Re-visioning tropes of womanhood in early African American all black cast movie musicals: representations of the holy woman and her transgressive counterpart in King Vidor’s Hallelujah (1929), Spencer Williams’ The blood of Jesus (1941) and Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the sky (1943)

TL;DRAbstract

The purpose of this thesis is to interrogate cinematic representations of black female sexuality and spirituality in King Vidor’s vision of religious normalcy and black life in the deep south in ‘\\(Hallelujah\\)’ 1929, Spencer Williams’s 1941 independently produced religious melodrama, ‘\\(The\\) \\(Blood\\) \\(of\\) \\(Jesus\\)’, and the vaudevillesque, folkloric Hollywood musical fantasy of Vincente Minnelli’s 1943 ‘\\(Cabin\\) \\(in\\) \\(The\\) \\(Sky\\)’. The paper will examine specific cinematic configurations of black womanhood that were popularised in the all black cast American movie musicals between 1929 and 1943. The highly marked racial and gendered configurations of the Mammy and Jezebel stereotypes function, the paper will argue, as phallocentric constructs of black femininity, firstly in the configuration of the black church woman as the bogeywoman, unknowable, a superwoman and secondly, that of the black female condition as transgressive and the catalyst of male devian

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