"Every woman extends backward into her mother and forward to her daughter."  -C.G. Jung (in Dash epigram)

"Following the credits, a boat glides down a thick, green river.  Standing near teh front of the boat is a woman in a long white dress and a large veiled hat.  The image is familiar from dominant cinema's colonialism-as-entertainment genre.  But we notice that this woman stands hipshot, chin cocked, one arm akimbo.  These ebonics signify that filmmaker Dash has appropriated the image from reactionary cinema for an emancipatiory purpose.  She intends to heal our imperialized eyes."  -Toni Cade Bambara (in Dash xii)

"It's interesting that whenever an artist takes a kind of mythic universe and infuses it with aspects of everyday reality, like the images of women cooking, often the cinema audience in this society just isn't prepared."  -bell hooks (qtd. in Dash 30)

"["Daughters of the Dust"] is less about the horrors of the slave experience as a way of life than about how that horrific institution shaped the interior lives and life choices of the salves and their descendants.  It is, finally, slavery that transformed African people into American products, enforcing a cultural amnesia that scraped away details without obliterating the core.  We remain in a middle passage, living out an identity that is neither African nor American, though we crave for both shores to claim us."  -Greg Tate (in Dash 70-71)

""[Daughters of the Dust"] offers a starting point for an exploration of the construction of African-American communal memories ... Most prominent is the rebellion against Enlightenment-based notions of vision and rationality, which explores the senses, the magical, the uncanny, the haunted, and the subjective."  - Paulla A. Ebron (see works cited)

"When I present my ideas, pitch my stories, send my screenplays out, they [the powers that be in Hollywood] say there is no audience for this. They come up with every excuse in the world.  I think the reason for that is that my films center around black women. If it is not a white male story, they are just not interested ...What is interesting is that every film that has come out with black women in it has done well. We have proved them wrong. Eve’s Bayou proves them wrong.  What are they going to say now?"  Julie Dash (interview with Moikgantsi Kgama)