On the very same day that Thomas Edison debuted the Vitascope, the US Supreme Court negotiated the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson. Headlines such as ‘Edison’s Vitascope cheered’ and ‘Supreme Court rules against Plessy’ were frequently juxtaposed with each other, inevitably connecting motion pictures and race with modern life.1¹ These interconnections between race and modernity have been productively complicated by film and media scholars Lynne Kirby, Anna Everett and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, who have foregrounded cinema’s entanglements within a larger media network consisting of the railroad and the commercial presses.2² For example, railroads that carried the black diaspora to their new homes in urban settlements during the Great Migration also circulated black press newspapers that functioned as guides to modern, urban life. As Stewart suggests, ‘the [Chicago] Defender’s value as a record of early African American filmmaking, moviegoing, and film criticism, couched within discourses on migration and political activism, cannot be overestimated’.3³ In short, one simply cannot tell the story of ‘modernity’ without an intersectional praxis that accounts for the complex entanglements between cinema, media (presses, railroad) and race.

中文翻译：

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重温现代性：跨媒体领域的黑人宗教声音

就在托马斯爱迪生推出 Vitascope 的同一天，美国最高法院就具有里程碑意义的案件Plessy v. Ferguson进行了谈判。诸如“爱迪生的 Vitascope 欢呼”和“最高法院对普莱西的裁决”等头条新闻经常相互并列，不可避免地将电影和种族与现代生活联系起来。^{1 1}电影和媒体学者将这些种族与现代性之间的联系复杂化了Lynne Kirby、Anna Everett 和 Jacqueline Najuma Stewart，他们将电影在由铁路和商业出版社组成的更大媒体网络中的纠葛突出显示。^{2 2}例如，在大迁徙期间将黑人侨民运送到他们在城市定居点的新家的铁路还发行了黑人新闻报纸，作为现代城市生活的指南。正如斯图尔特所暗示的那样，“[芝加哥]捍卫者作为早期非裔美国人电影制作、观影和电影批评记录的价值，体现在关​​于移民和政治激进主义的话语中，不能被高估” ^{。3 3}简而言之，一个人根本不能讲述“现代性”的故事，没有交叉实践来解释电影、媒体（新闻、铁路）和种族之间的复杂纠缠。