a response When black women actresses such as Lena Home appeared in main-
to absence, to cinematic negation. In "The Technology of Gender," stream cinema, most white viewers were not aware that they were
Teresa de Lauretis, drawing on the work of Monique Wittig, calls looking at black females unless the film was specifically coded as being
attention to "the power of discourses to 'do violence' to people, a about blacks. Burchill is one of the few white women film critics who
violence which is material and physical, although produced by ab- has dared to examine the intersection of race and gender in relation to
stract and scientific discourses as well as the discourses of the mass the construction of the category "woman" in film as object of the
media." With the possible exception of early race movies, black female phallocentric gaze. With characteristic wit she asserts: "What does it say
spectators have had t o develop looking relations within a cinematic about racial purity that the best blondes have all been brunettes (Harlow,
context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the Monroe, Bardot)?I think it says that we are not as white as we think."
"body" of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and Burchill could easily have said "we are not as white as we want to be,"
with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked for clearly the obsession to have white women film stars be ultra-white
at and desired is "white." (Recent movies do not conform to this was a cinematic practice that sought to maintain a &stance, a separation
paradigm, but I am turning to the past with the intent to chart the between that image and the black female Other; it was a way to perpet-
development of black female spectatorship.) uate white supremacy. Politics of race and gender were inscribed into
 - -
The Oppositional G a e
bell hooks
female gaze-this look that could bring pleasure in the midst of
mainstream cinematic narrative from The Birth of a Nation on. Asa seminal negation? In her first novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison constructs
work, this film identified what the place and function of white woman- a portrait of the black female spectator; her gaze is the masochistic
hood would be in cinema. There was clearly no place for black women. look of victimization. Describing her looking relations, Miss Pauline
Remembering my past in relation to screen images of black Breedlove, a poor working woman, maid in the house of a prosperous
womanhood, I wrote a short essay, "Do You Remember Sapphire!" white family, asserts:
which explored both the negation of black female representation in
cinema and television and our rejection of these images. Identifying the The onliest time I be happy seem like was when I was in the picture
character of "Sapphire" from Amos 'n' Andy as that screen representa- show. Every time I got, I went, I'd go early, before the show started.
tion of black femaleness I first saw in childhood, I wrote: They's cut off the lights, and everything be black. Then the screen would
light up, and 1's move right on in them picture. White men taking such
She was even then backdrop, foil. She was bitch-nag. She was there to
good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses
soften images of black men, to make them seem vulnerable, easygoing,
with the bath tubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them pictures
funny, and unthreatening to a whte audience. She was there as man in
gave me a lot of pleasure.
drag, as castrating bitch, as someone to be lied to, someone to be tricked,
someone the white and black audience could hate. Scapegoated on all To experience pleasure, Miss Pauline sitting in the dark must imagine
sides. She was not us. We laughed with the black men, with the white herself transformed, turned into the white woman portrayed on the
people. We laughed at this black woman who was not us. And we did screen. After watching movies, feeling the pleasure, she says, "But it
not even long to be there on the screen. How could we long to be there made coming home hard."
when our image, visually constructed, was so ugly. We did not long to We come home to ourselves. Not all black women spectators
be there. We did not long for her. We did not want our construction to submitted to that spectacle of regression through identification. Most of
be this hated black female thing-foil, backdrop. Her black female image the women I talked with felt that they consciously resisted identification
was not the body of desire. There was nothing to see. She was not us. with films-that this tension made moviegoing less than pleasurable; at
times it caused pain. As one black woman put, "I could always get
Grown black women had a different response to Sapphire; they iden-
pleasure from movies as long as I did not look too deep." For black female
tified with her frustrations and her woes. They resented the way she
spectators who have "looked too deep," the encounter with the screen
was mocked. They resented the way these screen images could assault
hurt. That some of us chose to stop loolzing was a gesture of resistance,
black womanhood, could name us bitches, nags. And in opposition
turning away was one way to protest, to reject negation. My pleasure in
they claimed Sapphire as their own, as the symbol of that angry part
the screen ended abruptly when I and my sisters first watched Imitation
of themselves white folks and black men could not even begin to
of Life. Writing about this experience in the "Sapphire" piece, I addressed
understand.
the movie directly, confessing:
Conventional representations of black women have done vio-
lence t o the image. Responding to this assault, many blaclz women I had until now forgotten you, that screen image seen in adolescence,
spectators shut out the image, looked the other way, accorded cinema no those images that made me stop looking. It was there in Imitation of
importance in their lives. Then there were those spectators whose gaze Life, that comfortable mammy image. There was something familiar
was that of desire and complicity. Assuming a posture of subordination, about this hard-workingblack woman who loved her daughter so much,
they submitted to cinema's capacity to seduce and betray. They were loved her in a way that hurt.
cinematically "gaslighted." Every black woman I spoke with who was/is
Indeed, as young southern black girls watching this film, Peola's
an ardent moviegoer, a lover of the Hollywood film, testified that to
mother reminded us of the hardworking, churchgoing, Big Mamas we
experience fully the pleasure of that cinema they had to close down
knew and loved. Consequently, it was not this image that captured our
critique, analysisi they had to forget racism. And mostly they did not
gaze; we were fascinated by Peola. Addressing her, I wrote:
think about sexism. What was the nature then of this adoring blaclz
 You were different. There was something scary in this image of young looked from a location that disrupted, one akin to that described by
sexual sensual black beauty betrayed-that daughter who did not want Annette Kuhn in The Power of The Image:
to be confined by blackness, that "tragic mulatto" who did not want to
be negated. "Just let me escape this image forever," she could have said. The acts of analysis, of deconstruction, and of readmg "against the grain"
1 will always remember that image. I remembered how we cried for her,
offer an additional pleasure-the pleasure of resistance, of saying "no";
for our unrealized desiring selves. She was tragic because there was no not to "unsophisticated" enjoyment, by ourselves and others, of cultur-
place in the cinema for her, no loving pictures. She too was absent image. ally dominant images, but to the structures of power which ask us to
It was better then, that we were absent, for when we were there it was consume them uncritically and in highly circumscribed ways.
humiliating, strange, sad. We cried all night for you, for the cinema that Mainstream feminist film criticism in no way acknowledges
had no place for you. And like you, we stopped thmhng it would one black female spectatorship. It does not even consider the possibility that
day be Ifferent. women can construct an oppositional gaze via an understanding and
awareness of the politics of race and racism. Feminist film theory rooted
When I returned to films as a young woman, after a long period of silence,
in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that privileges sexual hffer-
I had developed an oppositional gaze. Not only would I not be hurt by
ence actively suppresses recognition of race, reenacting and mirroring
the absence of black female presence, or the insertion of violating
the erasure of black womanhood that occurs in films, silencing any
representation, I interrogated the work, cultivateda way to look past race
discussion of racial d,ifference--of racialized sexual difference. Despite
and gender for aspects of content, form, language. Foreign films and U.S.
feminist critical interventions aimed at deconstructing the category
independent cinema were the primary locations of my filmic looking
"woman," which highlight the significance of race, many feminist film
relations, even though I also watched Hollywood films.
From "jump," black female spectators have gone to films with critics continue to structure their discourse as though it speaks about
"women" when in actuality it speaks only about white women. It seems
awareness of the way in which race and racism determined the visual
ironic that the cover of the recent anthology Feminism and Film Theory
construction of gender. Whether it was Birth of a Nation or Shirley
edited by Constance Penley has a graphic that is a reproduction of the
Temple shows, we knew that white womanhood was the racialized
photo of white actresses Rosalind Russell and Dorothy Arzner on the
sexual difference occupying the place of stardom in mainstream narrative
1936 set of the film Craig's Wife,yet there is no acknowledgment in any
film. We assumed white women knew it too. Reading Laura Mulvey's
essay in this collection that the woman "subject" under discussion is
provocative essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," from a
always white. Even though there are photos of black women from films
standpoint that acknowledges race, one sees clearly why black women
reproduced in the text, there is no acknowledgment of racial difference.
spectators not duped by mainstream cinema would develop an opposi-
tional gaze. Placing ourselves outside that pleasure in looking, Mulvey It would be too simplistic to interpret this failure of insight solely
argues, was determined by a "split between activelmale and passive/ as a gesture of racism. Importantly, it also speaks to the problem of
female." Black female spectators actively chose not to identify with the structuring feminist film theory around a totalizing narrative of woman
film's imagnary subject because such identification was disenabling. as object whose image functions solely to reaffirm and reinscribe patri-
Loolzing at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were archy. Mary Ann Doane addresses this issue in the essay "Remembering
able to critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood Women: Psychical and Historical Construction in Film Theory":
as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the This attachment to the figure of a degeneralizible Woman as the product
victim or the perpetrator. Black female spectators, who refused to iden- of the apparatus indicates why, for many, feminist film theory seems to
tify with white womanhood, who would not take on the phallocentric have reached an impasse, a certain blockage in its theorization . . . In
gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where the binary focusing upon the task of delineating in great detail the attributes of
opposition Mulvey posits of "woman as image, man as bearer of the look" woman as effect of the apparatus, feminist film theory participates in
was continually deconstructed. As critical spectators, black women the abstraction of women. The concept "woman" effaces the ddference
 bell hooks
The Oppositional Gaze

between women in specific socio-historical contexts, between women not to look, much feminist film criticism disallows the possibility of a
defined precisely as historical subjects rather than as a psychic subject theoretical dialogue that might include black women's voices. It is
(or nonsubject]. difficult to talk when you feel no one is listening, when you feel as though
Although Doane does not focus on race, her comments speak hrectly to a special jargon or narrative has been created that only the chosen can
understand. No wonder then that black women have for the most part
the problem of its erasure. For it is only as one imagines "woman" in the
confined our critical commentary on film to conversations. And it must
abstract, when woman becomes fiction or fantasy, can race not be seen
be reiterated that this gesture is a strategy that protects us from the
as significant. Are w e really to imagine that feminist theorists writing
violence perpetuated and advocated by discourses of mass media. A new
only about images of white women, who subsume this specific historical
focus on issues of race and representation in the field of film theory could
subject under the totalizing category "woman," do not "see" the white-
critically intervene on the historical repression reproduced in some
ness of the image? It may very well be that they engage in a process of
arenas of contemporary critical practice, making a discursive space for
denial that eliminates the necessity of revisioning conventional ways of
discussion of black female spectatorship possible.
thinking about psychoanalysis as a paradigm of analysis and the need to
When I asked a black woman in her twenties, an obsessive
rethink a body of feminist film theory that is firmly rooted in a denial of
moviegoer, why she thought we had not written about black female
the reality that sex/sexuality may not be the primary and/or exclusive
spectatorship, she commented: "We are afraid to talk about ourselves as
signifier of difference. Doane's essay appears in a very recent anthology,
spectators because-we have been so abused by 'the gaze."' An aspect of
Psychoanalysis and Cinema edited by E. Ann Kaplan, in which, once
that abuse was the imposition of the assumption that black female
again, none of the theory presented acknowledges or discusses racial loolzing relations were not important enough to theorize. Film theory as
difference, with the exception of one essay, "Not Speaking with Lan-
a critical "turf" in the United States has been and continues to be
guage, Spealung with No Language," which problematizes notions of influenced by and reflective of white racial domination. Because feminist
orientalism i n its examination of Leslie Thornton's film Adynata. Yet film criticism was initially rooted in a women's liberation movement
in most of the essays, the theories espoused are rendered problematic if informed by racist practices, it did not open up the discursive terrain and
one includes race as a category of analysis. make it more inclusive. Recently, even those white film theorists who
Constructing feminist film theory along these lines enables the include an analysis of race show no interest in black female spectator-
production of a discursive practice that need never theorize any aspect ship. In her introduction to the collection of essays Visual and Other
of black female representation or spectatorship. Yet the existence of Pleasures, Laura Mulvey describes her initial romantic absorption in
black women within white supremacist culture problematizes, and Hollywood cinema, stating:
makes complex, the overall issue of female identity, representation, and
spectatorship. If, as Friedberg suggests, "identification is a process which Although this great, previously unquestioned and unanalyzed love was
commands the subject to be displaced by an other; it is a procedure which put in crisis by the impact of feminism on my thought in the early 1970s,
breeches the separation between self and other, and, in this way, rep- it also had an enormous influence on the development of my critical
licates the very structure of patriarchy." If identification "demands work and ideas and the debate within film culture with which I became
sameness, necessitates similarity, disallows differenceupmust we then preoccupied over the next fifteen years or so. Watched through eyes that
surmise that many feminist film critics who are "overidentified" with were affected by the changing climate of consciousness, the movies lost
the mainstream cinematic apparatus produce theories that replicate its their magic.
totalizing agenda? Why is it that feminist film criticism, which has most Watching movies from a feminist perspective, Mulvey arrived at that
claimed the terrain of woman's identity, representation, and subjectivity location of disaffection that is the starting point for many black women
as its field of analysis, remains aggressively silent on the subject of approaching cinema within the lived harsh reality of racism. Yet her
blackness and specifically representations of black womanhood? Just as account of being a part of a film culture whose roots rest on a founding
mainstream cinema has historically forced aware black female spectators relationship of adoration and love indicates how difficult it would have
 - LJU

bell hooks

been to enter that world from "jump" as a critical spectator whose gaze
had been formed in opposition.
Given the context of class exploitation, and racist and sexist
domination, it has only been through resistance, struggle, reading, and
looking "against the grain" that black women have been able to value
our process of looking enough to publicly name it. Centrally, those black
female spectators who attest to the oppositionality of their gaze de-
construct theories of female spectatorship that have relied heavily on the
assumption that, as Doane suggests in her essay "Woman's Stake:
Filming the Female Body," "woman can only mimic man's relation to
language, that is assume a position defined by the penis-phallus as the
supreme arbiter of lack." Identifying with neither the phallocentric gaze
nor the construction of white womanhood as lack, critical black female
spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual
delight is the pleasure of interrogation. Every black woman spectator I
talked to, with rare exception, spoke of being "on guard" at the movies.
Talking about the way being a critical spectator of Hollywood films
influenced her, black woman filmmaker Julie Dash exclaims, "I make
films because I was such a spectator!" Loolung at Hollywood cinema
from a distance, from that critical politicized standpoint that did not
want to be seduced by narratives reproducingher negation, Dash watched
mainstream movies over and over again for the pleasure of deconstruct-
ing them. And, of course, there is that added delight if one happens, in
the process of interrogation, to come across a narrative that invites the
black female spectator to engage the text with no threat of violation.
Sigdicantly, I began to write film criticism in response to the first
Spike Lee movie, She's Gotta Have It, contesting Lee's replication of
mainstream patriarchal cinematic practices that explicitly represents wo-
man (in this instance, black woman) as the object of a phallocentric gaze.
Lee's investment in patriarchal filmic practices that mirror dominant
patterns makes him the perfect black canddate for entrance to the Holly-
wood canon. His work mimics the cinematic construction of white woman-
hood as object, replacing her body as text on which to write male desire with
the black female body. It is transferencewithout transformation. Entering
the discourse of film criticism from the politicized location of resistance, of
not wanting, as a workmg-class black woman I interviewed stated, "to see
black women in the position whlte women have occupied in film forever," Black looks: Eula Peuzant (Alva Rodgers, leJ), Yellow Mary (Ba~bara0,center), and N a m ~Peazant (Cora
I began to think critically about black female spectatorship. Lee Day, right) in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1992). Plroio courtesy oJKino Intemationcll.
For years I went to independent and/or foreign films where I was
the only black female present in the theater. I often imagined that in
 every theater in the United States there was another black woman The recent publication of the anthology The Female Gaze: Wo-
watching the same film wondering why she was the only visible black m e n as Viewers of Popular Culture excited me, especially as it included
female spectator. I remember trying to share with one of my five sisters an essay, "Black Looks," by Jacqui Roach and Petal Felix that attempts
I
the cinema I liked so much. She was "enraged" that I brought her to a to address blaclz female spectatorship. The essay posed provocative
theater where she would have to read subtitles. To her it was a violation questions that were not answered: Is there a black female gaze? How do
! of Hollywood notions of spectatorship, of coming to the movies to be 1 black women relate to the gender politics of representation? Concluding,
entertained. When I interviewed her to ask what had changed her mind I the authors assert that black females have "our own reality, our own
1 over the years, led her to embrace this cinema, she connected it to coming history, our own gaze-one which sees the world rather differently
1 !
to critical consciousness, saying, "I learned that there was more to from 'anyone else."' Yet, they do not nameldescribe this experience
looking than I had been exposed to in ordinary (Hollywood)movies." I of seeing "rather differently." The absence of definition and explana-
shared that though most of the films I loved were all white, I could engage tion suggests they are assuming an essentialist stance wherein it is
I
them because they did not have in their deep structure a subtext repro- presumed that black women, as victims of race and gender oppression,
ducing the narrative of white supremacy. Her response was to say that have an inherently different field of vision. Many black women do not
these films demystified "whiteness," because the lives they depicted "see differently" precisely because their perceptions of reality are so
seemed less rooted in fantasies of escape. They were, she suggested, more profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing. As Trinh
like "what we knew life to be, the deeper side of life as well." Always T. Minh-ha points out in "Outside In, Inside Out": "Subjectivity does
more seduced and enchanted with Hollywood cinema than me, she not merely consistsf talking about oneself. . . be this talking indulgent
stressed that unaware black female spectators must "break out," no or critical."
longer be imprisoned by images that enact a drama of our negation. Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance
Although she still sees Hollywood films, because "they are a major only when inhvidual black women actively resist the imposition of
influence in the culturen-she no longer feels duped or victimized. dominant ways of knowing and looking. Although every black woman I
Talking with black female spectators, looking at written dis- talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically
cussions either in fiction or academic essays about black women, I correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze.
noted the connection made between the realm of representation in When it did, individual black women consciously named the process.
mass media and the capacity of black women to construct ourselves Manthia Diawara's "resisting spectatorship" is a term that does not
as subjects in daily life. The extent to which black women feel adequately describe the terrain of blaclz female spectatorship. We do more
devalued, objectified, dehumanized in this society determines the than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions. As
scope and texture of their looking relations. Those black women critical spectators, blaclz women participate in a broad range of looking
whose identities were constructed in resistance, by practices that relations, contest, resist, revise, interrogate, and invent on multiple
oppose the dominant order, were most inclined to develop an opposi- levels. Certainly when I watch the work of black women filmmakers
tional gaze. Now that there is a growing interest in films produced by Camille Billops, Kathleen Collins, Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Zeinabu
black women and those films havebecome more accessible to viewers, Davis, I do not need to "resist" the images even as I still choose to watch
it is possible to talk about black female spectatorship in relation to their work with a critical eye.
that work. So far, most discussions of black spectatorship that I have Black female critical thinkers concerned with creating space for
come across focus on men. In "Black Spectatorship: Problems of the construction of radical black female subjectivity, and the way cul-
Identification and Resistance," Manthia Diawara suggests that "the tural production informs this possibility, fully acknowledge the import-
components of 'difference"' among elements of sex, gender, and sex- ance of mass media, film in particular, as a powerful site for critical
uality give rise to different readings of the same material, adding that intervention. Certainly Julie Dash's film Illusions identifies the terrain
these conditions produce a "resisting" spectator. He focuses his crit- of Hollywood cinema as a space of knowledge production that has
ical discussion on black masculinity. enormous power. Yet, she also creates a filmic narrative wherein the
 -
bell hooks
i
female spectatorshlp. Cinematically, they provide new points of re-
cognition, embodying Stuart Hall's vision of a critical practice that
acknowledges that identity is constituted "not outside but within repre-
sentation," and invites us to see film "not as a second-order mirror held
up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which
is able t o constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us
to discover who we are." It is this critical practice that enables production Select Bibliography
of feminist film theory that theorizes black female spectatorship. Look-
ing and l o o k a back, black women involve ourselves in a process
whereby we see our history as countermemory, using it as a way to know
the present and invent the future.

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York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
Balio, Tino, ed. The Aperican Film Industry, rev. ed. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985.
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. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 193&1939.
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. American CinemalAmerican Culture. New York: McGraw-H111, 1994.
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York: New York University Press, 1971.
Biskind, Peter. Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying
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Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive
History of Blacks in American Films (new expanded edition). New York:
Continuum, 1989.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style d Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985.
Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema: 1907-1915. New York: Scribners,

Britton, Andrew. "Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment," Movie

Butsch, Richard, ed. For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into
Consumption. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. Hollywood Films of the Seventies: Sex, Drugs,
Violence, Rock n' Roll and Politics. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
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