Oct 9th, 2018, 05:24 AM

Seeing White Supremacy Through a Cinematic Lens

By Leonardo Tow
Image Credit: Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0
Professor Alice Mikal Craven's perspective on white supremacy is spotlighted in her new book.

At the beginning of October, the American University of Paris celebrated the launch of Professor Alice Mikal Craven’s book Visible and Invisible Whiteness: American White Supremacy Through the Cinematic Lens. Professor Craven entered AUP as a part of the Comparative Literature and English department, but now splits her time between Comparative Literature and English, as well as the Film department, which she chaired for eight years.

The book is meant as an academic text on American white supremacy and it's perpetuation through Hollywood cinema. Professor Craven looks outside the canon of films that most individuals rely on when writing such a text. “We're going to learn more through the films that were forgotten than those that were selected for the canon,” she says.

As Professor Craven mentioned in her talk, many of the techniques that have become commonplace in Hollywood were set up by D.W. Griffith when he made the film Birth of a Nation, which has since been criticized for its racist connotations and glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. The New Yorker's Richard Brody wrote an article describing both the horrors of the work as well as the brilliance of the art describes it as, "the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality." Craven says that the need for a continuous narrative in Hollywood, directors often normalizes whiteness. These techniques are still perpetuated today.

"So in early films, for example, Imitation of Life, even the suggestion that the black characters might have actual personalities is something that has to be put to rest halfway through the film, because the only actors and actress that you saw in early Hollywood cinema that were black, were stereotypes and that use of these black stereotypes did not really change until, well, maybe it has not even really changed yet," Professor Craven said. "So the possibilities for characterization, the kinds of narrative lines that are acceptable, and the kinds of genres that exist in Hollywood cinematic language are ones that inadvertently confirm white supremacy. While I think that’s something most people would agree with, to be able to say it in ways that are instructive, rather than incendiary, takes a lot of time.”



At the launch, Professor Craven spoke about her inspiration for the book, beginning with her childhood in the tiny southern town of Elliott, North Carolina. In the preface of her book, she describes how her school became "integrated" when one black child entered her class as well as the one black couple who attempted to join her families church. When the pastor welcomed the couple, many other members of the congregation stood up and asked for his resignation. These early experiences along with the influence of the Franco-Algerian film scene, which she was exposed to after first moving to France 25 years ago, appear many times in her text.

Professor Craven said, “One of the things I learned is that when I lived in the South, I saw things that I thought were unjust, then I moved to the North to get away from them only to discover that there is racism everywhere. Then when I moved to Europe it was pretty much the same, it took me a while to see it, but I became extremely interested in the history of the Franco-Algerian war. Eventually, I realized that what I thought was an escape from the racial oppression of where I grew up was actually something that still exists, but in a very different form here [in Europe]. This gave me a window through which I could look, from a distance, at the things I wanted to write about.”

While in the preface of her text Professor Craven writes, “The seeds for this book were planted a long time ago”, she described for the Peacock a more recent inspiration. When she was at a Richard Wright conference, held at the American University of Paris from June 17-20, 2008. In speaking with J. Edgar Wideman, an author she had admired for a long time, she said, “I feel a bit shy talking to you because I’m not really a scholar of the things that I am discussing [when running the Richard Wright conference]; I’m a scholar of seventeenth-century Baroque tragedy.”

In response, Wideman said, “Black life in America is a Baroque tragedy.”

 “While he was making a joke, I thought it was a very accurate and eloquent joke. So that just tipped me towards doing more of my research on African American writers.” Craven said.

To close the interview, she told Peacock Plume, “I didn’t all of a sudden feel liberated from the instances of racism once I got to Europe, but I did begin to see how American racism is distinct from other forms of racism. That’s why I always say that this book is about American racism and white supremacy because it is my attempt to try and make sense of how racism functions in America.”

Look out for Professor Craven’s follow-up text in which she continues to explore American white supremacy through the cinematic lens of the contemporary era. She says, “When I got to the afterword and started writing about all of these things I realized that this wasn’t just an afterword, it was another book and while it’s not called volume two, it is essentially volume two.”