ENG 302 Devil
In a Blue Dress by Walter
Mosley Noir
and Racial Politics
I
want to make the argument that the new black directors appropriate the style of
film noir, among others, to
create the possibility for the emergence of new and urbanized images on the
screen. Whereas . . . Raymond Borde and ƒtienne Chaumeton's famous book . . .
describes film noir as purely
a style that uses the tropes of blackness as metaphors for the white
characters' moral transgressions and falls from grace, [black directors] focus
the noir style on black people
themselves. For Borde and Chaumeton, film noir is black because the characters have lost the
privilege of whiteness by pursuing lifestyles that are misogynistic, cowardly,
duplicitous, that exhibit themselves in an eroticization of violence. [Movies
by black directors], on the other hand . . . highlight less an aesthetic state
of affairs than a way of life that has been imposed on black people through
social injustice, and that needs to be exposed to light. . . . The noirs [in these new movies] are black people trapped in
the darkness of white captivity, and the light shed on them is meant to render
them visible, not white. [T]he recent run of black films that participate in
the discourse of film noir (Joe's
Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Head,
Deep Cover, One False Move, Juice, Illusion, Chameleon
Street, etcetera) force us to
re-examine the genre and its uses by black film-makers. They orient the noir style toward a description of a black public
sphere and black way of life.
--Manthia
Diawara, "Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema"
What
black people have experienced as a group for centuries many whites now
experience as solitary and alienated individuals. In their various groups white
Americans might feel that they belong, that there is a group spirit that looks
out for them. But individually they suffer the barbs of bureaucratic
indifference and the vicissitudes of corporate whims like everyone else.
--Walter Mosley
á
Grounding
psychological and philosophical problems in material social conditions and
socioeconomic oppression
á
Capitalism
á
Racism
á
Anxiety over gender
roles expands to include anxiety over racial identity
á
The theme of
ÒpassingÓ
á
EasyÕs anxiety over
the definition of ÒmanhoodÓ
á
Anxiety over maintaining
the color line
á
Using the outsider
tradition to reverse cultural hierarchy
á
Black and
working-class experience is made the central point of view
Social Context
á
Great Migration
á
Impact of World War
II on the Civil Rights Movement
á
Race relations in
the present day