The Film Studies Center and the Race/Film Study Group present the 2004 Oscar Micheaux Lectures on Race and Media

Friday, May 21, 2004, 4:30 pm

The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Texas Upbringing, An Interactive Cultural History
Carroll Parrott Blue
Documentary Filmmaker, Author and Professor, School of Communication, San Diego State University

Carroll Parrott Blue will present her stunning new DVD-ROM, which makes her personal story and its historical background come to life. Blue turns her lens on her mother's and her own lives as African American women in the segregated South before and during the Civil Rights era. This mother-daughter story foregrounds two strong women who fought institutionalized racism—one through community activism, the other through artistic creativity—even as the effects of racism and their differing responses to it frayed the very fabric of their relationship.

Users navigate through mindscapes of Blue's "Homeland" and "Hell" where they find beautifully interwoven visual and aural traces of people, buildings, media images, and events that shaped the community's struggle against racism and Blue's development as an artist.

 

Thursday, May 27, 2004, 4:30 pm

Oscar Micheaux's Afro-modenist Detective Novels and His Revision of the Pulp Fictions of the 1930s
Brian Cremins
Assistant Professor of English, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Oscar Micheaux's pioneering films have influenced filmmakers ranging from Ken Jacobs to Spike Lee, and have received a great deal of critical attention in the last ten years. Despite the growing awareness of Micheaux the filmmaker, Micheaux the novelist is less well known and remains a mystery for most scholars of African American literature. Micheaux's seven self-published novels provide us with a vital record of his varied experiences as a Pullman car porter, South Dakota homesteader, and urban raconteur and filmmaker.

Most fascinating are his two detective novels of the 1940s, The Case of Mrs. Wingate and The Story of Dorothy Stanfield, both of which examine and critique the conventions of the era's pulp fictions and B-movie serials while promising readers stories of "human interest, as intense, suspenseful and dynamic as an atomic bomb!" As products of a protean, modern multimedia artist, Oscar Micheaux's late novels document his numerous strategies of resistance in a popular culture glutted with degrading images of African Americans.

Both lectures will take place in the Film Studies Center Auditorium, Cobb 307, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue