Visual difference: Postcolonial Studies and Intercultural Cinema. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. (original) (raw)
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The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2015
This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teaching “postcolonial film.” It contains a template for teaching undergraduate students both film studies skills and critical skills to tackle postcolonial artistic creation in its widest respective theoretical and historical context. It also suggests ways for nonfilm studies specialists to integrate close study of a film within a course otherwise using text-based materials. An explication de texte is the most basic exercise that yields complex analyses of any sutured “text” and provides opportunities for sustained dialogue between the student and material. The highly sophisticated, creative, meticulous, and generative readings that students have produced in my experience of beginning every class curriculum with this most basic method of the French tradition has convinced me of its value for insightful reading and clear writing at all levels. I offer this example of explication, taken from my ...
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This special issue proposes new ways of seeing and thinking about postcolonial intellectuals through the frame of transnational screens. For this purpose, the issue develops around the twofold notion of the intellectual as a filmmaker and the intellectual as an object of filmmaking. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which this interrelationship expands notions of postcolonial theory and practice regarding the aesthetic and political intervention of intellectuals in transnational screen culture. Many postcolonial figures have been influential not only in rethinking the ways in which representation should be conceived and theorized but also in inspiring new forms of visuality and aesthetics through their life and work. These figures include Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebar, and Stuart Hall, and others explored in this issue, such as Toni Morrison, Raoul Peck, Ai Weiwei, and Steve McQueen. The special issue also includes exclusive interviews with Ai Weiwei and Trinh T. Minh-ha, artists, intellectuals, activists, and filmmakers whose engagement with postcolonial debates, and more broadly with the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking, have contributed to a reshaping of contemporary postcolonial realities and discourses, in scholarship and the public sphere.
Postcolonial and Feminist Approaches to Film and Feminism
Since the 1990s, feminist film studies has expanded its analytic paradigm to interrogate the representation of race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and the nation (Wiegman 1998). This has included a new understanding of the role of audiences, consumption, and participatory culture, and a shift from textual analysis to broader cultural studies perspectives that include the role of institutions, reception, and technology. This is especially due to the contribution of black feminism in the US (see Hollinger 2012), and its critique of psychoanalysis as a, and the rise of postcolonial studies following the milestone publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and its aftermath. The development of postcolonial studies strongly impacted the way of analyzing representations of the Other, asking for a rethinking of long-standing tropes and stereotypes about cultural difference, and also the gendering and racialization of otherness. This ushered in methodological interrogations on how visual representations are implicated in the policing of boundaries between East and West, between Europe and the Rest, the self and the other. The postcolonial paradigm is called upon to challenge the implicit and intrinsic Eurocentrism of much media representation and film theory (Shohat & Stam 1994), which implies a colonization of the imagination, where the Other is structurally and ideologically seen as deviant. Eurocentrism shrinks cultural heterogeneity into a single paradigmatic perspective in which Europe, and by extension the West, is seen as a unique source of meaning and ontological reality. Eurocentrism emerged as a discursive justification for European colonial expansions, making the colonizers, and their civilizational ideology, the lens through which the world is seen and value, judgment, and objectivity attributed (Shohat & Stam 1994, 2–3). It justifies imperial practices under the motto of the white man's burden and the need to bring civilization and progress to the rest of the world. Eurocentrism also generated the forging of race theories and race discourses in order to create a clear distinction between colonizers and the colonized. The eugenics of empire emerged by making the colonies the laboratories of the empire and the battleground in which to ventilate and develop white superiority and supremacy. Empire cinema contributed to specific ways of seeing, making films that legitimated the domination of colonies by the colonial powers. Colonial images of gender, race, and class carried ideological connotations that confirmed imperial epistemologies and racial
Comunicação e Sociedade, 2016
This paper aims to present a Knowledge Network on Transcultural Communication, a work in progress organized in Archives, Knowledge Bases and Virtual Museums. One of its substantive parts, the Knowledge Node Transcultural Cinema, gathers knowledge and sources (Film Studies texts, photos, videos, etc.) about critical cinema and resistance cinema. This node articulates theories and postcolonial concepts to analysis/interpretations based on examples of film images and videos that include postcolonial representations. The “clash of civilizations” is a core idea underlying the debate on dissent and / or consensus among cultures and about postcolonialism. The dissimilarity between colonial / postcolonial societies and cultures, often takes the form of a “conflict of meanings.” And the discursive resistance against colonialism is often based on mobilizing hybridizations. Contemporary cultures are essentially “hybrid cultures”. Such hybrid nature is present in many images and sounds of resis...
Against a Migrant Cinema. Critical Reflections on the Postcolonial Perspective.
Cinergie, 2019
The notion of “migrant cinema”, on the one hand, tends to historicize a phenomenon,recognizing in the current socio-political context a common ground on which such products, despite theirdiversity, can grow; on the other hand, like any codification, this historicization tends to bring back to thecollective sphere what is often an individual artistic expression: as it does not speak of society, it is simplynot interesting. In this sense, as we will try to argue in this essay, the postcolonial perspective on the onehand proves to be effective, as it opens up film studies to important methodological contaminations; on theother hand, as a negative consequence, it tends to treat “migrant cinema” as a genre in its own right, thustransforming the “eye of the migrant” into an “eye on migrant”. In a critical-theoretical perspective, thispaper will debate on how the denial of the existence of a migrant cinema is not an attempt to deconstruct aconsolidatedhistoriographicalframe, butonthecontrary, itisawaytoavoidthatthishistoricizationimpliesand replicates the same dynamics of abjection that it tends to eliminate.