The Harlem renaissance presented questions about what it meant to be a black man in the early part of the 20th century. The works of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, Walter White, and many others. Their works focused on the possibilities and trajectory of black life America. They asked questions of how best to progress towards equality in this nation. However, their works centered largely on black men and masculinity. In the process of preserving these personal histories of men, they lost those of black women. Cheryl Dunye’s film The Watermelon Woman (1996) expands upon many of the themes of the Harlem Renaissance, giving voices to those forgotten by the masculine movement and expanding the human space of not only the Harlem Renaissance, but also her modern age.
One of the defining characteristics of the Harlem renaissance was the rejection of convention in art as a means to convey the personal truths and histories of black people in America. Simply, the art of a white culture could not properly convey what it meant to be black in that society. Dunye’s film, using poetic documentary within a larger fictional narrative, similarly rejects the conventions of formal documentary and conventional narrative cinema in order to tell a story that is far more about the filmmaker than the titular character. By diverging from conventional cinema, Dunye makes a space for her identity that did not exist within the conventional bounds. Her tale is one that creates human space for her not only as a black woman, but also as a black lesbian within her time. This documentary expands upon the human space and the artistic themes of the Harlem renaissance to ask similar questions of how black women and black lesbians exist in a society that is not only racially and sexually unequal, but goes further by reclaiming the personal histories of the women obscured by the Harlem Renaissance itself.
Dunye’s narrative focuses on her search to learn about a forgotten movie star only ever billed as “The Watermelon Woman.” This titular character, though an invention, serves as a representative of the women who were washed out of the Harlem renaissance by the masculinity minded titans at its forefront. Through this conceit, Dunye is creating human space not only for herself in her modern age, but giving light to the personal histories that were forgotten by the history books. Dunye's film retroactively expands the scope of the Harlem Renaissance by seeking to illuminate and elaborate on the life of the fictional Watermelon Woman. Even though the life in question is an invention, it does not matter because it represents the human space that was not considered in its own day. The Watermelon woman’s contrived story is representative of the personal histories of women not recorded in the official version of the Harlem Renaissance, women like Ida B. Wells.
The film expands upon the themes and scope of the Harlem Renaissance in reclaiming the personal histories of the women of its time period as well as those of Dunye’s time. It is her act of making the documentary that allows her to tell her own personal history because her own identity and experience as a black woman are tied to the histories of those who came before her. In order for Dunye to truly create her own human space, she must consider and learn about the women who history left out. The Watermelon Woman works to expand the human space created by the Harlem renaissance by similarly denying artistic convention to tell a story of black womanhood and sexual identity that was not included in the recorded history of the period.
wc: 610
Pledged: Phillips Hutchison
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Dunye, Cheryl, dir. The Watermelon Woman. First Run Features, 1996.
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