An invisible operational mortar: The essential role of speech acts withintri-segregated moviegoing
Abstract
The contribution seeks to apply the principles of J. L. Austin’s speech-act theories to the study of local business segregation in the Jim Crow South. In particular, it borrows the notions of illocutionary and perlocutionary force when examining the seemingly bland and prosaic statements that are often used to normalise segregation within the business of commercial entertainment. For purposes of expanding the complexity of typical Manichaean (i.e., Black vs White) ethnic studies, this analysis was developed within the context of tri-racial segregation as applied to rural moviegoing within Robeson County, North Carolina during the first half of the twentieth century. Notably, the development of Robeson’s historical cinema-exhibition spaces eventually resulted in a highly unusual venue – i.e., the three-entrance theatre – whose physical architecture reflected tensions between local ethnic demographics and desired social hierarchies. Yet even in the face of these unusual physical constructs, this study contends that seemingly everyday objective/descriptive and non-demonising language remained an essential component in enforcing segregation.
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Table of contents
Whatever else it might be, and no matter what specific movies might mean to those who view them, the motion-picture industry in the United States has fundamentally depended upon a tripartite business structure of film production, distribution, and exhibition. In the early years of film studies scholarship, cinema historians tended to focus their efforts documenting and analysing the first two of those phases: first upon production, which included overt examinations of films, [ p. 102 ]actors and directors as objects of investigation, and eventually to studies of distribution methods, foregrounding the industry’s integrated relationship with distributors (which resulted in anti-trust decisions forcing the separation of studios from distribution chains) and to the development of alternative distribution methods for film, particularly television. In time, however, film studies practitioners turned their collective eye upon cinema exhibition. Indeed, in his broad overview of notable developments in cinema studies since roughly the 1970s, Charles Musser (2004) lauded the multiple modes and source types tied to the archival spadework that film historians often grounded their work in, all before concluding that “time and again, in-depth interrogation of the full sequence of events relevant to a film’s production, distribution and reception has provided opportunities for new interpretive insights” within cinema studies (p. 104).
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