Contact Information
Biography Information
Allyson Nadia Field is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University where she is also pursuing a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. She received a Masters in Film and Television Studies from the Universiteit van Amsterdam and her BA in Art History from Stanford University. Her research interests also include East-West encounters in Arabic literature, postwar French avant-garde movements, and global Silent Era cinemas. She is currently holding a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Project Description
Filming Back and Black: Strategies of African American Political Modernism reconsiders the history of “political modernism” by addressing the filmic strategies of African Americans engaged with formal experimentalism and political struggle, thereby contributing to scholarly investigations into the ways in which film functions as a political medium. This project is divided in two sections; the first part analyzes the strategic use of modernist formalism in the pre-cinematic and silent eras and the second part looks at the fully fledged “political modernisms” of the sixties and seventies that were in dialogue with contemporaneous avant-garde movements such as the French Nouvelle Vague. At the Du Bois Institute, she will focus on the first part of the project on silent era films, specifically the itinerant publicity campaign filmmaking of the Hampton Institute and the silent films of Oscar Micheaux, designed to create positive cinematic portrayals of African Americans. This section considers the filmic strategies and “uplift” rhetoric employed to counter the negative stereotyping of contemporaneous films as a way to “film back and black,” in effect answering film with film and proposing a dedicated filmic language for a uniquely African American subject. This project contextualizes these films within the historical understanding of the silent era of American film and the complicated racial politics of the cinema.