Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the Movies, 1921

Abstract This chapter tracks Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s experiences in the nascent race-film industry as a means to ponder the broader question of the role and efficacy of what Davarian Baldwin terms the Black mass cultural marketplace in the era’s racial reckoning. Dunbar-Nelson’s motion-picture ambitions—her failed ambitions—disclose the particular challenges for women wishing to participate in the Black cultural marketplace, as these likewise disclose the problematically rigid expectations of race-film production in the early 1920s. In short, Dunbar-Nelson’s short-lived race-film career provides an opportunity not only to think further about the risks inhering in Jim Crow-era mass culture—here, moviegoing and motion-picture production—but too the limits of early Black independent cinema.