Black to Ireland
Circum-Atlantic Double Exposure and Racialized Jump Cuts in The Emperor Jones
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272066 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Katie N Johnson (0000-0001-9853-2192, Miami University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 147-176 |
| Publication date | 2019-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlz053 |
| OpenAlex | W2989764037 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
The Emperor Jones (1933) was a film aimed at critiquing empire while also evoking the black diaspora. Yet the film was created by a team of Irish-American artists (playwright Eugene O’Neill, director Dudley Murphy, and actor Dudley Digges). Their work on The Emperor Jones came from a commitment to the idea that the colonization of Ireland was of a piece with the results of anti-black racism, colonialism and imperialism (although not similar), and as a way of negotiating their own contested relationship with legitimating structures in white, US culture. The film’s racial politics, which have been debated since its premiere, repeatedly interlink a range of global and circum-Atlantic legacies of white imperialism. The Emperor Jones abounds with contradictions: it both shattered racial constraints in American film while also articulating racial anxieties. We can see this manifested in two ways. First, the film’s anti-imperialist, antiracist ambitions are visible in the director’s attempt to overlay different cartographies, memories, and experiences of racial violation with a technique that I call “circum-Atlantic double exposure.” The second characteristic, which I call the “racialized jump cut,” is the mark of state censors and local projectionists who spliced out potentially inflammatory material from the film. Central to my argument is that double-exposure works together with racialized jump cuts in The Emperor Jones: the cut points to the doubling; the dissolve highlights the (w)hole. These two strikingly divergent and paradoxical features of the film—the director’s accretions and the state’s depletions—expose the problematics of representing imperial violence
Ancient history · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis) · Colonialism · Diaspora · Emperor · Empire · Irish · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · State (computer science) · White (mutation) · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Theater, Performance, and Music History
The black Atlantic
Cities of the Dead
Hollywood on the Hudson
Black Empire
Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture
Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture
The Afro-American
Transatlantic solidarities
Other people's diasporas”
Black Power on Stage
Eugene O'Neill in Ireland
Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery
The Archive and the Repertoire
How the Irish Became White
Whose Role is it Anyway
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |