Melville J. Herskovits, a Jew struggling to define his own identity, pioneered African-American studies into the growing field of research that exists today, and greatly influenced the way we identify ourselves. In an exclusive interview, Vincent Brown, producer and director of research of “Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness” and a Harvard professor, talks to The New York Jewish Film Festival about the inspiration behind this illuminating documentary.

NYJFF - Several debates are currently taking place around the ideas of whether someone is Black or African American, from information circulated by press to ideas being promoted by film stars. How does the film deal with this debate? How much of an influence did Herskovits have in leading to debates such as this one?

Brown - One of the things that attracted us to the story of Melville J. Herskovits was that whenever people talk seriously about the African origins of black cultural practice, if you follow their sources, they eventually lead you to Herskovits’s research.  He is more responsible than any other North American for putting the question on the agenda: how African is black culture in the Americas? His body of work has helped to provide a seemingly scientific guarantee for claims about the Africanness of African-America. What turned out to be most interesting, however, was that Herskovits’s research was related to his personal journey as a scholar of Jewish ancestry, and as a result, so too is the very notion of African America.

“Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness” suggests that the story of how so-called Negroes came to be called African-Americans is intertwined with the story of how Jews became white people.  In the twentieth-century United States, even the ways many Jews and African-Americans understood themselves was entangled. Through his research and writing, Herskovits shaped African-American self-knowledge.  At the same time, he became socially “white,” rather than particularly Jewish, by assuming the authority to speak about and in some instances for black people.  This is a reminder that debates about identity are never (and never could be) conducted wholly within a group.  This is how histories of identification work; we so often see ourselves through the eyes of others.

I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with this.  But the story of how a white man of Jewish ancestry acquired the power to re-make the historical understanding of black people should make us conscious of an important fact: the way we think about belonging is embedded in struggles over who has access to the most influential means of expression and the capacity to shape the terms of a public conversation.  If some people have more power to sway a debate by virtue of their social status—as in the case of Herskovits then, or perhaps popular hip-hop artists now—we always want to ask, to what end?

NYJFF - The film influences common stereotypes about race. How are modern-day stereotypes influenced by the work of anthropology?

Brown - It may be that, these days, anthropologists have too little influence over they way people talk about culture.  Franz Boas and his students, Herskovits among them, conceived of culture as a way of analyzing patterns of learned behavior without recourse to nineteenth-century racial science. They did this partly in order to undermine the intellectual credibility of crude stereotypes that biology determined behavior, and that human destiny was determined by racial type.  But now you have all kinds of writers who use culture largely to do the same work that race used to perform.  People talk about culture as destiny, rather than about the importance of social and political history.  E. Franklin Frazier, one of Herskovits’s toughest critics, worried about exactly this problem.

Having more anthropologists in the public debate might unsettle the kinds of vague generalities encompassed by the word culture, which so often leads to smug and simple explanations people’s predicament in the world—“culture of poverty” and “clash of civilizations,” to name two examples. Rather than explaining our world with stereotypes, we could follow the example of anthropologists like Michel-Rolph Trouillot and think more specifically about “how human thought and behavior is patterned and how those patterns are produced, rejected, or acquired.”

NYJFF - Perhaps you could speak generally about the goals of the film, and what you tried to bring across in your contribution.

Brown - We wanted to contribute to a conversation about the politics of ideas and introduce audiences to an important figure of whom very few people outside of academe will have heard.  We also wanted people to see how histories of Jewish and black self-understanding intertwine in Herskovits’s intellectual biography, how ways of looking at the histories of seemingly distinct peoples are themselves the products of deep and inextricable entanglements.

One thing that we all agreed on was the need to find visually compelling ways to tell complicated stories about ideas.  The director Llewellyn Smith and executive producer Christine Herbes-Sommers have been doing this in their filmmaking for some time, which is one reason I approached them with the idea. They make films about the history of ideas as visually exciting as popcorn thrillers—at least to me, anyway!

But I also wanted to see if we could bring the rigorous standards of academic research and interpretation to television documentary without alienating a non-academic audience.  I had conducted five or six years of research in libraries and archives before we started working together, so I was hopeful that we could produce a film that scholars would respect as much as the audiences would enjoy.  Actually, the response to the film has been more enthusiastic than I ever could have hoped.

Vincent Brown is Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. His webpage can be found at http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/brown.php.

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness will screen with Leon Blum: For All Mankind at the following times:
Mon Jan 18: 12:30pm
Tue Jan 19: 8:45pm
Wed Jan 20: 3:30pm

The Festival program and ticket links are available on both websites: TheJewishMuseum.org and Filmlinc.com. Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Walter Reade box office, or by calling CenterCharge at 212.721.6500.

The dates of The New York Jewish Film Festival are January 13-28, 2010.

Entries about the 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival are written by  Jaron Gandelman, Film Festival Intern, at The Jewish Museum.