One of the first views in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust displays a woman looking through a kaleidoscope given to her by means of Mr.

One of the first views in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust displays a woman looking through a kaleidoscope given to her by means of Mr. Snead, a photographer. As Snead explains the way the instrument works, she delights in the changing images. The kaleidoscope is an apt metaphor for Dash's possess project in making the film. As she told reporter Kevin Thomas, "I wanted to take the African-American experience and rephrase it in as it is a way that, whether or not you understood the film in succession the first screening, the visuals would be likewise haunting it would break from one side with a freshness about what we already know" (F15) at twisting the kaleidoscope of "what we already know" about the African American experience, Dash has created a recent way of seeing, and reading, that experience. Daughters of the Dust gives a portrait of a particular impetus in African American history; it also present to views by example how that history exigencys to be constructed, and rebuilded from an African American perspective.

Dash "spent 10 years researching the Gullah tradition, poring through papers and books in fresh York City's Schomburg Center for Research in Black refinement university libraries and the Smithsonian in Washington" (Smith B35) to this time Daughters of the Dust is not a documentary. Rather, it is lyrical and impressionistic, told, as Dash says, in the manner of a West African griot, or storyteller, "the way an aged relative would retell it, not linear on the other hand always coming back around. It's all communicateed but how you get to the information is different." Dash contrasts her storytelling arrangement with that of "television and formula films where you know what's going to happen in the first five minutes. With 'Daughters of the Dust' you can't apply that formula. You're thrust into the world of the new" (qtd in empire C17).

Dash's approach to narrative is consciously defamiliarizing: "I wanted the audience to be wrought up as if it was looking at a foreign film - this was actual important to me" (qtd. in Thomas F15) by way of twisting the audience's kaleidoscope in this manner, Daughters forces us to behold a segment of African American history as if for the first time. It helps as a concrete example of the kaleidoscopic perspective upon history articulated by Hayden White, who refer tos that we

recognize that there is no as it is thing as a single correct view of any intent under study but that there are many correct views, each requiring its admit style of representation. This would allow us to entertain seriously those creative distortions tendered by minds capable of looking at the past with the same seriousness as ourselves further with different affective and intellectual orientations. Then we should no longer naively look forward to that statements about a given period or complex of events in the past "correspond" to one preexistent body of "raw facts." For we should recognize that what constitutes the facts themselves is the point in dispute that the historian, like the artist, has tried to make plain in the choice of the metaphor by way of which he orders his world, past, current and future. (47)

The dominant historical perspective in succession people such as the Gullahs, inhabitants of the Sea Islands of Georgia and southern Carolina who are descended from enslaved Africans, has been that they are backward and uncultur marginal clan both figuratively and literally. In his 1949 studious mood Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, Lorenzo Dow gymnast quotes some of those denigrating dominant views with regard to Gullah speech patterns, including common by the editor of "several turns of Gullah folk tales . . whose interpretation of the dialect has been generally accepted as authoritative," A. E Gonzales:

Slovenly and careless of words these Gullahs seized upon the peasant English used by way of some of the early colonists and by the white servants of the wealthier colonists, wrapped their ill-made tongues about it as well as they could and, enriched with certain expressive African words, it issued in consequence of their flat noses and thick lips as thus workable a form of dialect that it was gradually adopted by means of the other slaves and became in time the accepted african speech of the lower districts of southerly Carolina and Georgia. . . The words are, of course, not African, for the African brought through or retained only a not many words of his jungle-tongue, and level these few are by no means authenticated as part of the original scant baggage of the african slaves. (qtd. in Turner 6-7)

While gymnast effectively dismantles the distorted perceptions of Gonzales and other "experts" by the agency of pointing out "their lack of acquaintance with the languages and agricultures of those sections of West Africa from which the Negroe were brought to the United States as slaves" (13) his examples demonstrate the cultural imperialism which is implicit and explicit in the dominant culture's treatment of a marginalized people

Julie Dash addresses the question of marginalization masterfully in Daughters of the Dust. She doesn't affirm the treatment accorded the Gullahs on the linguists and historians of the dominant improvement She simply points her camera in a different direction. She redefines the center In Daughters of the Dust, the Gullahs are the dominant civilization and the white world is at the margin.