In‐and‐out‐of‐race: The story of Noble Johnson

Posted in Articles, Biography, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2013-10-07 03:42Z by Steven

In‐and‐out‐of‐race: The story of Noble Johnson

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 15, Issue 1, 2005
pages 33-52
DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571487

Jane Gaines, Professor of Film Studies
Columbia University School of the Arts

Noble Johnson’s story is a very American story, a story more typical than we have historically wanted to admit. It is the story of race loyalty and race betrayal, of family belonging and disconnection. It is a mysterious story of disappearance, a chronicle of the way a public person became a “missing person.” His is also the story of someone who was more than one—a sort of man with a thousand faces and a range of identities. We claim him as an important African American while acknowledging that he chose to think of himself and to live in terms of other equally raced categories during different portions of his long life.

The case for owning his African American heritage was continually made to Johnson by his brother George in correspondence during the later years of his life. George’s history is one of deep affiliation with the African American community. A booster for black enterprise from his years as a real estate agent in the all-black town of Muskogee, Oklahoma, in his later years George started a black entertainment clippings service in Los Angeles, where he moved from Omaha, Nebraska, in 1926. But the glory for George was in the formation, in 1916, of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, a business made possible by Noble Johnson’s Los Angeles connections but also George’s industrious work building a distribution…

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Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era

Posted in Books, Communications/Media Studies, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2010-09-22 16:15Z by Steven

Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era

University of Chicago Press
February 2001
352 pages
36 halftones  6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226278742
Paper ISBN: 9780226278759

Jane M. Gaines, Professor of Film Studies
Columbia University School of the Arts

Winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award

In the silent era, American cinema was defined by two separate and parallel industries, with white and black companies producing films for their respective, segregated audiences. Jane Gaines’s highly anticipated new book reconsiders the race films of this era with an ambitious historical and theoretical agenda.

Fire and Desire offers a penetrating look at the black independent film movement during the silent period. Gaines traces the profound influence that D. W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation [(1915)] exerted on black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, the director of the newly recovered Within Our Gates [(1920)]. Beginning with What Happened in the Tunnel [(1903)], a movie that played with race and sex taboos by featuring the first interracial kiss in film [View the short film (00:01:02) by Thomas Edison from 1903-11-06 here.], Gaines also explores the cinematic constitution of self and other through surprise encounters: James Baldwin sees himself in the face of Bette Davis, family resemblance is read in Richard S. Roberts’s portrait of an interracial family, and black film pioneer George P. Johnson looks back on Micheaux.

Given the impossibility of purity and the co-implication of white and black, Fire and Desire ultimately questions the category of “race movies” itself.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note on Film Dates
  • Introduction – The “Race” in Race Movies
  • 1. “Green Like Me”
  • 2. Desiring Others
  • 3. Race Movies: All-Black Everything
  • 4. World-Improving Desires
  • 5. Fire and Desire
  • 6. The Body’s Story
  • 7. Race/Riot/Cinema
  • Conclusion – Mixed-Race Movies
  • Notes
  • Index
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