Watching History Through Our Fingers: Handling Past and Present Traumas in Teaching The Birth of a Nation
Watching History Through Our Fingers: Handling Past and Present Traumas in Teaching The Birth of a Nation

Summary/Abstract: Any film art and history survey class runs straight into the looming original sin of American cinema: D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, a horrifyingly racist revisionist reimagining of the Civil War and a massive blockbuster which helped reimagine the entire film industry in the first half of the 20th century. At a time when the Charlottesville white supremacist rallies, the Black Lives Matters protests, and the structural inequalities re-surfaced by the COVID-19 pandemic have brought the continuing legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow era to the forefront of our collective consciousness, figuring out how to teach the place of this film in our culture without further exposing students to traumatizing representations of African-Americans has become a continuously evolving challenge. At one of the most diverse campuses in the United States, we have been experimenting with trauma-informed collaborative models which grant students agency while still equipping them with the tools to understand the artistic, technical, historical, social, political, and business contexts and implications of Griffith’s work.

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