From the Search for the American Dream to the Journey Back to Southern Roots: Cinematic Representations of Black Migrations

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2021.i17.1002

Keywords:

Black migration, South, slavery, memory, Down in the Delta

Abstract

African Americans are excluded from the myth of the ‘nation of immigrants’ due to the forced nature of their relocation to the American continent. Yet, this exclusion can engender an association of blackness with lack of mobility and agency in the national imaginary, which obscures historical constrictions produced by slavery, segregation, and racism. In the last years, new narratives, ranging from historiography to cultural productions, have emerged that highlight how black Americans, despite all odds, have always resorted to migration as a way to fight racism. Cinema has played a major role in the representation of African Americans’ migrations as a fight to become masters of their own lives and has influenced the current reclaiming of the South in important ways.

Author Biography

  • Anna Scacchi, Università di Padova

    Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari

    Associate Professor

References

Angelou, Maya. “Why Blacks Are Returning to Their Southern Roots.” Ebony 45 (April 1990): 44-48.

---. “Why I Moved Back to the South.” Ebony 37 (February 1982): 130-134.

Best, Stephen. “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” Modern Language Quarterly 73 (September 2012): 454-474.

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. “Why I’ll Watch Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates Until I Wear It Out.” Perspectives on History 1 September 2010. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2010/why-ill-watch-oscar-micheauxs-within-our-gates-until-i-wear-it-out. All websites last visited on 15/05/2021.

Caddoo, Cara. Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Black Modern Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Carby, Hazel. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 738-755.

Commander, Michelle D. Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

DeSantis, Alan D. “Selling the American Dream Myth to Black Southerners: The Chicago Defender and the Great Migration of 1915-1919.” Western Journal of Communication 62.4 (1998): 474-511.

Dreher, Kwakiutl. “The South as a Space/Place of Reclamation of Black Fe/Male Inheritance.” Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976-2016. Edited by Bryan M. Jack. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. 137-154.

Ebert, Roger. “Down in the Delta.” December 25, 1998. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/down-in-the-delta-1998.

Freeman, Lance. A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. 1951. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Henderson, Carol E. “Ancestral Life Boat: The Cost of Progress in Down in the Delta.” CLA Journal 56 (June 2013): 344-355.

“In Motion: The African American Migration Experience.” 2005. http://www.inmotionaame.org/home.cfm.

Johnson, John H. “Publisher’s Statement.” Ebony, Special issue “The South Today” (August 1971): 33.

King, Russel and Nancy Wood. “Media and Migration: An Overview.” Media and Migration: Constructions of Mobility and Difference. New York: Routledge, 2001. 1-22.

Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” The New Negro. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925.

Massood, Paula J. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.

Morrison, Toni. “Rememory.” The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditation. New York: Knopf, 2019.

Robinson, Zandria F. This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-soul South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Scrugg, Charles. Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Sorin, Gretchen. Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights. New York: Norton, 2020.

Stewart, Jacqueline N. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Tucker, Terrence. “Healing the (Re)Constructed Self: The South, Ancestors, and Maya Angelou’s Down in the Delta.” CLA Journal 58 (September/December 2014): 91-104.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010.

Downloads

Published

2021-06-18

Issue

Section

Articles: Special Section