Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, And His Audiences (Book Review‪)‬

by Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000 288 pp.; $20.00, paper This is an important and impressive book, a broadly and deeply researched examination of Micheaux's work, in the face of the difficulties of doing research on a filmmaker whose forty films only yield three surviving prints. It is a richly interdisciplinary critical text in its scope and methodology: its approaches are drawn from cultural studies, film studies, ethnic studies, and what the authors call a "reception-oriented history" (xix). The book's authors are as effective at broad-stroking the historical context of Micheaux's work and the community that viewed it as they are at close-reading the texts of the three surviving films. The book is highly readable, wonderfully illustrated, with publicity stills from the films, promotional handbills, and contemporary portraits, and its endnotes and bibliography provide important resources for anyone who wants to heed the authors' call for further research on Micheaux. The authors are deeply invested in their subject and in doing justice to Micheaux's achievement, but they are not hagiographers; instead, they invoke their subject in all of his knotty complexity and contradictions. The buoyancy of this book is a result of the energy and clarity that Bowser and Spence bring to the roil of Micheaux's life and work.