Elements of Programming

Race and nation inglory

“…25 By articulating these stories together, the film echoes the approach of historians such as Huggins, whose words could almost serve as an epigram to certain sequences: "jw]hereas the master narrative detached... slavery and the slave experience from the central story... there can be no white history or black history, nor can there be an integrated history which does not begin to comprehend that slavery and freedom, white and black, are joined at the hip." 26 These ideas are powerfully expressed in the flogging scene in Glory, as Trip and Shaw reenact a historical pas de deux that suggests that the story of white and black in America are inseparable and mutually defining. Trip, the black soldier whose defiant character has already called forth particularly intensive disciplinary procedures, has slipped out of camp to acquire some decent leather boots.…”