White screens, Black fandom: silent film and African American spectatorship in Harlem

Abstract

This article investigates Black moviegoing in the United States during the silent film era. In existing scholarship, African American moviegoers tend to be discussed with reference to race movies–that is, independent films featuring all-Black casts. However, even during their heyday, race movies were in limited supply and could not compete directly with the dominant, vertically integrated Hollywood film studios. Thus, using data gathered from film programmes of Harlem’s Black cinemas in the 1920s–reconstructed primarily through Black newspapers New York Age and New York Amsterdam News–the article discusses the popularity of Hollywood films among Black spectators. If Black viewers were not embedded in the newly institutionalised white fan culture–consuming screen narratives that representationally marginalised them–then what were the parameters of their engagement? Drawing on fan magazines, social surveys, and established literature on African Americans as consumers of mainstream culture, this piece interrogates the pleasures of cinema as articulated by Black viewers.