earticle

영어

Building on the previous works of African American historians, political scientists, literary theorists and critics, film historians and critics, this paper argues that The Birth of a Nation is not only a propagandistic epic presenting the vision of a new modern nation built on the destruction of black bodies, but also of a great empire to be born through the ideology of white supremacy in the context of the contemporary political milieu of Wilsonian democracy. I elucidate the interconnectedness between domestic racial dominance and violence within the US based on the ideology of white supremacy, and the expansion of the US as an imperial power in the intertextual relationship among Griffith’s film and the writings of Thomas Dixon Jr. and Woodrow Wilson. An era eerily reminiscent of the present period in American history, the idea of ‘American democracy’ in the formulation of Wilsonian democracy propagating the fantasy of America as a land of freedom gave legitimacy to US’s emergence as an imperial power. The mobilization of the idea of American democracy has always gone hand in hand with its segregationist and/or racist domestic policies, and I demonstrate that this idea of American democracy has served well to posit a white, imperial democracy outside the US while depriving the rights of non-white bodies by dehumanizing them within the US, as manifested in The Birth of a Nation (The Clansman) announcing the birth of a white, imperial America.