Sound and Feminist Modernity in Black Women's Film Narratives

Feminist film theory addressing black women’s representation in film has steadily developed a series of subject positions that challenge the dominant assumptions of Anglo/Euro feminist film theory. ¹ The feminist critical practice by which we designate some filmic and critical work as feminist, and others as black feminist, has preserved the “occult” ² status of black women as subjects in academic discourse. As a result, the study of sound in black feminist films has been neglected, while sound in European and American aural female subjectivities in film has been explored in some depth. This emphasis on visuality, and Black/ Anglo/Euro feminist film criticism’s prioritization of the black female form, is an inevitable consequence of the ruling archetypes of black femininity in the Hollywood silent film era. Concerted efforts were, then, inevitably focused on discussing, analyzing, and contesting the visual iconography of black women on screen and, consequently, the use of sound in African American women’s film has been an under-researched area. Notwithstanding my discomfiture with the term “black women’s film,” which is simultaneously homogenizing and separating, given the lack of attention to the auditory, I offer some scattered speculation on the value of sound and of studying sound. I use three films that could more usefully be called anti-colonial: Julie Dash’s Illusions (1981) and Daughters Of The Dust, (1991) and Omah Diegu’s The Snake In My Bed (1995). I explore the hypothesis that sound is imperative to the entrance of subaltern women into modernity, that is, to the rights of all subjects, including the subaltern, to access public entitlements and juridical guarantees. For the female subject, this may be understood as having the right to be portrayed with dignity and the right to self-representation or legal representation. ³ My conjectures and observations seek to foreground some strategies used by filmmakers’ use of sound and its contribution to the participation of black women as modern anti-colonial subjects in film.