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Homewood Museum curator talks depictions of slave homes in film

By JACOB TOOK | November 2, 2017

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COURTESY OF JACOB TOOK Julia Rose began her research in 2003 with films like Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Director of the Homewood Museum Julie Rose gave a presentation on the depiction of slave dwellings in Hollywood film and media during the 20th century on Monday. Her talk was the final event in the Museum’s Fall 2017 Architectural Lecture Series.

In her research, Rose analyzed a selection of films and television shows that clearly show the buildings in which slaves lived. She examined the depictions of those buildings to determine whether the idea of slave life reflected in media is accurate and how that idea can influence audiences’ perceptions of slavery.

Rose explained that there has been a recent shift to reevaluate the manner in which museums address slavery, adding that during the ‘70s and ‘80s, many museums were criticized for their biased portrayals of slave life.

“There are trends now in museums that speak to this issue of bringing marginalized populations’ stories from the margins int

o center focus,” she said.

According to Rose, the rise of feminism in the late 20th century prompted many museum curators to rethink what kinds of perspectives they needed to include in exhibits and presentations of slave life.

Rose’s research began in 2003, when she watched some films on VHS that depicted aspects of slavery.

“Curators were very much influenced by popular culture in what our vision was of slave life and how that was created through movies,” she said. “I went about investigating our collective understanding, our national narrative of what slave life looked like, by using film.”

She added that she is not a film critic but sees her work as one way of rethinking the history of marginalized and subjugated people.

Rose discussed a selection of almost 30 films, including many adaptations of the acclaimed novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she said had a large influence on the way Americans perceived slavery.

The earliest film she examined was Edwin Porter’s 1903 version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and she recently added films like Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave, which won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture.

She also considered well-known films like Shirley Temple’s The Littlest Rebel, Disney’s Song of the South and the television show Roots.

While many films depict some aspects of slave life, Rose said that she only included those which feature slave dwellings, the focus of her research.

“Hollywood rarely dealt with slave life as a primary subject for their films, and this is reflected in the scant number of films where slave cabins are clearly represented,” she said.

She added that while these dwellings were usually depicted as fiction, they were nevertheless largely accepted by American audiences as true representations of what slavery was like.

Additionally, Rose elaborated on the importance of the home in her research. She said that it was a way of lending moral power to characters and that living space is a part of each person’s identity.

“Hollywood movie sets and scenes of home places helped to develop and define film characters,” she said. “The slave dwellings in these films stand to symbolize the home place as a sanctuary.”

The depiction of slave dwellings in films, Rose said, reflects Hollywood’s views on the history of slavery. She added that we should question the representation of that history.

“Film representations of slave dwellings were often representations of American collective memory in slave life, but we need to ask and we need to be critical,” she said. “Are they accurate? Are they idealized? Are they political, nostalgic?”

Sophomore Caroline West said that she expected Rose to offer more political and social analysis of the films and how slave dwellings are represented, but her research was primarily architectural.

“It seemed like such a detached, almost cold way of analyzing something that is so horrific,” West said. “In some ways that was a little bit disturbing to me, that you could distill it down into these descriptive analyses without acknowledging the horrific mentality of enslavement.”

West said that the section of Rose’s research in which she considered some of Shirley Temple’s films offered the most insight on the social and political implications of how slave dwellings were depicted.

In The Littlest Rebel, the house of a wealthy white family in the South is burned down by the Union army, forcing them to stay in a slave cabin.

Rose pointed out the unusually lavish decorations in the cabin that contrasted with the typically sparse interior that is usually depicted in such films.

“Because they’re white, they can’t be degraded, and so even though they’re living in a slave cabin they made it so lavish and beautiful,” West said. “Obviously that has a lot of connections to racism in general and the prioritization of depicting whites in a positive way on film, in such a way that you feel sympathy for them.”

While West acknowledged that Rose focused on architecture of slave dwellings because that is her area of expertise, she questioned whether it is possible to examine slavery objectively. West said that it may be necessary to offer additional social and political analysis.

“The practice is so clearly wrong and inhumane that to some degree it seems very wrong to try to distill it into discrete parts,” she said. “That is almost a way of obscuring its really vile nature.”


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