Boundaries for Another

Susan Courtney's chapters from Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation offer a dynamic reading of the issues of race and identification in Hollywood films. While she focuses on the advent and execution of miscegenation clauses, what is at stake in her argument are the ways in which identities are created and accepted by another for the other. I intend to set Courtney's readings and examples within a larger theoretical framework from which we can further understand the discussion that snowballed in class.

A useful tool for understanding how boundaries are defined is the idea of boundaries as a process. Boundaries are formed not by the people within, but by the people beyond. Tessa Morris-Suzuki suggests, "categories and exclusion…do not exist only within the boundaries of each nation, but replicate themselves across frontiers like a chain reaction" and "exclusivist images of 'culture' or 'ethnicity' in one nation feed off and reinforce exclusivist images of neighboring nation" (8). Paul Willemen, also arguing about the national, suggests the Bakhtinian notion of dialogism as a means to recognize the mutual construction and imagination of boundary between two entities. While Willemen and Morris-Suzuki's interest lie in defining the national, their ideas are useful for digesting Courtney's interest in the regional and racial.

The regional and the racial are construed by Hollywood through exclusion (i.e. miscegenation clauses). Courtney suggests that the advent of miscegenation was in reaction to the moral boundaries of the South as perceived by the Hollywood elite. Hollywood, in part, played the role of constructing the South's moral boundaries. The same applies to race where again the Hollywood elite "deem[ed] 'race' to be a visible fact" (142). Blackness is visible, and therefore race. Courtney suggests that it can be constructed both from within and imposed upon the subject from the outside. It is a boundary determined by whiteness, and in determining the boundary whiteness deems itself to be non-racial. What this process creates is tokenism as a means for ghettoisation, and the fetishizing of specificity.

The same process can be recognized in Hollywood's imagining of the South. Yes, the South is the first to determine its own boundaries. But we must recognize the South is determined from the outside as well by being visually set in a determined context. Hollywood creates that context just as Kazan felt he created the true South in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Courtney suggests Hollywood uses a, "complex series of inscriptions that direct us when to see" (171). The landscape becomes performative as if a blood essence is bubbling forth like Courtney argues is inescapable in Hollywood's race. Hollywood's Southern landscape must perform its authenticity. The landscape must perform as determined by Hollywood, and it must pose for the camera. The authenticity is in its pose.

-- Jim Bittl

Sources:

Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. "Introduction," in Reinventing Japan: Time, Space, and Nation (M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 8.


Willemen, Paul. "The National Revisited," in Theorising National Cinema, ed. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen (BFI, 2006), 29-43.