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Nat
Turner: A Troublesome
Property
Directed
& Written by Charles Burnett
Producer/Writer:
Frank Christopher
Co-Producer/Writer/Historian: Kenneth S. Greenberg
60 minutes, 2002
Nat
Turner's slave rebellion is a watershed event in America's long
and troubled history of slavery and racial conflict. Nat
Turner: A Troublesome Property tells the story of that
violent confrontation and of the ways that story has been
continuously re-told during the years since 1831. It is a film
about a critical moment in American history and of the multiple
ways in which that moment has since been remembered. Nat Turner
was a "troublesome property" for his master and he has
remained a "troublesome property" for the historians,
novelists, dramatists, artists and many others who have
struggled to understand him.
To
emphasize the fictive component of historical reconstruction,
the film adopts an innovative structure: interspersing
documentary footage and interviews with dramatizations of
different versions of the story, using a new actor to represent
Nat Turner in each version. As literary critic Henry Louis Gates
explains in the film, "There is no Nat Turner to recover;
you have to create the man and his voice." The filmmakers
chronicle an extraordinary history of attempts to create and to
recreate the man. Such a complex film required a unique
collaboration between MacArthur Genius Award feature director
Charles Burnett, acclaimed historian of slavery Kenneth S.
Greenberg and award-winning documentary producer Frank
Christopher.
The
earliest source, "The Confessions of Nat Turner," was
not written by Nat Turner but was assembled out of a series of
jail cell interviews by white Virginia lawyer Thomas R. Gray.
The man portrayed in this first telling of the Nat Turner story
clearly saw himself as a prophet, steeped in the traditions of
apocalyptic Christianity. However, this first confession of Nat
Turner raised the question of whether the slave rebel was an
inspired and brilliant religious leader in search of freedom for
his people, or a deluded fanatic leading slaves to their doom.
Viewers watch this same controversy play itself out over and
over again during next 170 years of our nation's history.
Historians
Eugene Genovese and Herbert Aptheker discuss how the figure of
Nat Turner was transformed as a metaphor whenever racial
tensions flared. Religious scholar Vincent Harding and legal
scholar Martha Minnow reflect on our nation's attitudes towards
violence. Alvin Poussaint and Ossie Davis recall how Nat Turner
became a hero in the Black community. And when William Styron
published his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Confessions
of Nat Turner - and invented a sexually charged relationship
between Turner and a white teenaged girl he later killed -- it
unleashed one of the most bitter intellectual race battles of
the 1960s. Today, Nat Turner's slave rebellion continues to
raise new questions about the nature of terrorism and other
forms of violent resistance to oppression.
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In light of current
dread of terrorist assaults, Nat Turner: A Troublesome
Property boldly takes on special meaning. A dramatic script,
brilliant acting, and a compelling approach presents a tragic
and morally ambivalent story of unfathomable horror but also a
desperate cry for freedom. In its presentation of realism and
myth, the film surpasses Ken Burns's historical documentaries.
Throughout, commentators, both white and Black, furnish a broad
range of perspectives that require us to think deeply about
American racial violence and our moral and emotional reactions
to it.—Bertram
Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida
Brilliant work. The myth and reality of this slave rebel are
both explored in an unblinking and historically informed way.
The Confessions are portrayed for what they are - a fascinating
and mysterious co-creation by Thomas R. Gray, Jr. and Turner.
And most tellingly, this film unravels the controversy over
William Styron's novel, the responses to it, and the enduring
dilemma of knowing and representing this most vexing aspect of
American history - revolutionary violence by slaves seeking
their own freedom. Finally, the illusive Nat Turner story, and
the multiple ways of representing it, has been captured in this
stunning and original film.—David W.
Blight, Yale University
This film about the historic figure Nat Turner is magnificent.
It is required viewing by all who are deeply concerned about the
nature of race relations in America.—Cornell
West, Princeton University
Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities Distributor
Contact: California Newsreel/Resolution, Inc / www.newsreel.org * *
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Kenneth S. Greenberg -- co-writer and co-producer
of the film Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property,
directed by Charles Burnett -- is Professor and
Chair of the History Department at Suffolk University. His books
include Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of
American Slavery and Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels,
Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers,
Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery
Argument, Baseball, Hunting and Gambling in the Old South;
and he is the editor of The Confessions of Nat Turner and
Related Documents.
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Born in Mississippi in 1944,Charles Burnett grew
up in Watts. He studied at UCLA's graduate film department
in the late '60s and early '70s alongside fellow
African-American movie innovators Larry Clark, Julie Dash, Haile
Gerima, and Billy Woodberry.
After
serving as the cinematographer on 1976's Bush Mama,
Burnett made his feature debut in 1977 with the acclaimed Killer
of Sheep (87 minutes), in which he was writer, director,
cinematographer.
Tough poorly distributed, the picture never gained the
widespread notice. |
Killer
of Sheep in 1981 won honors at the Berlin
International Film Festival, as well as what later evolved into
the Sundance Film Festival, and picked
up top prize at the Sundance Fest in 1981. This film is
considered a "national treasure" by
its inclusion in the Library of Congress' Historic Film
Registry.
In
1988, Burnett received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship grant
and began work on the film that has become known as his
masterpiece, To Sleep With Anger (1990;102
minutes), which again he both
wrote
and directed. David Anson of Newsweek described Burnett's
film in these terms: "At first we seem to be in an acutely
observed middle-class soap opera, witnessing the generational
disputes between the family patriarch (Paul Butler) and his wife
(Mary Alice), and their two married sons (Richard Brooks and
Carl Lumbly).... Enter Harry (Danny Glover), a smiling charmer
from the old days in the Deep South.... Is Harry in fact an evil
spirit, setting a curse upon the house?... Glover, in what may
be the best role of his film career, makes him an unforgettable
trickster, both frightening and a little pathetic...a catalyst
to explore the conflicting systems of belief--Christian,
magical, materialistic--that collide with wonderfully resonant
incongruity throughout the movie."
Other
works in his filmography include
Finding
Buck Henry (2000),
Silence
Broken: Korean Comfort Women (1999),
The
Annihilation of Fish (1999),
Selma
Lord Selma (1999),
Oprah
Winfrey Presents: The Wedding (1998), Nightjohn
(1996),
Young
at Hearts (1995),The
Glass Shield (1994),
The Guests
of the Hotel Astoria (1989), Bless Their Little Hearts
(1984),
My Brother's Wedding (1983).
Some
have described Burnett's as being in the tradition of social
realism. Dennis Leroy Moore described Burnett's films as
"blistering art and representative of what American
neo-realism in film is like."
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
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