“What’s past is prologue.” One of the first lines uttered in director Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but it is redeployed here by the character Viola Peazant. Used as a means of creating distance between herself and the islands from which she hails, the quote grounds the discourse of the film to follow. The past is a place, both physical and psychic, and how much of that place we carry forward with us…
On ‘Daughters of the Dust’ and the Radical Reconceptualization of Black Female Iconography
Posted on March 12, 2020
