["There is nothing like this book. At once a magnificent work of social and cultural history, an anthropology of race, and a political economy of racial capitalism and Empire, this is the most original examination of the American film industry ever published. But like all of Robinson's work, Forgeries of Memory and Meaningthe works of Shakespeare, scientific discourse, and early minstrelsy. And his prodigious research has does much more, extending over three centuries to reconstruct the roots of modern black representation in uncovered celluloid gems and theater works I never knew existed."--Robin D. G. Kelley, University of Southern California, LINK ]
There he is, on the frontispiece, and there he is again, on the contents page, and in his other antic guises, scattered throughout the pages of Robinson’s magisterial history – the original, endlessly repeated Jim Crow, the comedic deformity and defamation of a people; a sell, a fraud.
Selling is part of what it’s about – or what it came to be about. But there is much more to it than that … And it all began much earlier, centuries before, in fact. For Forgeries is much more than a scholarly exegesis of the treatment of race in fi lm and performance, though it does that brilliantly, excavating a wealth of obscure, scarcely known material, as well as re- evaluating the great landmarks obscured as much, in their way, by unreckoning critical acclamation. Its fundamental achievement is to lay bare the cultural wellsprings of modern American society, the weight and meaning of its rootedness in slavery and the ingenious rapacity with which that fraudulent inheritance was invested; the dividends it paid; the costs it incurred.
Robinson’s narrative – though that word does not adequately convey the reconstructive nature of his enterprise – begins with nineteenthcentury ‘race’ science, reaching back to the images and understandings of ‘blackamores’ forged under pressure of slavery in a Europe that had long engaged in such practices and the consequent inferiorisation of their subjects. ‘Race is mercurial – deadly and slick … By the time the moving picture camera arrived on the scene, the Negro was in full costume. But before then, that costume would undergo extraordinary changes in the seventeenth century and then again at the end of the nineteenth century.’
As Robinson demonstrates, many of those extraordinary changes were wrought by the salvoes fi red, campaigns fought, territory grappled over, in the battle over slavery:
quote: the sheer audacity and apparently undeterrable stream of antislavery propaganda and the frequent occurrence of actual slave revolts compelled a proslavery counterattack. It was at this moment in the struggle over slavery that many of the caricatures of Blacks which would dominate American fi lm came into existence.
The first target to come under the attack of white caricaturists was the free black middle class – its growth, despite all the forces ranged against it, a testimony to black resilience and enterprise. Its representatives were the most egregious in not knowing or respecting their allotted place, in daring to organise their own social lives, their own institutions, their own media, and were consequently pilloried for this through a sustained grossness of imagery and ridicule that permeated national cultural life.
It is no small part of Robinson’s achievement that, in giving us a history of ‘race’ in American fi lm, he gives us a history of black America for that period. And, in giving us a history of fi lm itself, he gives us a dynamic portrait of the growth of the industrial and fi nancial development with which the fi lm business was inextricably linked and out of which it grew. It is a concrete demonstration of the way in which the representations blazoned on the screen and absorbed by millions of people, multitudes of them new immigrant Americans, were only the fi nal flowering of a growth that was rooted deep in the economic and political structures of the nation. With painstaking subtlety, Robinson elucidates the links between, for example, the banking and finance houses, the indebted railroad companies (their infrastructure constructed by black convict labour) transporting the raw materials for industry across the continent and transporting mass populations to the thriving world fairs and exhibitions where ethnographic images (in keeping with the latest race science) of blacks as savages, or blacks as slavery-nostalgia were purveyed – to advertise and sell anything from porridge and pancake mix to washing powder, tobacco and shoe polish. Images that were then used as source and substance for the new wonders of the moving picture industry, that then fed back into advertising and other media in a continuous loop.
The career of one such black icon is instructive – ‘Aunt Jemima’. Originally a fi gure from lyrics in the repertoire of the black minstrel Billy Kersands, ‘Jemima’ was then incorporated into blackface minstrelsy, and subsequently became the smiling ‘mammy’ face of a multi-million dollar food industry. The demeaning ‘mammy’ fi gure, with her fat jollity, knotted headscarf, devotion to the white family and total asexuality, bears, as Robinson demonstrates, no relation to any reality of southern black life for enslaved women. But this did not prevent her becoming the comforting face of race in popular culture. Aunt Jemima, launched
as a walking, talking fi gure at the massive Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, was performed by a black actress and a former slave, Nancy Green, who sang songs, told stories – and cooked pancakes; a front for bulk selling of this cheap, mass-produced commodity. Fictional Jemima took over real-life Green:
quote: Though complemented by regional surrogates, Green would dominate the performance of Aunt Jemima till her death in 1923. By then her own biography and the fi ction of Jemima had long been merged by the corporate and historical reconstructions of the origins of Jemima. But hers was merely a particle of the fi ctionalizations of race, blackness and American history whose appearances would come to dominate American popular culture.
D.W. Griffi th’s 1915 Birth of a Nation is seen as crucial in what Robinson calls ‘the rewhitening of the nation’. He frames his discussion of Birth not only in terms of prior film historiography but also Griffith’s earlier work (‘paternalist, sentimental’); the source novel from which Birth is drawn; and the poisonous racial politics of the time. It was a time when the brilliant black boxer Jack Johnson (his mastery captured on fight films) so utterly refused to know his (blacks’ only) place that he was threatened by lynch mobs and public death threats and when a compound of anti- Semitism, racial and class hatred led to the railroading of a black man, Jim Conley, and a Jewish man, Frank Phagan, over the murder of a poor white woman; Phagan was eventually abducted from the prison farm where he had been sent and lynched. As Robinson laconically puts it, ‘class animosity and anti-Semitism superseded Negrophobia’; in Griffith’s fi lm elements from the murder case together with elements from the novel combined to
recast the American Civil War as a violent fratricidal confrontation between whites … Griffi th then reimagined the Reconstruction as a temporary moment of mulatto political ascendancy and Black triumph, rape, and anarchy … ‘Lincoln’s dream’ was to return Blacks to Africa, and only his assassination had frustrated his act of cleansing.
The film had opened in March 1915; Thanksgiving night that same year saw the formation in Georgia of the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. When is added to the wealth of this telling detail and close argument yet more contextual interconnection, between America’s subsequent ( arguably business-driven) involvement in the first world war and its growing expansionism, the formidable richness of Robinson’s research and the multi-layered complexity of his analysis become apparent.
That the weight of the racism, expressed in mass-manufactured cultural products, that Robinson documents is almost overwhelming is not surprising for:
quote: At the onset of mass movie production, apartheid was the structural instrument of American capital, and American film makers supplied a galaxy of imagery and story lines which naturalized and popularized white hegemony.
Many of those story-lines, much of that imagery would, indeed, be surprisingly familiar to any student of English eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury drama. A 1911 Pathé fi lm For Massa’s Sake appears to lift its main plot device from Thomas Morton’s 1816 The Revolt of Surinam, in which a freed slave sells himself back into slavery to clear his former master’s debt. Over and over, as in nineteenth-century English drama (with the towering exception of Ira Aldridge), blacks were represented by white actors in burnt cork make-up; while the evil mulatta/o, a staple of American motion pictures and an exemplar of the perils of race- mixing or ‘amalgamation’ had, also in the nineteenth century, crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, from a race-science obsessed America to England, that earlier home of racial science.
Yet it would be wrong to leave the story there. For in myriad ways black artists, actors, film makers, entertainers sought to challenge, subvert or broaden the humanity of those restricted images within which the major film industry attempted to confi ne them; from the black, independent and radical fi lmmaker Oscar Micheaux, whose best work was self- and community fi nanced on a shoestring budget; to the militant black actress Fredi Washington; the lesser known Theresa Harris; and the brilliant comedic presence of Mantan Moreland, with his capacity for ironic inversion of his role even as he played it. Even Stepin Fetchit on occasion neatly sidestepped his accustomed function. Not to mention those musicians and performers who, as blacks in minstrelsy, challenged the grotesquery of blackface minstrelsy, to deepen the humanity of the image of the black-skinned entertainer. At the end of the nineteenth century, one such entertainer, Bob Cole, actually performed in whiteface – an unprecedented cocking of the snook at America’s Jim Crow segregationist culture. Or there was the glamorous Aida Overton Walker, who from a singer and dancer became a choreographer – and the initiator of the dance craze, the cakewalk, which she taught to ‘English aristocrats and the cream of white American society’.
That is Robinson’s history for you – built, piece upon piece, from the ground up into a fascinating multi-storied structure, displaying a historical sweep that encompasses both the seemingly insignifi cant detail and the overarching grand design. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning in its breadth of vision, its originality of scholarship and its supple clarity of analysis is, quite simply, a tour de force.
By Hazel Waters, Race & Class 50: 98-101
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