The fascinating and widely studied Gullah culture of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia inspired director Julie Dash to make the award-winning 1991 film, "Daughters of the Dust," which will show Thursday night at 9:15 in Loew Auditorium.
Visiting African and African American studies Professor Chinosole will introduce the film.
"It's an important film because it's the first by an African American to have a national theatrical release," Chinosole said. "It was so important that Atlanta has named a special day after Julie Dash. "The film lyrically recalls Gullah culture at the turn of the century.
"They were slaves on huge plantations that produced indigo," Chinosole said of the Gullah. "Because they were isolated from the mainland, very often the masters of the plantation would be absentee landlords, so they had a lot more cultural autonomy than other slave populations. They have the most easily recognized retentions of African customs and language in the United States."
Chinosole explained that "Daughters of the Dust" utilizes motifs current in the womanist literature of Toni Morrison, Margaret Creel and Toni Cade Bambara. Womanism can be described as a manifestation of feminism rooted in African American cultural and historical conditions.
The film is presented in conjunction with the current Hood Museum exhibition of the photographs of Carrie Mae Weems. Weems' photographs, interspersed with text, deal with issues of African American identity.
Her photographs of the modern day Sea Islands depict stores that sell sweet potato pies and religious "healing oil," landscapes full of palm trees and old slaves' quarters and graveyards.
Hubcaps strewn in a yard and mattress springs tangled in trees give a haunting feeling of displacement, as if urban detritus had been transported to these picturesque islands. Pictures of a house once occupied by slaves and graveyards with unevenly sunken tombstones conjure the sense of an abandoned world, though the Gullah still live there today.
Crucial elements of Weems' work are the written passages that appear between the images. These reproduce African folklore and show it transformed by African American experience. One reads, "Wall paper your home with newspaper. Before a hag can bother you, it must read every word. And if it can't read, there you go."
Included in Weems' "Sea Island Series" are ceramic plates that bear poems all titled, "Went Looking For Africa." Sometimes Weems finds Africa "in the grave-yards of Hilton Head," sometimes in "a bowl of buttered beans."
The Gullah and the Sea Islands continue to inspire anthropological, ethnographic and historical research as well as works of art such as Dash's film and Weems' photographs.
