Enchanted Memories of Regional Difference in African American Culture

Abstract

Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust offers a starting point for an exploration of the construction of African American communal memories. Self‐consciousness about such memory making can illuminate the historically generated roles of gender, regionalism, and urbanrural differences in both popular and scholarly understandings of African American culture. This is not just an issue for African American studies, however. A number of key dilemmas in contemporary anthropology are implicated. Most prominent is the rebellion against Enlightenment‐based notions of vision and rationality, which explores the senses, the magical, the uncanny, the haunted, and the subjective.