Motherlands as Gendered Spaces. Cultural Identity, Mythic Memory and Wholeness in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust.

Abstract

This paper will analyze from an interdisciplinary, post-colonial and Black feminist point of view the project of reconstruction and revision that deeply affects the thematic and formal features of the work of African American filmmaker Julie Dash, and her 1991 award winning film Daughters of the Dust. My paper will show how Julie Dash consciously created her characters to challenge the icons of the dominant culture. My critical study departs from the consideration of the post-colonial condition of contemporary United States, since for African Americans there is a situation that critic Michelle Wallace describes as “internal colonization”. The paper will also refer to Julie Dash’s homonymous novel Daughters of the Dust published in 1997, since in both the film and the novel the Carolinas and the Georgian Islands off the US mainland become motherlands where identity and family history can be traced through memory, storytelling, ancestry and myth. The presence of these elements in the film and the novel allow the characters to enter into spiritual journeys towards empowerment and wholeness. Ancestry, a deep sense of spirituality, a style that establishes connecting bonds with both the past and the present, reveals a mastery in a figurative use of visual language that enlarges the initial project of historical reconstruction towards the connecting and healing understanding of wholeness as spiritual return. Claiming the space know as Ibo Landing in the Sea Islands as a sacred one, a place where the archetypal African memory is secured, Daughters follows the project depicted by Paule Marshall in her 1983 novel Praisesong for the Widow, because both the novels and the film emphasize the diasporic identities of their characters who seek history within themselves, defining the links among black women worldwide.