NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 

RE-VIEWING THE TROPICAL PARADISE: AFRO-
CARIBBEAN WOMEN FILMMAKERS 

by 

HASEENAH EBRAHIM 
PH.D DISSERTATION 

SUBMITTED 1998  

DEPT OF RADIO/TV/FILM, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, EVANSTON, ILLINOIS, USA 

 

 

 



 

 

1 

 

ABSTRACT 

This dissertation presents a new conceptual framework, a "pan-African 

  feminist" critical model, to examine how Euzhan Palcy of Martinique, Gloria 

  Rolando and the late Sara Gómez of Cuba, and the Sistren Collective of Jamaica have   

negotiated - individually or collectively - the gender/race/class 

  constraints within each of their societies in order to obtain access to the 

  media of film and video. I examine the aesthetic, political, social and 

  economic strategies utilized by these filmmakers to reinsert themselves into 

  recorded versions of history, and/or to intervene in racist, (neo)colonial 

  and/or patriarchal systems of oppression.  

 
 



 

 

2 

 

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 

 

Purpose and Scope of the Dissertation 

  

This dissertation examines the aesthetic, political, social and economic strategies 

utilized by selected Afro-Caribbean women filmmakers in exploiting the media of film 

and video to reinsert themselves into recorded versions of history, to challenge their 

(mis)representations, and/or to intervene in racist, (neo)colonial and/or patriarchal 

systems of oppression.
1
 I offer what I have termed a “pan-African feminist” analytical 

framework
2
 as a methodological tool to examine the manner in which these Afro-

Caribbean women filmmakers have negotiated, individually as well as collectively, the 

gender/race/class constraints within each of their societies in order to obtain access to 

the media of film and video, to adopt culturally relevant communication strategies and 

themes, and to pursue their goals of social transformation and cultural empowerment.  

                                                 

NOTES 

 
1
 For the sake of brevity, I will use the term "filmmaker(s)" to include those people 

who work in the medium of film as well as video and/or in television production.  

 
2
 The concept of a pan-African feminist framework, which will be discussed more 

fully in Chapter 2, is one which I have constructed by drawing upon various African 

and African Diaspora feminisms, tales of legendary black women, and the orature of 

African/Diaspora female deities. I use the term “pan-African” synonymously with the 

term “of Africa and the African Diaspora.”  I use the term with a lower-case “p” to 

distinguish it from the term “Pan-African” as the ideology that advocates political 

union of all people of African ancestry. 



 

 

3 

 

This dissertation arises out of my broader area of research interest, i.e., 

cinemas of Africa and the African Diaspora. As I will discuss in greater detail later in 

this chapter, African/Diaspora women have received little attention in the body of 

scholarship emerging out of interest in black cinema as well as feminist investigation of 

women filmmakers. The absence of any systematic appraisal of black women's 

filmmaking around the world has provided the impetus for this project. However, 

difficulty of access to the films/videos directed by many black women filmmakers, 

especially those who live or work outside the United States, consolidates/reinforces the 

importance of examining the broader socio-economic context within which the 

filmmakers work, emphasizing as it does, the extratextual constraints independent 

filmmakers face in attracting attention to their work. It is my hope that this project will 

provide a greater understanding of the greater process of filmmaking beyond the act of 

making the film itself.  

When I initially conceptualized this project, I did not anticipate the number of 

black women filmmakers existing “out there”, around the world, nor the number of 

film/video texts they have generated, although I did anticipate the paucity of scholarship 

on the work of black women filmmakers from outside the United States -- despite 

academia's and feminism's increasing acknowledgment of African-American/Black 

British filmmakers such as Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Ngozi Onwurah, Zeinabu irene 

Davis, and others. Even Euzhan Palcy, the first black woman to have directed a 

Hollywood production, and who has three features to her credit in addition to other short 

works, a three-part television documentary, and a made-for-TV movie for Disney, has 



 

 

4 

 

received little scholarly attention in English-language publications-- reiterating the 

continued significance of nationality/national origin as a vector of marginalization in 

addition to the now commonly acknowledged triad of race/gender/class. It is my regret 

that this project could not include all the other black women filmmakers in Africa, 

Europe, Latin America, Australia, and wherever else they may be toiling, usually against 

the odds. Your turn too, will come. 

 For many years, Caribbean cinema generally meant Cuban cinema, Cuba being 

the only Caribbean country with a long history of indigenous film production. Today, 

the distinctive histories and geopolitical configurations of the Caribbean islands provide 

a number of fascinating contexts for cinematic production, from socialist Cuba to the 

French “overseas territories” of Martinique and Guadeloupe, to independent nations 

such as Jamaica and Haiti. This dissertation will examine how black women filmmakers 

from the three Caribbean islands of  Jamaica, Cuba and Martinique have negotiated the 

specific opportunities and constraints represented by the distinct geopolitical, social and 

institutional contexts within which they work.  

The selection of Afro-Caribbean women filmmakers in this dissertation 

represents specific confluences of modes of production and geopolitical positioning of 

the islands they call home. While my desire to explore the ramifications of being black 

and female has necessarily limited the scope of this analysis, I do not mean to diminish 

the contributions of non-black women filmmakers in the Caribbean. The contribution of 



 

 

5 

 

Cuban women filmmakers of all races has been documented elsewhere.
3
  

Caribbean cinema reflects a vitality that mirrors Caribbean filmmakers' often 

cosmopolitan lifestyles and forced adaptability to a diversity of cultural influences, 

including African, European, North American and South American. Within this young 

cinema, women filmmakers are forging a space for themselves, so that a cinema which 

has been described as a cinema in its infancy (Cham 1992) has, nevertheless, produced a 

filmmaker who became the first black woman to direct a Hollywood studio production. 

Euzhan Palcy of Martinique catapulted to international recognition when she directed 

MGM's 1989 release, A Dry White Season, set in apartheid South Africa. Sarah 

Maldoror, of Guadeloupean and French parentage, is a pioneer of pan-African 

filmmaking and became the first black woman to direct a feature film when she made 

Sambizanga in 1972.  Sara Gómez, of Cuba, directed De cierta mañera /One Way or 

Another, a film that is now considered a classic of both Latin American and feminist 

cinema.  

 Initially, the scope of this dissertation ambitiously aimed at including all black 

women filmmakers working outside the US and the UK.
4
  I say "ambitiously", because 

                                                 

 
3
 See Benamou (1994) and the articles by Benamou and Fusco, and the short profiles 

on Cuban women filmmakers in Center for Cuban Studies (1992). However, these 

discussions either neglect to discuss the work of Rolando, or mention her only in 

passing. 

 
4
African-American and black British women filmmakers appear to be the two national 

black groups that receive consistent, if not frequent, critical and scholarly attention. 

For this reason, I had intended to exclude these two groups of filmmakers. 



 

 

6 

 

working under the mistaken assumption that I would identify only a handful of black 

women filmmakers in Africa, Europe, Australia, Latin America and the Caribbean, I fell 

into the trap of allowing the marginalization of black women filmmakers in North 

American feminist and other film discourses to cause me to underestimate the extent of 

their existence and productivity.  When I began this project, I not only identified about 

35 black women working around the world in the media of film and video, but they 

lived and worked in over 20 countries (these figures probably remain an 

underestimation). Since my approach to the examination of these filmmakers and their 

work emphasizes the social, cultural, political and economic contexts from which they 

emerge, such a research project would have entailed huge amounts of funding and time, 

both of which are, of course, only available to a limited extent to any doctoral candidate.  

For practical reasons, mainly that of accessibility to the actual works in the US, I have 

limited the scope of this examination to the work of black women filmmakers from 

Cuba, Martinique and Jamaica.
5
 I have also excluded detailed analyses of the lives and 

works of black women filmmakers who are born in Europe or North America of 

Caribbean parentage, but I have included a brief overview of this category of 

filmmakers in Chapter 3.  

It should be emphasized that the work of all the filmmakers who have been 

excluded as a result of this practical determination continue to demand recognition and 

                                                 

 
5
 Two Afro-Caribbean women filmmakers whose work I have not been able to obtain 

include Elsie Haas of Haiti and Lydia Rene-Corail of Guadeloupe. 



 

 

7 

 

are no less worthy of analysis than the ones that have been included in this 

dissertation. This analysis of the cinematic expression of Afro-Caribbean women will 

make a contribution to the scholarship on pan-African cinema as well as to feminist film 

criticism, both areas of research in which the absence of Afro-Caribbean women has 

been notable. 

There are several modes of production in filmmaking, and a global perspective 

reveals a range of cinematic practices and politics of production, distribution, reception, 

stylistic and ideological frameworks and relations with the state.
6
 The modes of film 

production that can develop and flourish in any society are inevitably constrained or  

supported by the overall political and economic ideologies and structures of that society. 

The larger social environment, within which a film industry functions, or filmmaking 

practices survive, is a crucial determinant of both content and style. 

It is my proposition that the costs associated with film production, together with 

the structures of distribution and exhibition (and their control) are of major significance 

in the choices, aesthetic and extra-aesthetic, that any filmmaker makes in the creation of 

a text. If we insist on seeing films and videos merely as artistic expression, albeit 

influenced by the historical and geographical subject positioning of their creators, but 

fail to acknowledge the conditions of production/distribution, as well as the assigning of 

value (criticism) by those who control those aspects, then we fail to perceive the 

                                                 

 
6
 Bordwell (1985, xiv) describes a "mode of film production" as a "characteristic 

ensemble of economic aims, a specific division of labor, and particular ways of 

conceiving and executing the work of filmmaking." 



 

 

8 

 

political nature of so-called artistic expression. Auguiste (1991, 216 ) of Britain's 

Black Audio Film Collective argues that independent filmmakers have to be engaged 

with cinema, among other things, "as a constellation of institutional conflicts", in 

addition to (and I would argue as a determining factor in) cinema "as a systematising of 

the ways in which sound, image, colour and movement signify." 

In the industrialized nations of the West, film productions are usually defined in 

relation to Hollywood, with its transnational reach and control, and exemplifying the 

industrial mode of production, i.e., studio/industrial/commercial/television production, 

characterized by the profit motive, standardization of production procedures and highly 

specialized and hierarchical division of labor and, generally, access to large amounts of 

capital, ease of access to distribution and high-profile marketing.   

Crofts (1993, 50) observes that in most parts of the world, Hollywood "has 

successfully exported and naturalized its construction of the cinema as fictional 

entertainment customarily requiring narrative closure and assuming a strong individual -

- usually male -- hero as the necessary agent of that closure", through a marketing 

strategy based on star-construction (performers and/or director), genre differentiation 

and slick production values.
7
  

"Independent production” is characterized by Bernstein (1993) as "an umbrella 

                                                 

 
7
 However, Crofts goes on to argue that there are many types of national cinema, such 

as European art, anti-imperialist Third Cinema, commercial Third World, commercial 

European, regional, ethnic, totalitarian, Hollywood imitators and Hollywood ignorers 

such as Indian cinema.  



 

 

9 

 

term, defined negatively, to denote any production practice that is not under the aegis 

of the major studios of a given period.”
8
  Such a broad definition, however, tends to 

mask the wide disparity in the resources available to independent filmmakers. The US 

film industry continues to define "independents" as all companies not owned by, or who 

do not themselves own, a distribution company (Staiger 1983, 69). Nevertheless, in 

everyday usage, the term "independent filmmaker(s)" generally refer(s) to individuals or 

groups working outside the mainstream industrial/national/ structures. These filmmkers 

may work in the individual/artisanal or collective mode of production, which may be 

financed through a variety of sources, even by a government-controlled national film 

board. In capitalist countries, such film boards function as an alternative avenue of 

resources to that of the privately-controlled dominant industrial structures, while in the 

former socialist countries such film boards usually constituted the dominant structure, 

and continue to do so in countries such as Cuba. 

It should also be noted that although television production in the US (or 

elsewhere, for that matter) may be considered industrial in its mode of production, for 

many black women working in countries such as France or England, such independent 

television stations as Channel 4 may provide the only access to distribution (and 

sometimes, funding) of their work. Thus, despite having completed several projects for 

French television, for example, Euzhan Palcy considers herself an independent 

                                                 

 
8
Or, in the case of television, under the dominion of major networks or the dominant 

broadcast stations in any nation. 



 

 

10 

 

filmmaker, as does Ngozi Onwurah of England. Both Channel 4 in England, and 

Canal Plus in France, have participated in the production and exhibition of films and 

videos by black women filmmakers in these countries. 

In the individual  mode of production, the filmmaker usually functions as an 

artist, obtaining financial backing on a film-by-film basis, and exercising creative 

control over all aspects of the production, often performing multiple roles including 

producer/distributor and often writer/editor too. Other talent/crew may also be working 

in multiple positions. This mode of production is also referred to as artisanal.  

Funding of such individually-produced independent films may come from a 

variety of sources -- private commercial sponsors, public funding through the form of 

government-sponsored grants, and from the personal resources of the filmmaker and 

his/her friends and colleagues. Independent filmmaker, Haile Gerima, has drawn 

attention to the politics underlying the connection between aesthetics and the control of 

film production and distribution. Gerima (1989, 66) argues that the process of obtaining 

film financing is a crucial site for the exercise of power regarding what constitutes 

acceptable aesthetics. 

 

Most of the time, the power structure that sits on the funding panels serving as 

judge and jury in the awarding of these grants also consciously and 

unconsciously dismisses as ‘primitive’ and ‘unartistic’ any form of African-

American visual identity. The dependency relationship that emerges as a result 

of this patronage in the long term snuffs out vibrant, burning aspects of this 



 

 

11 

 

cinema movement. 

 

In other instances, such as funding emanating from sources working within an 

industrial mode of production, arguments regarding the “marketability” of a cinematic 

text may conceal  ideological agendas unacceptable to many black filmmakers. Such 

struggles are elaborated further in Chapter 5, which examines the experiences of Euzhan 

Palcy. 

In the collective mode of production, groups of people work together, usually for 

non-profit purposes. Such groups are generally organized to promote equal participation 

by members, non-hierarchical forms of labor organization and collective decision-

making. All film production is, of course, collaborative, but the industrial mode of 

production is characterized by a sharply hierarchical division of labor in which the 

producer, as financier, has ultimate authority. In the US, many collectives were formed 

in response to the various political movements in (and since) the 1960s; many women's 

collectives have formed in response to gender and/or neo(colonial)  oppression, 

especially in Third World countries. Some well-known media collectives include the 

black British collectives, Sankofa, Retake,  

Ceddo and Black Audio Film Collective (all in the UK)
9
, Taller Popular de 

Video (Nicaragua), Third World Newsreel (US) and women's collectives such as Cine 

Mujer (Colombia), SEWA (India), Sistren (Jamaica), CoMulher (previously Lilith 

                                                 

 
9
 The Black Audio Collective is apparently no longer in existence. 



 

 

12 

 

Video Collective, Brazil), among others.  

Such collectives can be seen as formations specifically intended to circumvent 

the binary structures of cinematic modes of production which pit an industrial mode of 

production against an artisanal one for most filmmakers. The output of media collectives 

tend to be predominantly in short forms or documentaries, rather than feature-length 

fictional films.
10

 

The socialist mode of production is characterized by the centralized control by a 

national state apparatus of all the material resources necessary for any form of 

filmmaking -- including allocation of film stock, equipment, technical and other 

personnel, training -- as well as centralized state control of exhibition and distribution. 

According to Marx, the imprint of industrialization for profit's sake undermines the 

human spiritual capacity for harmonious artistic expression (Baxandall 1983). The 

socialist mode of production permits what would be an undreamed-of benefit to 

filmmakers working in many other modes of production -- the time allowed, with full 

salary, for script development as well as other phases of the production. In Cuba, for 

example, a filmmaker is permitted to spend a year or more writing and refining a script 

for any project that has been green-lighted by ICAIC.  

In addition to centralized state control as the characteristic feature of the socialist 

mode of production, the potential of film as cultural and artistic expression in the service 

                                                 

 
10

There are exceptions, of course, such as the Bolivian group, Ukamau's Yawa 

mallku/Blood of the Condor (1969) and El coraje del pueblo/The Courage of the 

People (1971); though rooted in actual events, these are fictionalized accounts. 



 

 

13 

 

of political goals was recognized from early on. Artistic philosophy among the 

ruling elites within the former socialist nations perceived the role of film as utilitarian 

and didactic in nature. Baxandall notes that the Marxist approach to art in general is 

characterized by an emphasis on historicism and a notion of art as essentially didactic 

and as reflecting the revolutionary values of a proletarian class perspective. 

The notion of film as the "most important art", as Lenin noted, was reflected in 

the rapidity with which the Castro government set up the infrastructure for the 

construction of a new film industry to serve the needs of a Revolutionary Cuba -- a mere 

three months after Castro’s Rebel Army entered Havana in January 1959. In fact, ICAIC 

(The Cuban Film Institute)was established under the first decree concerning cultural 

affairs passed by the Revolutionary government (Chanan 1985, 19).  

This recognition of the impact of film (particularly prior to the advent of 

television) generally led the former socialist regimes to maintain vigilance over the 

activities of filmmakers, with periodic waves of relaxation of censorship, or the threat of 

censorship. However, censorship within the former socialist regimes has not only 

fluctuated in degree of vigilance and control within each nation, countries such as 

Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc. have themselves varied considerably 

in the degree of freedom of expression allowed intellectuals and cultural workers, 

including filmmakers, so that a simple dichotomy of "free" vs. "censored" cannot 

accurately capture what is a range of policies which would be more effectively 

conceived of in terms of a continuum "stretching from the total control of the Stalinists 

to the nearly total freedom of Czechoslovakia in 1968" (Paul 1983, 14). The greater 



 

 

14 

 

freedoms allowed in some East European nations have resulted, argues Paul (1983, 

18), in some artists and filmmakers "playing the rather curious role of state-supported 

critics of the regime.” This latter situation has generally been characteristic of the Cuban 

film industry as well. 

While socialist film production has most closely been associated with socialist 

realism, it should be noted that this particular aesthetic style is only one of several 

stylistic strands emerging from socialist film production. The concept of socialist 

realism refers to an exploration and depiction of the dialectical process of the struggle 

between the social classes as the principal dynamic in history. The socialist outlook on 

artistic production saw the collaboration between a socialist government (representing 

the proletariat) and artistic workers as one of helping to limit the upper -class control of 

artistic resources prevailing in capitalist societies, but as Baxandall (1983, 79) notes, the 

"trite formula film of socialist realism self-righteously pitted ragged workers against 

sleek capitalists." The Marxist view that good art presents an analysis of explosive 

turning points in history, revealing long-concealed patterns of social structures, was 

replaced with uncritical versions of socialist life (Baxandall 1983, 80-81).  

 

Instead of explosive turning points, exemplary reinforcive anecdotes are decked 

out with the importance of narrative embellishment. Indeed, the  

impression of sameness of life in a Communist state is a political goal: a 

guarantee that history has no more surprises.  

    



 

 

15 

 

The delineation of modes of production as discussed here does not reflect 

mutually exclusive categories. Some filmmakers work in more than one mode of 

production. Euzhan Palcy, for example made La Messagere (1977), a short film for 

Martinican television, and followed it with an independently produced feature film, Rue 

Cases Nègres, in 1983, before directing A Dry White Season for MGM in 1989. In 1993, 

she released Siméon, produced in co-operation with French and other European 

television stations.  

While such modes of production characterize intra-national film production, 

international co-productions have become commonplace for many Third World 

filmmakers in particular, hampered by a lack of funding within their own countries. 

Tomás Gutierrez Alea's Strawberry and Chocolate (1993) for example, is a co-

production of the Cuban Film Institute and Mexican and Spanish financial support from 

both public and private sources.
11

 Many African films are co-produced with European 

countries. 

Filmmakers from the Caribbean have adjusted to working in a variety of 

economic and cultural contexts, ranging from the absence of infrastructural and 

budgetary structures in countries such as Jamaica and Haiti, to the established and, until 

recently, relatively stable production environment of the Cuban parastatal, ICAIC, 

where Sara Gómez worked from 1961 until her death in 1974. Palcy works primarily in 

                                                 

 
11

 The film was a production financed by the Mexican Film Institute known as 

IMCINE, ICAIC, the Spanish TV station Telemadrid, and Tabasco Films. 



 

 

16 

 

an industrial mode of production, an opportunity probably facilitated, to some 

extent, by Martinique's status as a "overseas territory" of France which makes Palcy a 

French national. Sistren is a women’s collective, working in a collaborative mode. 

Gómez and fellow Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando work(ed) within a socialist mode 

of film production, although Rolando now works independently in video, including 

collaborative projects with US participants. 

  

Distribution/exhibition
12

  

The defining characteristic of the major Hollywood studios is a corporate 

relationship to a distribution firm -- often wholly-owned -- as well as to exhibition 

outlets. Control of all three branches of the film industry is referred to as "vertical 

integration", a characteristic feature of Hollywood studios in the domestic market until 

the 1948 Paramount Decree forced the majors to divest of their exhibition arms, a 

process that has seen a steady reverse since the Reagan era. In the US, as well as in 

many other countries, the major studios have a virtual stranglehold on distribution. This 

form of distribution, which I will refer to as major commercial distribution, typically 

involves large inter/national distribution firms which supply the first run commercial 

theater circuit, consisting of mainstream commercial cinemas, that screen popularly-

oriented feature films. These theaters may be independently owned, or they may be 

                                                 

 
12

 I do not wish to suggest the order in which I discuss the various forms of 

distribution constitute a hierarchy of preferences by filmmakers.  



 

 

17 

 

owned by a distribution company. 

Independent commercial distribution involves the purchase of distribution rights 

by small profit-making companies such as Kino, which generally utilize the "art house" 

exhibition circuit.  Art houses are profit-making exhibitors, which generally screen films 

considered to have a limited appeal, catering to a small but loyal audience, usually in 

larger cities and college towns. They may screen, for profit, foreign films, 

documentaries, independently produced features, cult films and hold festivals of 

animation or experimental films (Bordwell and Thompson 1993, 25). The art house 

circuit may be also be utilized by the “art film” subdivisions of major commercial 

distributors such as Miramax, which is now a subdivision of Disney. 

Non-commercial distribution, usually offered by non-profit distribution 

companies and national film boards, targets educational institutions, community groups, 

collectives, trade unions, festivals, and film clubs.  In the case of self-distribution, the 

director/producer controls the exhibition of his/her film, and may target many of the 

same groups/institutions as non-commercial distributors, or may choose to “four-wall” 

theaters in selected locations.
13

 In some African countries, self-distribution may take the 

form of filmmakers traveling with their films to rural areas and villages, etc. 

Non-theatrical distribution, which may be commercial or non-commercial, refers 

to the exhibition of films outside of motion picture theaters, including airlines, libraries, 

                                                 

 
13

 “Four-walling” refers to the rental of a movie theater by the producer who pays the 

theater a flat rental fee (the "house nut") for the cost of operating the theater, does all 

the promotion him/herself, and keeps most of the proceeds. 



 

 

18 

 

festivals, etc. This type of distribution may utilize the medium of video, and may 

include home video and television as distribution channels. Home video, which has 

become a significant form of distribution has, since 1988, brought in twice the revenues 

obtained from the domestic theater circuit in the US market (Bordwell and Thompson 

1993, 26). Television, whether by broadcast, satellite or cable transmission, is the other 

major form of non-theatrical distribution. The dichotomy between television and film 

has become increasingly blurred as cinema attendances fall globally, while the number 

of television outlets and stations increase due to changes in technology and regulation. 

Within the socialist mode of production, distribution and exhibition are 

controlled by a centralized state apparatus, such as ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e 

Industria Cinematográficos) in Cuba, which also controls most aspects of national film 

production. For collectives, the usual form of distribution is through non-profit 

distribution outlets or self-distribution. 

This dissertation will explore three individual Afro-Caribbean women 

filmmakers and one collective, whose working conditions reflect a broad range of 

modes of production and who have developed a corpus of work that represents a variety 

of cinematic forms, including full-length fictional features, documentaries, short forms 

with mixed modes (documentary and fiction). The diversity of their concerns are 

reflected in themes ranging from apartheid to the IMF and international finance, from 

social change in Cuba to life in 1930s Martinique, from Afro-Caribbean religions to 

zouk music. Some have achieved a fair measure of commercial or popular recognition -- 

a French movie theater was even named after Palcy, while Maldoror, now in her 70s, 



 

 

19 

 

produces regularly for French television.  

In the next chapter, I will present a conceptual framework that aims to situate 

Afro-Caribbean women’s cinematic expression at the confluence of a number of other 

traditions of film criticism, none of which have -- in and of themselves – sufficiently 

theorized the articulation of race, gender, class, mode of production and national origin 

(or geopolitical positioning) that constitute the site of cinematic expression of women of 

African descent. This framework will insert intersections of race, class and national 

origin into the theoretical discourses of feminist film scholarship, gender into Third 

Cinema and/or black cinema debates, and cinematic expression into African Diaspora 

studies of cultural expression. However, I will first provide a brief discussion of 

terminological choices in the chapters that follow. 

  

Terminology 

While others have explored the definitions of the term “Caribbean”, I use it 

here to encompass only the island nations of that region.
14

  However, I do not restrict 

the term to include only the English-speaking islands, as is commonly the case. In 

addition, I use the terms Caribbean, West Indies and Antilles interchangeably, 

although the term “West Indies” is usually used in the Anglophone context and 

“Antilles” in Francophone discourses.  

                                                 

 
14

 See, for example, Benitez-Rojo (1996) and Glissant (1989) for explorations of what 

constitutes the Caribbean and “Caribbeanness.” 



 

 

20 

 

I have included only those women filmmakers, born and raised in 

Martinique, Jamaica and Cuba, who define themselves as "black." I have adopted the 

criterion of self-identification to avoid the ethnocentrism inherent in adopting any one 

usage of the term "black", a term whose usage around the world varies considerably, 

challenging fixed or essentialist notions of racial identity. A chaotic multiplicity of 

meanings, even within an individual country, emphasizes the necessity of historicized 

use of such terms of identity. For example, Terborg-Penn (1987, 50) notes that "in 

many Caribbean and South American societies, women of African descent vary in 

colors that determine legal status, as well as cultural association. Hence, a mulatto 

woman in the British West Indies, for example, does not identify herself as black, 

whereas the same woman born in the United States may choose to or be forced to do 

so by society."  

While not all people of African descent consider themselves/are considered 

black in many parts of the Caribbean, the term "black" may, in other contexts, also 

encompass people who are not of African descent, such as South Asians in South Africa 

and the United Kingdom.
15

 I also avoid conflating the term "black" or "African-

heritage" with the term "Caribbean" or "West Indian" as many scholars are wont to do. 

Many Caribbean societies are multicultural and the categories of race, nation and 

identity are not fixed and discrete. In many Caribbean nations, a range of terms may be 

                                                 

 
15

 However, even in these countries, such explicitly political usage of the term “black” 

may be passionately contested. 



 

 

21 

 

in use, much of which is based on parentage and skin color/phenotype, and use of a 

term other than "black" does not preclude acknowledgment of African ancestry. For this 

reason, I will explore the status of race relations within each of the islands in order to 

contextualize the filmmaker's subject positioning when she chooses to be identified as 

"black." I use the terms “pan-African” and “African/Diaspora” interchangeably to mean 

“of  Africa and the African Diaspora” in which “Africa/n” is being used, as per common 

(if inaccurate) usage, to refer to sub-Saharan Africa. However, the term “pan-African”, 

when used adjectivally to qualify the terms “feminism” or “feminist”, is being used in 

the very specific sense outlined in Chapter 2, to refer to a particular framework of 

analysis. 

I use the term "filmmaker" in the broad sense when referring to the mode of 

production. Citron (1988) notes that the term is generally used in the US to describe 

those who work primarily as independents, and those who are primarily responsible for 

both the financial and creative aspects of the filmmaking process, a process considered 

artisanal.  The term "director" is used to refer to those people who work within the 

mainstream industrial mode of production, characterized by a highly specialized 

division of labor in which the director is responsible for the overall creative vision of the 

project. However, this distinction has become increasingly blurred in common usage, 

and I will use the term "filmmaker" to encompass both contexts of production, as well as 

those women who work in television and/or several modes of production. I will use the 

term "mainstream" or "dominant" to refer to those films that receive mass distribution, 

usually in several countries. 



 

 

22 

 

 

 

Literature Review 

In the analysis of the texts produced by Afro-Caribbean women filmmakers and 

the contexts out of which they emerge and circulate, I propose the use of a critical 

framework (which will be elaborate upon in Chapter 2) that draws on theoretical 

concepts from the scholarly disciplines of women's studies, film studies, and African 

Diaspora/postcolonial studies. At the same time, my argument for a “pan-African 

feminist framework” has important ramifications for all of the aforementioned 

disciplines, which have each failed to provide an adequate methodology for the analysis 

of cinematic expression by pan-African women, particularly in terms of their 

engagement with multiple sources of oppression, the notion of rebellious or womanish 

behavior, values emphasizing self-reliance, collectivity, the oral tradition, and 

involvement in the struggle for social transformation, among others.  

In the United States, black studies, women's studies, and film studies all 

emerged as academic disciplines in the 1960s. Many of the white women who 

spearheaded the women’s movement of what came to be referred to as the ‘second 

wave’ of feminism had, in fact, developed their organizational skills within the black 

civil rights movement, although the relationship between the two movements 

remained an uneasy one (Giddings 1984).
16

 Challenges to the ethnocentrism of the 

                                                 

 



 

 

23 

 

feminist movement (and its academic counterpart, women studies)
17

 by women of 

color developed a momentum in the 1980s, beginning with the anthology entitled  All 

The Women Are White, All The Blacks Are Men, But Some Of Us Are Brave, edited by 

Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith. Others followed, including Moraga 

and Anzaldúa’s (1983) This Bridge Called My Back.  

Guy-Sheftall (1993, 77) notes that in the decade following the mid-1980s, 

Black Women’s Studies emerged in academia “in part because of the failure of Black 

and Women’s Studies to address adequately the unique experiences of Black women 

in the USA and throughout the world.” Historically black universities, especially 

Spelman College in Atlanta, which is the oldest college for Black women in the world, 

spearheaded the movement for the establishment of black women’s studies programs 

(Guy-Sheftall 1993).  

The initial reluctance of mainstream feminism to transcend a gender-specific 

perception of oppression forced women of color to articulate their own kinds of 

feminisms. These new feminisms attempted to broaden the definitions and agendas of 

feminism in order to increase its relevance to their own lives. Among these, several 

strands of black feminisms (or womanisms), and critical frameworks have emerged. 

                                                                                                                                             

16
 Giddings (1994, 303) argues that “echoing the scenario of the nineteenth century, 

White women developed their feminism in a Black organization and then turned the 

thrust of their activist energies elsewhere.”  

 
17

 Allen (1996) has noted that while women’s studies programs developed within the 

institutions of higher learning in the US, this was not necessarily the case in other 

parts of the world. Her analysis looks at the US and Germany. 



 

 

24 

 

These black feminisms/womanisms also constitute a discourse within the field of 

African Diaspora studies and will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 2. 

Before the wave of attacks from women of color on feminism’s ethnocentric 

assumption of “woman” as white, middle-class and heterosexual, a call for black 

feminist criticism had already been made by Barbara Smith several years earlier with 

her publication of an essay entitled Toward a black feminist criticism in 1977. Smith  

protested the invisibility of black women generally, and black lesbian women in 

particular, in literary criticism by black men and white women.
18

 Arguing that the 

primary commitment of black feminist criticism must be the exploration of racial and 

sexual politics, and the inextricability of race and gender in black women’s identity 

and writings, Smith also warned against the imposition of white/male frames of 

analysis on black women’s art.  

However, it was not only white feminist criticism that came under attack for its 

marginalization of black women but also black literary criticism. Giddings (1984, 5) 

argues that  “despite the range and significance of our history, we have been perceived 

as token women in Black texts and as token Blacks in feminist ones.”  

 Indeed, since the mid-1980s, a substantial number of anthologies of writings, 

and criticism of writings, by women from African and the African Diaspora have been 

                                                 

 
18

 Smith’s “Toward a feminist criticism” first appeared in the October 1977 issue of 

Conditions: Two, and the Combahee River Collective’s statement, “A Black feminist 

statement” first appeared in that same year (Chay 1993). The 1980s saw an increase in 

such challenges, including those by Dill (1983), Lugones and Spelman (1983), Walker 

(1983) and Spelman (1988) among others. 



 

 

25 

 

published. Davies and Graves’ anthology, Ngambika: Studies of Women in African 

Literature (1986), explores feminism in the African context, and includes critiques by 

both men and women and of both male and female African writers. Eldred Jones’ 

Women in African Literature Today followed in 1987. Subsequently, numerous 

anthologies have emerged which explore women authors in various parts of Africa and 

the African Diaspora.
19

  

While black feminist criticism has tended to focus on women writers from the 

African Diaspora, (white) feminist film scholarship has, until recently, neglected Third 

World women (or women of color in First World countries), and black film criticism 

has neglected women filmmkers. In the area of media studies in general, and feminist 

film scholarship specifically, Valdivia (1995, 9) notes that "although most authors 

begin their work by acknowledging that race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age and global 

issues intersect with the topic of gender and the media, the vast  

majority of books and articles available on this topic focus primarily on white, middle-

class heterosexual, Western women." 

Western feminisms have produced a sophisticated tradition of scholarship of 

undeniable influence on film theory and criticism. Early feminist film criticism, like 

                                                 

 
19

 See, for example, Christian (1980) and Brown (1981) among many others. In the 

1990s, Davies and Fido (1990), Niandou (1994), Johnson (1995), Raiskin (1996), 

Egejuru and Katrak (1997) are among the many monograph-length publications that 

examine or collect the writings of African/Diaspora women. Allan’s (1995) study 

explores the writings of both black and white women writers using a womanist 

framework. In addition, numerous journal articles have also been published on the 

writings of African/Diaspora women.  



 

 

26 

 

black film criticism, began with a critique of representation, particularly of 

stereotypic images of women, explored in such classic texts as Molly Haskell’s (1974) 

From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and Marjorie 

Rosen’s (1973) Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American Dream. During the 

1970s, the British film journal, Screen, served as a forum for the exploration of new 

contributions to film theory including semiotics (positing film as a system of 

signification and the notion of “woman as image” as opposed to the images of 

women), Marxist (ideology is a function of representation) and psychoanalytic 

(classical cinema perpetuates unequal gender relations by constructing the typical 

spectator – and, therefore, the “gaze” – as male). For these early feminist film critics, 

women were notable for their absence both on the screen (Johnston) and in the 

audience (Mulvey), but other feminists soon questioned such contentions. For 

example, Rich (1994, 35) questions the notion the spectatorial gaze is necessarily 

male:
20

 

 

Johnston and Mulvey’s texts taken together, for example, pose a monumental 

absence that is unduly pessimistic…Woman is absent on the screen and she is  

absent in the audience, their analysis argues…As a woman sitting in the dark, 

watching that film made by and for men with drag queens on the screen, what 

                                                 

 
20

 Rich’s article was originally published in 1979. Mulvey’s (1975) essay on visual 

pleasure and narrative cinema and Johnston’s on women’s cinema as counter-cinema 

are now classics in feminist film scholarship. 



 

 

27 

 

is my experience? Don’t I in fact interact with the text and that context, with 

a conspicuous absence of passivity?… For a woman’s experiencing of culture 

under patriarchy is dialectical in a way that a man’s can never be: our 

experience is like that of the exile, whom Brecht once singled out as the 

ultimate dialectician for that daily working out of cultural oppositions within a 

single body. 

  

Psychoanalysis (Freudian and Lacanian) remains influential in feminist film 

criticism. The psychosexual emphasis of  Freudian psychoanalysis in particular has 

ignored other types of social relations in favor of gender inequities in order to explain 

the manner in which classical cinema reinforces existing social relations. Mayne 

(1994, 61) notes: 

 

That the cinema is obsessed with the polarities of masculine and feminine is a 

basic assumption of feminist film theory. But cinema’s role in orchestrating 

other forms of difference – sexuality outside the heterosexual paradigm, or 

class and race difference – has not been a central area of inquiry … The 

women filmmakers whose works have received the most sustained critical 

attention tend to be white, European, and heterosexual; hence examinations of 

films by women filmmakers marginalized in multiple ways could suggest new 

definitions of alternative film practice. 

 



 

 

28 

 

Gabriel (1989, 39) has argued that “to the extent that Third World culture 

and familial relationships are not described through psychoanalytic theory, Third World 

filmic representation is open for an elaboration of the relation ‘viewer’/ ‘film’ on terms 

other than those founded on psychoanalysis. The Third World relies more on an appeal 

to social and political conflicts as the prime rhetorical strategy and less on the paradigm 

of oedipal conflict and resolution.”  

The hegemony of the psychoanalytic approach in feminist film criticism, with its 

roots in 19
th

 century European cosmology and which draws upon the Oedipal myth (and 

in Lacanian psychoanalysis, on the “mirror stage”) demonstrates little relevance for 

those who come from different cultural traditions. In many non-Western cultures, the 

non-typicality of the nuclear family undermines the centrality of the parents in the 

psychological development of a child. In addition, as Bardolph (1984, 50) has noted, in 

cultures with a strong oral tradition, “man here is not defined by his Oedipal 

relationship, but by his interaction with his whole lineage within human memory; his 

grandfather in particular is very important, as the Law and language are handed down in 

complex manner across three generations.”
21

 In recent years, other black film critics 

have argued against theories of spectatorship revolving around a de-racinated viewer.
22

  

                                                 

 
21

 Some white feminist film scholars, having a long-vested interest in theoretical 

approaches grounded in psychoanalysis, insist on its applicability regardless of the 

different familial structures and cultural patterns of non-Western societies. A recent 

example is Kaplan (1997). 

 



 

 

29 

 

One of the earliest monographs on women film directors to include women 

of color was Barbara Quart’s (1988) Women directors: The emergence of a new 

cinema. A short chapter is allocated to Third world women directors, who Quart labels 

as “pre-feminist.” However, an earlier anthology (Brunsdon 1986) and another 

(Pribram 1988) that was published the same year as Quart’s, allows black women 

filmmakers to speak for themselves on the subject of their representations in popular 

culture, including film. More recent anthologies of feminist film scholarship are also 

beginning to integrate women of color and Third World women into their scope of 

analysis. Notable in this regard for going beyond token inclusion of Third 

World/women of color filmmakers is the anthology, Multiple voices in feminist film 

criticism, edited by Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar and Janice Welsch (1994). It 

includes several articles on/by black and/or Third World women filmmakers and 

critics, as well as course files on women of color in cinema. Other white feminist 

critics such as Mellencamp (1994), Benamou (1994), Kaplan (1997) and Foster (1997) 

have joined the ranks of film scholars who have extended their interest in cinema in 

relation to gender issues to include considerations of race and/or the work of women 

of color/Third World women filmmakers. 

Mulvey’s (1975) stated intention that psychoanalysis be used to destroy the 

pleasures of narrative cinema has remained an influential force in feminist film 

                                                                                                                                             

22
 For example, see Diawara, Wallace, hooks and Bobo in Diawara’s Black American 

Cinema. Feminist film theories of spectatorship tend to draw heavily on Lacan’s 

concept of the mirror stage, in which the child first recognition of itself in the mirror 

as a unified whole is, nevertheless, one that is based on an idealized illusion of itself.   



 

 

30 

 

criticism. This association of narrative cinema with an insufficient/incomplete 

feminist consciousness continues to plague women filmmakers, particularly black 

women filmmakers whose willingness to work in the narrative form reflects a cultural 

affinity with African oral tradition in which storytelling as a mode of communication 

holds high value.
23

 In her Introduction to Lionheart Gal, Ford-Smith (1986, xv-xvi) 

comments on storytelling in Jamaica: 

 

The tale-telling tradition contains what is most poetically true about struggles. 

The tales are one of the places where the most subversive elements of our 

history can be safely lodged, for over the years the tale tellers convert facts into 

images which are funny, vulgar, amazing or magically real. The tales encode 

what is overtly threatening to the powerful into covert images of resistance so 

that they can live in times when overt struggles are impossible or build courage 

in moments when it is[sic].To create such tales is a collective process 

accomplished within a community bound by a particular historical purpose. 

The rules and process of making them suggest the possibility of a unity 

                                                 

 
23

 The term “narrative” in film theory has a more specialized meaning than in common 

usage (i.e. as a synonym for “story”), referring to the classical Hollywood plot 

structure in which an initial state of equilibrium is disrupted setting into motion a 

series of events, dictated by a cause-effect logic and ending in resolution. However, 

even in film discourses it is generally used in opposition to experimental/avant-garde 

forms which privilege formal experimentation with the medium, particularly those 

which disrupt the illusion of reality. 



 

 

31 

 

between the aesthetic imagination and the social and political process and 

action.
24

 

 

Black film criticism  

Black film criticism was launched in 1929 in a “little magazine” in Switzerland 

founded by American expatriates (Cripps 1978). The group also issued a short film 

called Borderlines, starring Paul and Eslanda Robeson, and its release at the same time 

as Hollywood’s all-black cast productions, Hearts in Dixie and Hallelujah! elicited a 

flurry of critical comment on black participation in cinema. Critical inquiry into black 

cinematic expression began to develop momentum in the mid-1970s with the 

publication of several explorations of the stereotyping of black Americans in cinema, 

primarily in Hollywood cinema.
25

 These include Bogle’s (1973) Toms, Coons, 

Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, Leab’s (1976) From Sambo to Superspade, and 

Cripps’ (1977) Slow Fade to Black.  

In 1982, in the anthology Black Cinema Aesthetics which he edited, Yearwood 

attempted to delineate a black cinema aesthetic which emphasized the transformation of 

dominant cinematic practices, particularly the means of cinematic production (and, 

presumably, distribution/exhibition). He defined a black film as “any film whose 

                                                 

 
24

 Ford-Smith also notes, however, that such tales demand to be de-coded in order to 

heighten awareness of social contradictions. 

 
25

 See Cripps (1978) for a decade-by-decade review of black film criticism in the US. 

He also briefly mentions black film criticism in England and France until the 1970s. 



 

 

32 

 

signifying practices… emanates from an essential cultural matrix deriving from a 

collective black sociocultural and historical experience and [which] uses black 

expressive traditions as a means through which artistic languages are mediated.” While 

Yearwood’s essay remained US-centric and male-centered, the anthology did include an 

essay on the images of black women in cinema and another on African cinema. More 

diasporic in scope was Cham and Andrade-Watkins’ (1988) anthology on black 

independent cinema which included essays on parts of Africa and the UK, by scholars 

from Africa and the UK. Also included was Third Cinema theorist Teshome Gabriel’s 

proposal of the notion of a traveling/nomadic aesthetic as appropriate for the analysis of 

black or Third World cinemas.  

During the 1980s, black film criticism and the critical paradigm known as Third 

Cinema began to converge.  Downing’s (1986) anthology, Film and Politics in the Third 

World includes an essay on blacks in Brazilian cinema and an interview with Afro-

Cuban filmmaker, Sergio Giral.
26

 I will return to the subject of Third Cinema later. 

Also during this period, Pfaff (1988) and Diawara (1992) published analyses of 

African cinema, the former focusing on individual filmmakers, and the latter on the 

political, economic and social context of filmmaking in sub-Saharan Africa. Ukadike’s 

comprehensive Black African Cinema followed in 1994, utilizing an interdisciplinary 

approach to provide both textual readings and contextual analysis of the diverse cinemas 

                                                 

 
26

 However, of the four articles on black African cinema, three focus on Ousmane 

Sembene, and all four discuss cinema only in West Africa. 



 

 

33 

 

of Africa. Cham subsequently expanded his diasporic interest in cinema to include 

anthologies on Caribbean cinema (1992) and African cinema (1996).
27

 A recurring 

theme in the scholarship on African cinema by these key scholars in the field reveals the 

importance of the griot (storyteller) and the role of oral tradition in African cultural 

expression, including cinema.
28

 

In 1993, Diawara published an anthology, Black American Cinema, which 

argued that the “new Black realism” of films like John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood 

(1991) and the symbolic, expressive style of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) 

reflect two primary paradigms in black (American?) cinema aesthetics, a time-based 

aesthetic in the former, and a space-based one in the latter. The new Black realist style is 

characterized by linear storytelling, and a firm grounding in the materiality of black life 

in American society. Diawara (1993, 24) notes that “a key difference between the new 

Black realism films and the Blaxploitation series of the 1970s lies in character 

development through rites of passage in the new film... As characters move obstacles 

out of their way, they grow into men, and develop a politics of caring for the 

community.”
29

 The symbolic expressive style of space-based narratives, “where the past 

                                                 

 
27

 I am here considering English-language publications in the field. It should be noted 

that a number of European-language publications on African cinema already existed at 

this time, primarily in French but also in German and Russian. See, for example, 

Vieyra (1969), Bachy (1982) and Budiak (1983). 

 
28

 See, for example, Cham (1982), Pfaff (1984), Diawara (1988) and Ukadike (1994). 

 



 

 

34 

 

constantly interrupts the present, and repetitions and cyclicality define narration 

(13)”, and “their themes involve Black folklore, religion, and the oral traditions which 

link Black Americans to the African diaspora (10).” 

In addition, Diawara and several other contributors (Michele Wallace, bell hooks 

and Jacqueline Bobo) attempt to theorize black spectatorship in terms that challenge the 

re-racinated (but gendered) spectator rooted in psychoanalytic approaches dominant in 

film (especially feminist) theory, arguing for “blackness” and “black femaleness” as 

categories of experience that impact on the degree of oppositionality to 

dominant/preferred readings of a text.  

 

Third Cinema 

Gladstone Yearwood’s call for an analysis -- and transformation of -- the power 

relations structuring film practice itself, is echoed in the concerns of Third Cinema. An 

often misunderstood concept, Third Cinema arose in an attempt to re-pose the question 

of the relationship between the cultural and the political in the context of cinematic 

practices that could not be fully understood within the dominant commerce/art 

theoretical formulations prevalent in Euro-American film production and scholarship. 

                                                                                                                                             

29
 While Diawara does not make a link to gender in his characterization of these styles, 

the films he cites as exemplifying the new Black realism style deal with rites of 

passage in manhood. However, more recent releases such as Set It Off (1996), in 

which the protagonists are female, would appear to fall into the same category. The 

example cited as being expressive in style, however, are films that may have 

protagonists of either gender, and are directed by both male and female directors, 

including Charles Burnett, Bill Gunn, Zeinabu irene Davis, Julie Dash, Marlon Riggs, 

among others. 



 

 

35 

 

Third Cinema posits a view of film as primarily neither art nor commodity, but as a 

tool for social transformation. The central concern of Third Cinema is collective 

empowerment (Gabriel 1989). 

As an idea, the concept of Third Cinema is rooted in the Cuban Revolution of 

1959 and Brazil's Cinema Nôvo.
30

 However, the term “Third Cinema” itself was coined 

by Argentinian filmmakers, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, in their 1969 

manifesto entitled "Towards a Third Cinema", in which they promoted the notion of 

cinema as a weapon of decolonization, and the documentary (but one that no longer 

echoes that common in the West which position viewers as passive consumers of 

information) as the chief form of revolutionary cinema. Published in 1970, the Cuban 

filmmaker, Julio Garcia Espinosa's essay, "For an imperfect cinema", echoed the 

political commitment to the use of cinema as a weapon for social and cultural 

transformation. In fact, Solanos and Getino’s (1983, 24) likening of a camera to a rifle, 

the film to a detonator, and the filmmaker to a guerilla fighter who “travels along paths 

                                                 

 
30

 Cinema Nôvo refers to a cinema movement in Brazil that spanned the 1960s and 

early 1970s in which filmmakers sought to introduce issues such as 

underdevelopment, poverty and exploitation in Brazilian films which had, until then, 

tended to ignore social realities. The Cinema Nôvo filmmakers drew on Italian neo-

Realism  (use of non-actors, location shooting) and French New Wave (low budget 

/creative financing, collective production, disruptive narrative techniques). In addition, 

their Marxist ideology drew on issues relating to the working class, but also to 

folklore. Arising out of this movement was a film important in terms of pan-African 

cinema, Carlos Diegues’ Ganga Zumba (1963), a historical account of a successful 

slave revolt on a 17
th

 century sugarcane plantation. A later phase of the movement was 

characterized by more allegorical narratives to circumvent the censorship of a 

repressive military dictatorship. The relationship between the Cuban Revolution and 

cinema is elaborated in Chapter 4. 



 

 

36 

 

that he himself opens up with machete blows” also invokes a vision of the 

filmmaker as an embodiment of the Santería deity, Oggun, god of metals and 

technology, and in whose iconography in the New World, the machete reigns supreme. 

Third Cinema distinguishes itself not only from First cinema (industrially-

based entertainment cinema), or second Cinema (the art cinema of the petit 

bourgeoisie), but also from other Third World cinema. Third Cinema is not 

synonymous with Third World cinema precisely because not all cinematic output from 

Third World countries can be said to have a revolutionary consciousness. In 1982, 

Teshome Gabriel's Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, 

attempted to delineate a methodological framework based on the concept of a Third 

Cinema. Gabriel (1989) argued that Third World films may characterize one or more 

of three phases (which he labels as unqualified assimilation, remembrance and 

combative). Only the third, the combative phase, in which filmmaking is practiced as a 

public service and in the interests of Third World peoples, constitutes Third Cinema. 

In this sense, Third Cinema’s emphasis on the use of a cultural form as a combative 

tool mirrors Frantz Fanon’s “literature of combat.” Gabriel’s framework drew 

criticism for its essentialist approach to film practice in many parts of the world and 

for lacking consistency.
31

 Nevertheless, the concept of Third Cinema foregrounds a 

                                                 

 
31

 See Willemen (1989) for a discussion of some of the problematic aspects of Third 

Cinema approaches to film practice and criticism, which include its reliance on 

Western paradigms (such as Italian neo-Realism, Griersonian documentary and 

socialist realism), its ascription of revolutionary consciousness to the oppressed 



 

 

37 

 

common determination by many Third World filmmakers to transform/challenge 

existing modes of film production and structures of dissemination. 

The centrality of Frantz Fanon in both postcolonial theory and 

African/Diaspora studies is echoed in this formulation of Third Cinema as a critical 

methodology, being explicitly based on Fanon’s three phases of cultural 

decolonization as outlined in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).  

According to Harris (1993), the African Diaspora as a subject of study gained 

impetus from the International Congress of African Historians convened in Tanzania 

in 1965. Azevedo (1993) notes that the study of Africa has a long history outside the 

US, where efforts to systematize the study of Africa began in the 1950s but gained 

impetus from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and the wave of political 

independence sweeping the African continent, resulting in the establishment of Black 

Studies (usually specifically African-American) and African Studies programs.  

Today, these programs may be combined to form programs in pan-African  

Studies (under various names) or they may remain separate academic entities within 

many institutions. 

St. Clair Drake (1993) characterizes African Diaspora studies as being 

concerned with the interrogation of the experience of African dispersal. This 

conception of African Diaspora studies is limited to the Diaspora (and in Drake’s case, 

specifically to the diaspora in the Western hemisphere) and is seen as a sub-field 

                                                                                                                                             

without due regard for the psychological/ideological effects of domination, and being 

too universalistic. 



 

 

38 

 

within African studies. For this reason, I use the term African/Diaspora to refer to 

both Africa and the African Diaspora.
32

 

I will draw upon a broad spectrum of ideas from disciplines within the arena of 

African/ Diaspora studies (and in instances where applicable, postcolonial studies)  

including the political and psychological writings of Fanon, identity discourses and 

debates on representation by Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, literary and 

cultural analyses by various authors including Carole Boyce Davies, Selwyn Cudjoe, 

Maryse Condé, E. K. Brathwaite, political, economic and social analyses of the 

Caribbean and of specific islands by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Carlos Moore, Aggrey 

Brown, Gloria Joseph and Colin Clarke among others.  

The connection between African Diaspora studies, Third Cinema and black 

cinema has been an intimate one, not only in terms of the centrality of Fanon’s 

political thought in Third World and black film criticism, but also because of the 

influence of Third Cinema on the revolutionary consciousness of many of Africa’s 

                                                 

 
32

 While some scholars use the term “African Diaspora” to include the African 

continent, African colleagues have noted that it is inaccurate to include Africa in the 

term since there can be no “diaspora” without the notion of a “homeland.” My use of 

the term African/Diaspora avoids this linguistic inaccuracy. Of course, internal 

diasporas within the African continent are an ongoing process due to political and 

economic instability, war, famine and natural disasters. The term African/Diaspora 

also includes the African-descent Caribbean diasporic populations in Canada, the US, 

Europe and the UK. Azevedo uses the term “Africana” synonymously with “African 

and the African Diaspora” without any comment on the usage of this term, which 

reappears in other African Diaspora studies literature.  



 

 

39 

 

earliest generation of filmmakers, among them Ousmane Sembene, Med Hondo and 

Sarah Maldoror, as well as some Black British filmmakers.
33

  

While none of these traditions paid much attention to the specific role of women 

in their formulations until the more recent advent of black feminist and womanist 

criticism, it was in the mid-1980s that an awareness of the contributions of black women 

to black cinematic practice and aesthetics began to emerge. Taylor’s (1986) essay on the 

so-called “L.A. Rebellion” explored the re-definition of cinema aesthetics including 

those emerging from African-American women filmmakers such as Julie Dash, Alile 

Sharon Larkin and Barbara McCullough. Alile Sharon Larkin herself published an essay 

in 1988 in which she challenged the imposition of white feminist definitions and 

priorities on black women filmmakers, and Jacqueline Bobo (1988) attempted to 

broaden the discourse by examining black women as cultural consumers.  

In the United States, the journal Black Film Review has been the most consistent 

among periodical film publications in profiling black women filmmakers, conducting 

interviews and discussions of the work and working conditions of many African-

American women filmmakers including Kathleen Collins Prettyman, Madeline 

Anderson, Julie Dash, Saundra Sharp, Michelle Parkerson, Ayoka Chenzira, Camille 

Billops, Carmen Coustaut,
34

 British filmmakers such as Ngozi Onwurah, Martina Attile, 

                                                 

 
33

 Pines and Willemen  (1989) provide a series of discussions that reveal the mutual 

influence of critical endeavors circulating within these two traditions. 

 



 

 

40 

 

and Maureen Blackwood, as well as some Caribbean/European  filmmakers such as 

Elsie Haas of Haiti, Euzhan Palcy of Martinique and Gloria Rolando of Cuba. However, 

most of these are interviews, or essays written in a journalistic style, and do not 

constitute a critical tradition. Nevertheless, such interviews constitute a crucial source of 

information for critics whose aim is to provide insights into the relationship between 

aesthetics and politics/economics, or between aesthetics and various black cultural 

practices.  

The European bilingual (French and English) film publication, Ecrans d’Afrique, 

has graced its covers, and has included profiles on – and/or interviews with – a number 

of women filmmakers from Africa and the Caribbean, including Sarah Maldoror, 

Euzhan Palcy, Safi Faye (Senegal), several Tunisian women filmmakers, such as 

Moufida Tlatli, Selma Baccar and several others, as well as Kadiatou Konate (Mali), 

Margaret Fombé Fobé (Cameroon), Zimbabwean producer Miriam Patsanza, among 

others. 

Among the issues that have emerged in black film criticism is one that also 

appears as a recurring theme in African/Diaspora feminist criticism, namely, the 

necessity for greater contextualization of production in analyzing cultural texts. What 

are considered aesthetic choices may, and frequently do, arise not only from the specific 

ideological/stylistic preferences of the filmmakers but also out of the conditions of 

                                                                                                                                             

34
 Notably, while the cinematic output of African-American women may have begun 

to receive some increased critical attention, these filmmakers have attained little 

commercial recognition. 



 

 

41 

 

production, distribution and beliefs about the possible reception of their work. 

Recognizing this connection refutes the "the commercial industry's own split between its 

institutional and textual practices" (Allen 1992, 180), as well as the assumptions of 

many film scholars and film critics, who, in divorcing the text from its broader 

socioeconomic context, confer upon it, as Clyde Taylor (1988, 83) would say, "a 

specious autonomy", succinctly articulated by independent filmmaker Zeinabu irene 

Davis (1990, 28) in a rebuttal to David Nicholson and (ironically) Clyde Taylor in the 

pages of Black Film Review : 

 

Black critics seem to take the question of style and form in Black independent 

filmmaking as a simple matter of aesthetic choice. It is not.  It is a matter of 

extreme hardship -- political and economic factors, lack of opportunity and 

equipment and more that influence and form aesthetic decisions... 

In my latest film, Cycles, I made a decision to use black and white film and to do 

without sync sound because it was cheaper to produce. This was an aesthetic 

choice bound by the limitations of economics and equipment access. 

 

With regard to the cinematic production of black women, however, few inroads 

had been made into the abyss that constituted critical inquiry into black women’s 

cinematic endeavors by the 1990s.  Black women outside the United States have been 

particularly marginalized. It has only been in the mid-1990s that critical analyses of 

gender and race, or the work of black women filmmakers, began to appear as a steady 



 

 

42 

 

(if small) trickle within the discourses of black or feminist film scholarship. These 

include several essays by Gloria Gibson-Hudson (1991a, 1991b, 1994), a womanist 

analysis of three films by black women filmmakers by Reid (1991), and essays by 

Benamou (1994) and Mellencamp (1994).
 
 

In past two or three years, scholarship on black women in cinema has begun to 

encompass African women. Petty’s (1995) analysis of a television series produced and 

directed by a Camerounian woman, Ngona Ambassa, explores how the conventions of 

narrative structure and mise-en-scène, which are usually utilized in television series such 

as Dallas or Dynasty to  create psychologicaly-laden representations “are subverted in 

Miseria to create social or issue-oriented representation (142).” 1997 saw the 

publication of an entire issue of the European journal, Matatu, dedicated to African 

women in cinema, although there is a  preponderance of articles exploring the 

representation of women in African films, rather than analyses of films made by African 

women. Cham’s (1996) anthology on African cinema, however, integrates women and 

gender issues through the inclusion of both the voices of African/black women 

filmmakers such as Sarah Maldoror and Anne Mungai, as well as examinations of 

women and feminism in African cinema by both male and female critics, black and 

white. 

With regard to black women filmmakers in the Caribbean, Euzhan Palcy’s 

success in breaking through Hollywood’s barriers gained her a degree of recognition 

rare for any black woman, much less one from the Caribbean. Press attention in the 

US reached a peak after the release of Palcy’s A Dry White Season in 1989. In France, 



 

 

43 

 

however, it was her earlier adaptation of Joseph Zobel’s novel, "La rue cases-

nègres", that elicited scholarly interest in her work, including a monograph on Sugar 

Cane Alley by César (1994). An English translation of Ménil’s essay on Sugar Cane 

Alley has been included in Cham’s (1992) anthology on Caribbean cinema, Ex-Iles.
 35

 

 Although there do exist a few scholarly analyses on Palcy’s work in English-

language publications, these remain fewer in number than one would expect 

considering her pioneering achievement in becoming the first black woman to have 

her film produced by a Hollywood studio. These include an essay on militant 

resistance in A Dry White Season by bell hooks (1994), while Kolocotroni and 

Taxidou (1992) and Nixon (1991) discuss white mediation and ideological substitution 

in that film, respectively. A short essay by Keith Warner (1985), the translator of the 

Zobel’s novel on which Sugar Cane Alley is based, and an interview with Palcy are 

also included in Cham's (1992) anthology. Herndon (1996) explores the affirmation of 

Afro-Caribbean identity in Sugar Cane Alley. 

 The late Afro-Cuban filmmaker, Sara Gómez's De cierta manera/One Way or 

Another, has received scholarly attention from feminist film critics such as Lesage 

(1979), Kuhn (1982) and Kaplan (1983), and from scholars of Latin American cinema 

such as López (1990a, 1990b), Burton-Carvajal (1994), Martínez-Echazábal (1994) 

and Chanan (1985). Benamou’s (1994) examination of women in Cuban cinema 

remains exemplary in feminist /Latin American film scholarship for its efforts to 

                                                 

 
35

 Menil’s essay was first published in Présence Africaine, no. 129 (1983). 



 

 

44 

 

provide some insights into race as well as gender in Gómez's One Way or Another. 

The tendency of film scholars to privilege full-length feature films over short 

forms/documentaries, duplicating the US film industry's biases, may explain why, 

despite her prolific output of short documentaries within a decade, so little attention 

has been given to Gómez's other work, except in Cuban publications such as the film 

journal, Cine Cubano, and Chanan's The Cuban Image. However, critics in North 

America may be constrained by limited access to Gómez's documentaries, only two of 

which are available in the United States.
36

 

The Sistren Collective has been the focus of scholarly attention in several journal 

articles (Katrak 1989; Cobham 1990; di Cenzo and Bennett 1992; Ford-Smith 1989/90; 

Wilson 1993). In addition, there have been two books (Ford-Smith 1986, 1989), one of 

which, Lionheart Gal (1986), was published by Sistren itself, as well as a master’s thesis 

(Noel 1988), and several popular or journalistic articles (Katrak 1990; Jamaica 1985). 

These publications focus primarily on Sistren’s organizational structure as a primarily 

working-class women’s collective, and on their use of socio-drama to raise political 

consciousness about women’s issues. Katrak (1989) and Cobham (1990) discuss the use 

of oral tradition, Jamaican patois and ritual frameworks in Sistren’s plays. None of 

these, however, deals with the Collective’s production of video documentaries and 

                                                 

 
36

 Nevertheless, it is apparent from their writings that several of the film scholars who 

write regularly on Latin American cinema, including Cuba cinema, travel regularly (or 

have traveled) to Cuba, where Gómez’s documentaries are available at ICAIC for 

screening. 



 

 

45 

 

docudramas. 

In 1997, Gwendolyn Foster's Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian 

Diaspora was published. As the first monograph-length examination of the work of 

black and Asian women directors, this publication has to be welcomed as a valuable 

contribution to a long- neglected area of scholarship. Providing detailed, scholarly 

analyses of selected works by Zeinabu irene Davis, Julie Dash, Mira Nair, Trinh T. 

Minh-ha, Prathiba Parmar and Ngozi Onwurah, the book tends to be overly 

celebratory and displays a linguistic bias. It clearly privileges -- without comment -- 

English-speaking (and primarily, British or American) filmmakers. Although an 

important historical figure in terms of black women’s cinema, Euzhan Palcy has been 

relegated to a section entitled “Other Voices”, and Sara Gómez is omitted entirely. 

Perhaps predictably, collectives such as Sistren are also invisible. This marginalization 

of Afro-Caribbean women, regardless of their achievements, continues to provide an 

impetus for this dissertation, which will analyze the work and social, economic, 

political and historical context, of Afro-Caribbean women’s cinematic expression.  

I emphasize, however, that their absence from the critical literature does not 

reflect an absence of actual production by Afro-Caribbean women filmmakers. The 

four filmmakers discussed in this analysis have produced a substantial body of work in 

the relatively short history of their participation in film/video production. For example, 

the four filmmakers whose work I explore in this dissertation have produced 23 



 

 

46 

 

documentaries of varying lengths, 4 feature films (a 5
th

 is currently in production), 1 

made-for-TV movie, and 3 fictional shorts (30-60 minutes in length).
37

 

The inadequacies of feminist and black/Third Cinema film criticism in the area 

of black women’s cinematic production leads me to the discourses of 

African/Diaspora feminism in order to construct an appropriate framework . Thus, in 

Chapter 2, I offer a conceptual framework for the analysis of African/Diaspora 

women’s cultural expression that draws on various black feminisms from around the 

world, as well as on African/Diaspora cultural traditions and values. Chapter 3 

provides an overview of the Caribbean, including the geopolitical and economic 

context of the region, the discourses of identity, and the role and nature of the mass 

media in the region. Chapter 4 explores the work of two Afro-Cuban women 

filmmakers, the late Sara Gómez, and videomaker Gloria Rolando. Chapter 5 presents 

an analysis of selected texts from the body of work produced by Martinican 

filmmaker, Euzhan Palcy. Chapter 6 examines the video documentaries produced by 

the Sistren Collective in Jamaica. In Chapter 7, I offer concluding remarks about the 

modes of production, stylistic elements, and thematic concerns evidenced in the work 

                                                 

 
37

 For practical purposes, I only discuss films and videos released up to, and including, 

1997. As a result, while I have included Palcy’s made-for-TV movie, Ruby Bridges, in 

general commentary, I have not provided a detailed discussion of this work. 

 

CHAPTER 2 

 



 

 

47 

 

of Afro-Caribbean women filmmakers as seen from within the framework of a pan-

African feminist critical perspective.



 

 

48 

 

CHAPTER 2: TOWARDS A PAN-AFRICAN FEMINIST CRITICISM 

 

In terms of the critical lens with which all of the aforementioned analyses have 

approached the work of black women filmmakers, little attempt has been made to 

identify an appropriate framework that is cognizant of the black women’s cultural, 

social and political positionings, or of the multiple nature of black women’s 

oppressions or marginalizations. In this chapter, I propose the use of what I call a pan-

African feminist framework as a useful conceptual framework for undertaking a critical 

examination of the work of black women filmmakers in particular, but which may also 

be utilized to explore the work of filmmakers falling into other categories of 

identification. For this purpose, I will draw upon the broad interdisciplinary arena of 

African/Diaspora studies, which necessarily includes black feminist discourses, as well 

as Caribbean and African discourses on cultural expression, including those of black 

cinematic practices, to delineate (what I have tentatively termed) a “pan-African 

feminist” framework for the analysis of black women’s cinematic expression.  

While the various critical trajectories of African/Diaspora feminisms co-exist in 

uneasy alliance, I argue for a broader critical lens, one which like a river draws upon it 

many tributaries as it flows towards the goal of illuminating pan-African women’s 

cultural expression. Currently, various strands of feminism/ womanism exist in 

different parts of the African Diaspora. These include black feminism, womanism and 

Africana womanism in the United States, various articulations of African feminisms 



 

 

49 

 

including those by Filomina Steady, Carole Boyce Davies’ “genuine African 

feminism” and Ogundipe-Leslie’s  Stiwanism, as well as discourses on the dynamics of 

feminist consciousness and movements in the Caribbean. 

It is necessary that a viable framework be able to draw upon all of these diverse 

strands of feminisms, African/Diaspora cosmologies, as well as theories of black 

aesthetics and discourses of identity formulation and representation. If, as Rose (1982, 

28) remarks, “black art forms have freely taken from one another forms, techniques, 

ideas as they seem appropriate,” African/Diaspora studies provides us with the tools for 

analyses of the films of black women by allowing us to consider the specific 

manifestations of art forms emanating from African/Diaspora cultures -- including 

performance, dance, music and drumming, mythologies and folklore, the visual arts 

(whether adornments of dwellings or of the person, fabric design and decoration, 

painting, etc.). Such characteristic elements of African/Diaspora cultural expression 

include repetition, improvisation, exaggeration, antiphony (call and response), 

polyrhythmic and multivocal structures, and verbal dexterity.  

I will begin by reviewing the status of the dynamic field of inquiry involving 

feminisms relating to women from Africa and the African Diaspora, before delineating 

a methodological formulation for the analysis of cinematic expression by pan-African 

women that draws on all of these discourses. 

 

 

African/Diaspora feminisms 



 

 

50 

 

The search for a discourse appropriate to understanding the cultural 

expression of pan-African women leads to an emerging field of knowledge upon which 

I wish to draw for this purpose, viz., African diaspora women's studies, and within its 

sphere of analysis, the lively discourses of African, African-American and Caribbean 

feminisms.
38

 A central concern emerging from these discourses is the necessity of 

exploring the broader social context of black women's lives in relation to their cultural 

expressions, rather than the individualist, psychosexual and ahistorical concerns of 

white feminist approaches. Honor Ford-Smith (1988, 22), a Jamaican scholar and a 

former member of the Jamaican women's media collective, Sistren, articulates the 

methodological approach favored by black/African/Caribbean feminist/womanist 

(hereafter referred to as African/Diaspora feminisms) approaches to the analysis of the 

works of black women, when she argues that we need to understand "cultural 

expression as an integrating factor in society rather than as a series of actions and 

products cordoned off from social and political processes." It is for this reason then, 

that this dissertation will draw upon a number of other theoretical discourses in order to 

fully interrogate the interventions of black women filmmakers from the Caribbean on 

the constructions of cultural identity in that region, as well as on religion, economics, 

health, etc.  

                                                 

38
The term “feminism” is used here to refer to theoretical and/or practical approaches 

addressing women's oppression, and to other issues relating to the status and power of 

women in their societies.  



 

 

51 

 

Johnson-Odim (1991) has pointed out that although several schools of 

feminism may exist among First World (white) feminists, the most widely-held 

perception of feminism emerging from white, middle-class Western women is that it 

conceives of the feminist struggle solely in terms of gender oppression.
39

 This type of 

feminism, i.e., liberal, bourgeois, or reformist feminism, clearly fails to engage most 

women of color beyond a common concern to promote gender equality as a major goal. 

Such common concerns include freedom from physical and sexual abuse and equality 

in opportunities and rewards not only in the workplace, but in all spheres of existence. 

The reason for such lack of engagement is not always obvious to white women, viz., 

that the eradication of gender discrimination may end oppression for white, middle-

class (and heterosexual) women, but it does not eliminate oppression for women for 

whom the sources of oppression are multiple, arising out of a confluence of 

race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, poverty, and other 

factors. The history of the black woman's struggle in the United States, for example, 

indicates pervasive racism within the women's movement (Giddings 1984; Carby 

1987).  One of the best known black women participating in the early American 

suffragist movement, Sojourner Truth, regularly encountered disdain and opposition 

                                                 

 
39

 This type of feminism has increasingly become more receptive to challenges to its 

ethnocentrism. In addition, Marxist/socialist feminists have themselves challenged the 

ahistorical nature of much feminist theorizing. Nevertheless, even an otherwise 

excellent reference, Kuhn and Radstone’s (1990) The Women’s Companion to 

International Film, makes no mention of Marxist-feminist approaches to film theory, 

confirming the dominant status of liberal feminism in feminist film scholarship. 



 

 

52 

 

from her fellow white suffragists, many of whom objected to both her blackness as 

well as her peasant origins, eliciting her now famous "Arn't I a woman?" address at the 

Second National Woman's Suffrage Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851-- one of the 

earliest documented challenges to the norms of Eurofeminist aesthetics (Forman 

1994).
40

  

The divergent perspectives of women of color and white feminists have led to 

clashes between Western feminists and those from the Third World at several 

international women's fora, when Western feminists demanded that "politics" be kept 

out of the conferences and concentration be focused on women's issues!
41

 This is not to 

say that some white feminists have not seen the interconnection of race/ethnicity, class, 

sexual orientation and gender in the oppression of women of color, but these radical 

feminists have, according to Johnson-Odim, "been displaced by the far more popular 

liberal feminism which has not sufficiently defined racism and imperialism as major 

                                                 

 
40

 Painter (1996), however, claims that the phrase “ar’n’t I a woman” was invented by a 

white feminist comrade of Truth’s many years after the event. However, despite noting 

that the convention was well-covered in reports of the time, she bases her refutation on 

the fact that one other reporter did not document this phrase in reporting Truth’s 

speech. Painter argues that “today the one historians judge the more reliable – because 

it was written close to the time when Truth spoke – is Marius Robinson’s” (174). Also, 

I use the term "aesthetic(s)" as a notion that is profoundly political, a site for the 

contestation of power. 

 
41

See Cagatay, Grown and Santiago (1986) and  Okeyo (1981). Of course, this 

argument undermines white feminism's own goal of linking the personal to the 

political. 



 

 

53 

 

feminist issues" (1991, 316), necessitating the involvement of women of color to 

reincorporate race/ethnicity and class into feminist analyses.  

The narrow agenda of waging a battle solely on the gender front will result, if 

successful, in benefiting only a small percentage of women, viz., white, middle-class, 

heterosexual feminists, who will be in a position to take their places alongside their 

male counterparts in continuing to perpetuate other forms of oppression that continue 

to exist. The initial reluctance of mainstream feminism to transcend a gender-specific 

perception of oppression forced women of color to articulate their own kinds of 

feminisms that attempt to broaden the definitions and agendas of feminism in order to 

increase its relevance to their own lives. African-American feminists who have 

examined the problematic relationship of white, middle-class feminism with the lives 

and concerns of women of color, or who have advocated black feminist critical 

approaches include Barbara Smith (1977), Deborah McDowell (1980), Hazel Carby 

(1982), bell hooks (1981), Barbara Christian (1985), Patricia Hill Collins (1990), and 

Clenora Hudson-Weems (1995), among others.  Proponents of African interpretations 

of feminism include Filomina Steady (1987, 1992), Chikwenye Ogunyemi (1985), 

Deidre Badejo (1989), Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (1994) and Obioma Nnaemeka (1995). 

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (1997), Consuelo López Springfield (1997), Rhoda 

Reddock (1989), Honor Ford-Smith (1989/90), Magali Roy-Fequiere (1994), Carole 

Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (1980) have all attempted to elaborate on the 

dynamics of feminism(s) in the Caribbean. 



 

 

54 

 

Paravisini-Gevert (1997, 7) argues that in the Caribbean, women’s responses 

to local conditions have resulted in a variety of feminisms that often clash with each 

other as “women of different classes and races strive to achieve sometimes 

contradictory goals.” She notes that the specific historical conditions of the Caribbean 

make women’s concerns focus on issues different from their Euro-American feminist 

counterparts: 

 

The insular factors affecting the development of feminist movements in 

the region -- the indivisibility of gender relations from race and class, 

the intricate connections between sexual mores, skin pigmentation, and 

class mobility, the poverty and political repression that may have left 

women’s bodies exposed to abuse and exploitation – seem alien to the 

concerns of European American feminist thought. 

 

 Western mainstream feminism’s reluctance to engage manifestations of 

oppression other than gender may have concealed a desire to hang on to existing 

privileges. As Steady points out, "the issue of racism can become threatening, for it 

identifies white feminists as possible participants in the oppression of blacks" (1987, 

3), a potential already borne out by history, as in the participation/defense/perpetuation 

of racial oppression by white women in South Africa.  

The inextricability of women of color's experiences of oppression arising out of 

their various identities simultaneously  is cogently expressed by Nnaemeka (1995, 93) 



 

 

55 

 

here responding to the Africanist Katherine Frank's conception of African female 

subjectivity: 

 

Contrary to Frank's assertions, subjectivity is not well-delineated and 

hierarchized for many women whose multiple identities and resultant 

multiple oppressions are experienced simultaneously. Furthermore, 

because these multiple identities/subjectivities shift constantly, thereby 

defying a fixed hierarchy, it is difficult for black women to determine 

which identity is acted upon at every given moment. A black woman 

does not get oppressed in the morning because of her race and 

summoned back in the evening to be oppressed because of her sex; she 

is not that lucky. 

 

To counter this privileging of gender, some black feminists have chosen to use 

the term "womanist", introduced by Alice Walker (1983), to distinguish their expanded 

conceptualization of feminism which, argues Walker, encompasses a sense of 

commitment to the "survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female." (1983, 

xi). Allan (1995) identifies the major features of a womanist ideology as “audacity, 

women-centeredness, and whole(some)ness of vision” which she appropriates as the 

principles of a womanist critical praxis. 

Walker’s introduction of the concept (and the term) intensified the theoretical 

and critical discourses that would challenge white feminism’s Eurocentrism, as women 



 

 

56 

 

of color, especially those of African descent, have attempted to develop a framework 

for the analysis of black women’s cultural expression that goes beyond the simple 

insertion of race into traditional feminist enterprises with their focus on gender.  

Some (white) feminists, such as Elaine Savory Fido, in a discussion 

with Carole Boyce Davies in an anthology they co-edited on Caribbean women 

and literature (Davies and Fido 1990), dismiss "womanism" as simply a cultural 

manifestation of feminism, which Fido sees as having a political agenda, while 

the former does not. Again, the term political is construed in a very restricted 

sense, but more importantly, it suggests that womanism is only useful in 

expressing a different cultural tradition from white, middle-class feminism, 

thereby minimizing the different perspectives and experiences, as well as 

political positioning and, therefore, political agenda, of most women of color.  

The existence of the terms “black feminism” and “womanism” alerts us 

to the inaccuracy of perceiving the question of feminism among black women 

in monolithic terms. Charges of womanism’s insufficient political commitment 

comes from some black feminists too (hooks 1989; (charles) 1997).
42

 

One of womanism’s foremost detractors has been the cultural critic, bell 

hooks, who argued that feminism’s commitment to struggle made it superior to 

womanism because the latter was not sufficiently radical. hooks (1989, 181-182) is 

                                                 

 
42

 (charles) (1997) also criticizes Walker’s assumption that the term “womanish”, 

rooted in southern African-American culture, would be equally applicable to black 

women globally. 



 

 

57 

 

baffled at the ready acceptance of many black women of the term “womanist”, while 

claiming they cannot identify with the term “black feminist.” 

 

I hear black women academics laying claim to the term “womanist” while 

rejecting “feminist.” I do not think Alice Walker intended this term to deflect 

from feminist commitment, yet this is often how it is evoked. Walker defines 

womanist as black feminist or feminist of color. When I hear black women 

using the term womanist, it is in opposition to the term feminist; it is viewed as 

constituting something separate from feminist politics shaped by white women 

[my italics]. For me, the term womanist is not sufficiently linked to a tradition 

of radical political commitment to struggle and change. 

 

Why then, did Walker coin a new term? If a womanist is the same as a black 

feminist, what is the purpose of clarifying the non-separatist (from men) agenda of 

womanism? Even if Walker had not intended to use the term as oppositional to 

feminist, but rather as something more complex (“womanist is to feminist as purple is 

to lavender”), as an intensive form of feminism, once out in the public arena, the term 

was appropriated by many black women as their own, precisely because they wanted 

something that would not bring with it the baggage of white feminism’s racism and/or 

ethnocentrism, and an agenda that was not shaped by white women. Womanism 

attempts to reframe the gender debate around the issue of racial/cultural difference, 



 

 

58 

 

while black feminism simply advocates racial inclusion into the existing frameworks 

and agendas of white feminism. 

In addition to charges of insufficient political commitment, Walker’s 

conceptualization of womanism has been criticized by black women as essentialist and 

universalist  (Allan 1995) and her own practice of it as imperialist (Nnaemeka 1996). 

Nevertheless, it was clearly an attempt to carve out an affirmative space for women of 

color who did not want to engage in a gender war that would exclude the men who 

shared with them oppression rooted in racism even as they wished to challenge their 

sexism.  

The initial refusal of white feminist cultural critics to accept the multiplicity of 

black women’s concerns has led to a consistent pattern of devaluation of the cultural 

work of black women. In her now classic essay, Toward a black feminist criticism, 

Barbara Smith (1977) notes the systematic devaluation of the work of black women 

writers not just by male literary critics (both black and white) but also by white feminist 

ones. I have already referred to a similar devaluation of Third World and women of 

color’s attempts to define their own agendas in the field of film studies by characterizing 

their work as “pre-feminist.” 

Allan (1995, 11) notes that "for Walker, the white feminist bulwark against 

sexual oppression falls short of the intrepidity that compels the womanist to turn over 

every stone in the complicated masonry of power relations." Thus, the kinship of the 

term "womanist" with the term "womanish" as audacious is rooted in an awareness of the 

strategy of defiance as one the major