MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The Emperor Jones is a 1933 film adaptation of the 1920 Eugene O’Neill play of the same title, directed by Dudley Murphy, featuring Paul Robeson, Ruby Elzy, Dudley Digges, Frank H. Wilson, and Fredi Washington. Very loosely based on the O’Neill drama, the film follows Brutus Jones (Robeson) a newly hired Pullman Porter from a rural town who leaves his wife Dolly (Elzy) to travel for work, quickly succumbs to vices of the big city, accidently stabs and kills friend-turned-rival Jeff (Wilson) landing him a stint on a southern chain gang and finally escapes the chain gang to return home to his wife, only to take a job stoking coal on a steamer headed to the Caribbean where he jumps ship to a remote island whose crude leader he deposes and replaces with the partnership of a colonial white merchant Smithers. In the paper I propose for the Travel & Tourism panels of the MAPACA (Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Assn.) conference, I employ cultural historical criticism and visual analysis to examine the various diasporic scenes the film’s protagonist navigates in his dramatic travels and development as a man. I argue the film can be seen as an African American male coming-of-age tale in which aspects of African American culture and history, such as gendered paradigmatic restrictions on mobility, African cultural continuities in the African American (or black) church and continuities in antebellum, plantation-style servitude a la post bellum chain gangs are situated within a broader diasporic framework including the African continent, the Caribbean and the Americas. The result is a filmic coming-of-age tale in which ideals of escape, refashioning and becoming converge uneasily with those of roots, belonging and homecoming on screen. I believe my proposed paper fits squarely into your call for presentation proposals on travel and tourism.