Representations of Black Masculinity in Oscar Micheaux’s Silent Film Within Our Gates

My paper focuses on studying the representations of black masculinity in the Harlem Renaissance’s discourse, and investigates how these representations challenged the limited, reductive and one-dimensional stereotypes which were adopted and further disseminated by the popular culture of the time. To do so, I will analyze a number of black male characters depicted in the silent film, Within Our Gates (1920), of the African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.

The Matter of Treatment

Chapter 6 places the African American race film industry into the context of southern history as well as the studio system. Hollywood’s combination of derivative typecasting of African American characters and strict segregation in institutional practices evidenced a broad neglect of black topics, themes, and audiences, and well before the studio system’s consolidation, African American filmmakers showed an interest in the possibilities of the medium. In the years after World War I especially, a tradition of African American filmmaking sought to redress the commercial, aesthetic, and political deficiencies of the mainstream film industry. Through figures such as Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, and others, race film played a number of key roles in a black culture within and beyond the South, even as civil rights figures like the NAACP’s Walter F. White attempted, with modest success, to bring about reform within Hollywood.