Black Women In The Film Bessie

Black women have played a pivotal role in the construction of the blues traditions of African American culture, regardless of whether they have be credited as such. In her article “How HBO's "Bessie" Brings A Dynamic Portrayal of Black Womanhood to the Screen”, Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn proposes that Dee Rees’ film Bessie “embodies the social changes of African-Americans at the turn of the century, and the women whose musical texts embodied a rich cultural legacy and a new frontier for women...”(Littlejohn). While Bessie explores the life, musical career, alcoholism, and bisexuality of black blues woman Bessie Smith, it also gives insight into the changing social conscious of black women in the 1920s society. Artist such as Bessie Smith constructed
By enacting an act of inheriting, “the activity of stripping, shifting, and recreating black cultural production to identify theoretical positions and/ or orientations” (Dotson 38), much of Smith’s limit pushing work can be seen as being built upon the legacy of socially oriented production started by Rainey. Through the analysis of the film Bessie with connection to ideas presented in Angela Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, this paper will prove that black blues women were black feminists, and therefore, their works must be privileged as instrumental when exploring of the social conscious of working-class Black women in
Through their music, black blues women have been able to create an aesthetic community of resistance with collective desire for freedom against the forces that oppress them, a tradition that is still used by artists today. Unfortunately, primarily due to respectability politics, artists such as Bessie Smith and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey rarely get the credit they deserve for changing the way in which feminist themes are incorporated into music and mainstream society. However, regardless of whether credit was given or not, just as Bessie Smith enlisted acts of inheritance to the works of Ma Rainey, the Beyoncé’s, Erykah Badu’s, and Solange’s of today still enlist the same themes that were present in their works to address the racial and gendered oppression of the black female body. All of these women, whether under the genre of blues, Hip Hop, R&B, or Soul, have used their music to express the ever-changing social conscious of working-class Black women in