Synthesising literary theory, media theory and cultural studies to form a challenging interdisciplinary study, the authors argue that current debates about Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism are merely surface manifestations of a deep rooted shift: the decolonisation of global culture.
A substantial additional chapter by the authors brings the book into the present. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam consider new related terms that have come to the fore in recent years, such as the transnational, and consider how postcolonial studies itself has evolved.
They also look at what happened to some of the film trends noted, such as aesthetics of garbage and indigenous media. This revisiting of a classic text will be essential reading for students of media studies, literary and cultural studies and postcolonial studies"-- Physical Description: xxi, pages ; 24 cm.
Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: hardback hardback paperback paperback. Ask Us: Live Chat. Sightlines London, England. Check Holdings for more information. Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record! Each locale or region or nation has its own relation to the global economy, its specific relations to conquest, colonial- ism, slavery, and global capitalism, its own history of settlement, invasion, or immigration, and its own relation to official discourses and national exceptionalisms.
In the UK, it emerged against the backdrop of decolonization and postcolonial immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. In Canada, it emerged against the backdrop of aboriginal dispossession, Anglo-French biculturalism, and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in In Bolivia, it emerged against the backdrop of the history of indigenous dis- possession and racial segregation combined with the majority demographic status and growing political power of the Quechua and the Aymara.
Some African American critics saw multiculturalism as drowning Black specificity in a bland ethnic minestrone rather than serving up a spicy Afro-diasporic gumbo. In this sense, Native American and African American intellectuals formulated slightly different critiques of multicultural dis- course.
In the France of the s, meanwhile, a large swath of the French political spectrum took to denouncing multiculturalism as a symptom of hysterical American identitarianism. This broad front against multiculturalism — deeply rooted in the supposedly race-blind exceptionalism of Jacobin republicanism and the idea of the abstract, raceless, and genderless citoyen — led to bizarre alignments and strange bedfellows.
Politically diverse figures converged in their rejection; Alain Touraine, Pierre Bourdieu, Lionel Jospin, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jacques Chirac, and Alain Finkielkraut, while not closely aligned politically, all shared a common hostility to multiculturalism. The same left French intellectuals who denounced George Bush, Sr. Only at the end of the s do we find a strong counter-current to these attitudes in France, as some on the left moved from a broad rejection of multiculturalism and postcolonialism toward a partial embrace of both projects.
Minority intellectuals from Africa and the West Indies especially were more ready to embrace multiculturalism and identity politics. A book by a scholar of Antillean background, Fred Constant, entitled, simply, Le Multiculturalisme, offered clear evidence of this shift. The French model, Constant asserts, privileges unity against diversity, while the Anglo- American model constructs unity through diversity.
Within a nuanced, anti-essentialist, and coalitionary approach, Ndiaye recommends forms of Black solidarity that operate in tandem with other minority activisms: [W]e want to be invisible in terms of our social life, such that the abuses and discriminations that affect us as blacks are reduced.
But we also want to be visible in terms of our black cultural identities, in terms of our precious and unique contribution to French society and culture. While some saw multiculturalism as the very opposite of left radicalism, others saw it as the opposite of democratic liberalism. What was missed in both accounts was that the opposite of multiculturalism is not political radicalism but rather mono- culturalism.
Marxism, anarchism and other left ideologies can all take monocultural or multicultural forms, although the right, needless to say, is much more likely to be stridently monocultural, ethnocentric, and xenophobic. For Cameron and other conservative leaders such as Sarkozy and Merkel , it was multiculturalism — and not discrimination and xenophobia — that created separate communities; thus Cameron blamed the proponents of a solution to a problem for the problem itself.
Unlike the critique of Eurocentrism, the critique of racist representations has now become a taken-for-granted part of the film and media studies field, incorporated even by journalistic TV film critics. Garbage, these films show, is a very material reality rooted in societies permeated by artificially stimulated consumption. Americans, for example, create 50 percent more garbage per capita than other similar Western economies, and double the trash output of the Japanese. Harrow looks at African cinema through the analytical template of garbage.
Some revisionist adaptations, in this sense, practice a kind of epidermal subversion by casting actors of color in roles assumed to be White, thus triggering subtle changes in representation, performance, and reception. By casting two actors of Afro-Caribbean heritage as Heathcliff, the Andrea Arnold version brings to the surface the submerged ethnicity of the novel, subtly transforming its affect and drift. The transcendent, but illicit, passion uniting Catherine and Heathcliff becomes about overstepping boundaries of race as well as of class.
The intra-national class differences that mark the Austen novel transmute into the trans- national cultural differences of the Chadha adaptation, so that the romance between the American Darcy and the Indian Lalita come to homologize the geo-political romance of India and the US in the period of the film. Collins, comes to incarnate the alienated Indian bedazzled by the West.
If the counterpoint in a film like Bride and Prejudice is cultural and spatial, between East and West, in other films the counterpoint is temporal, between past and present. The pre- credit ouverture sequence, shot in the style of a historical costume drama, dramatizes an incongruous form of Black protest.
Based on an actual event in , the scene shows a recently manumitted Black woman named Joana Zeze Motta protesting loudly as armed men on horseback take away her own slave and hand him over to a White master. Through- out, the film analogizes the old order of slavery with the new order of racialized class oppression.
Huddled with other prisoners, mostly Black, in a suffocatingly over- crowded prison cell, Black actor Lazaro Ramos addresses us directly: the Brazilian prison, he tells us, is the contemporary equivalent of the slave ship.
The cinema in this sense follows a trajectory similar to that of world literature as charted 81 by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters. Discussions of transnational cinema, similarly, often extend the assump- tions of Western post-New Wave auteurism into the world at large.
To use a baseball metaphor, it is as if the major leagues of the Western festivals and distributors do some scouting in the minor leagues located in the global ghettoes of the world, and come up with some talented players to add to the roster of consecrated auteurs.
Currently the second most prolific maker of feature films after Bollywood , Nollywood makes roughly three times as many features as Hollywood, but makes only roughly one-fortieth of the profit. Harrow, and 85 others — except to say that it clearly calls for altered categories of analysis. Neither critical race theory, political auteurism, nor anti-colonial critique are quite sufficient to the task.
Most of the African films that we discussed were drawn from the Francophone corpus, and had a clear anti-colonial thrust, in stories with national-allegorical or pan-African overtones. But while the Francophone films were largely made on celluloid and dependent on European funding, Nollywood films are largely made in digital or video, edited on computers and copied onto cassettes and disks, part of an industry that is African-owned and financed.
If the auteur reigns supreme in the Francophone cinema, in Nollywood, as Manthia Diawara points out, stars and distributors are more important than auteurs. The idea that the contemporary world was shaped by colonialism is simply taken for granted rather than fore- grounded or dissected by the films. Nollywood, moreover, is now itself diasporic, linked to Nigerian immigrant communities in the US, the UK, Europe, or other parts of Africa.
The US seems to be just another node or terminus in a broader search for survival or relief from economic scarcity or political oppression. If it is not modeled on Francophone auteur cinema, Nollywood, despite its name, is also not really modeled on Hollywood in terms of its aesthetics or modes of production and distribution.
Hollywood, after all, constantly pro- duces negative images of White Americans as gangsters, prostitutes, drug addicts, assassins, and corrupt politicians. While usually not explicitly anti-colonial or even critically postcolonial, and while usually market-driven, the films at least have the virtue of resonating with the desires and curiosities of African and Afro-diasporic audiences.
If we can regard the movement from Francophone auteur cinema to Nollywood as a case of pronounced discontinuity, we find a greater degree of continuity, not surprisingly, when we compare the earlier and the later films of some of the filmmakers discussed in our book.
At times, the directors whose work we discussed have returned to their earlier themes and even literally cite passages from their earlier films. As the political situation in Chile opened up in the mid s, Guzman returned to his homeland to show the film to selected audiences. Shaped by a repressive environment where any positive memory of the Allende period was taboo, some of the attendees, prior to the screening, recite the official line that Allende had created a chaotic situation, that the military coup was necessary and so forth.
One unforgettable sequence records the reactions of a group of theatre students to the earlier film. As they watch the finale of The Battle of Chile, the students, their bodies slumped, look thunderstruck. One young woman begins the post-film dis- cussion by speaking, voice breaking but determined, of her pride in the bravery of the Chilean people. Another man, of indigenous appearance, weeps uncontrollably in a paroxysm of grief and historical pain. It is the complete breakdown of speech, paradoxically, that testifies to the powerful emotions triggered by the film.
Inarticulateness becomes a form of eloquence. The film vividly conveys a sense of the awesome capacity of the cinema to resuscitate buried pasts as lived through the body. Guzman returns to the themes of The Battle of Chile in a very different way in his documentary meditation La Nostalgia de la Luz. Although astronomers, archeologists, and widows would not seem to have much in common, the film reveals their subterranean affinities.
All three are exploring the past — the archeologists and the widows, obviously, but also the astronomers witnessing events that occurred light years earlier. All three are also linked to the space of the Atacama Desert, a moisture-free place resembling the surface of Mars. The same lack of humidity that helps astronomers scrutinize the universe also helps archaeologists and Chileans widows trace the remainders of the past. While the women scour the desert for calcium in the form of the bones of their murdered relatives, the astronomers look for calcium as a remnant of stars and the Big Bang.
In a case of the microscopic—astronomical sublime, the observer is over- whelmed by the unmasterable totality of an infinitely vast universe, as uncannily beautiful images of asteroids segue into extreme close-ups of asteroid-like bone fragments. A skull becomes a paysage moral. As the closest of close-ups transitions into the longest of long shots, we see the world in decaying bones, the universe in a grain of Atacama sand.
Alvarez, learned astronomical theory during the day and how to identify constellations at night. Studying the cosmos gave them a paradoxical feeling of freedom during imprisonment. What is prison when one has the freedom to wander among the stars? What is exile when one feels at home in the Milky Way? The military, fearing that the prisoners might use the constellations to guide their escape, banned the astronomy lessons. If The Battle of Chile plunged us into the vortex of revolutionary events in Latin America through agile in-your-face cinematography, giving us a very physical sense of the kinetic joys and sometimes lethal dangers of street activism, a recent documentary by Egyptian-American Jehane Noujaim plunges us with agonizing immediacy into the vortex of the events of the Arab Spring.
Like The Battle of Chile, The Square sympathizes broadly with the left but lets the representatives of all tendencies, even rightists and Islamists, speak their mind. Like The Battle of Chile, the film registers the day-to-day triumphs and setbacks of an evolving mass-movement responding to events as they happen, viewing them not at a safe and voyeuristic distance but rather intimately and close-up.
The excitement in the streets bleeds into the film and into the movie theatres. And like The Battle of Chile, The Square conveys the passionate engagements of a moment when masses of people suddenly sense their own power, when they have glimpsed their national desire and realized that their desire is widely shared, in a short-lived utopian moment where gender, class, and religious divides begin to break down.
As in The Battle of Chile, we see extremely articulate everyday people in the process of finding their collective voice. We are aware that the filmmakers are dodging live bullets, tossed tear-gas canisters, and onrushing military vehicles.
Just as The Battle of Chile showed an Argentinian cameraman filming his own death, The Square shows us a policeman dragging a murdered body across the street and dumping it in the garbage, footage later picked up by international networks. Immersive in the best sense, the film gives us a sense of what revolution actually feels like. Rather than interviews, voice-over, and talking heads, we witness activists in dialogue with one another, responding to events as they occur.
Although France is a postcolonial country in historical and demographic terms, postcolonial theory for decades formed a structuring absence in French academic discourse. This absence contrasted not only with the Anglo-American academic world but also with other parts of Europe the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, and Iberia and with many parts of Asia and Africa, all sites where postcolonial studies have been a significant presence for decades.
A version of such studies did exist, however, in the form of a postcolonial terrain, occupied not by postcolonial studies but rather by work within the traditional disciplines. Whereas postcolonial studies in the Anglophone world was initially the product of scholars in English and comparative literature and the humanities generally, postcolonial studies in France was dominated by anthropologists and historians. The proposed law was subsequently rescinded. Thousands of cars were burned, and hundreds of public buildings were torched all around France.
If postcolonialism in the Anglophone zone has been largely associated with literary studies and the academe, against the background of Common- wealth literature, in France it was closely linked to revisionist history and only secondarily to literature and la Francophonie. Unlike the US and the UK, however, where postcolonial critique still remains largely restricted to the academe, in France it was linked to minoritarian political activism in the public sphere.
Indeed, France has witnessed lively polemics in the print and electronic media about postcolonial issues. Thus, today, in the context of neo-liberalism, immigrant workers are made to play the role of deregulators of the labor market in order to facilitate the extension of the logics of precarious living and flexible production to the entire wage-earning population.
As evidence for continuity, one might cite the facts that 1 the demographic majority in the overcrowded projects banlieue are literally a by-product of the French colonization of parts of sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb as well as of post-independence economic crisis; 2 that the reinstatement of martial law on November 8, , was based on a state-of-emergency decree originally used for repression in French Algeria; 3 that repatriated pieds-noirs from Algeria form a major presence in the anti-immigrant National Front; and 4 that many repatriated colonial civil servants from Algeria were placed in positions of control over post- colonial immigrants.
Naipaul give to this term: they are defined by external and dominant perceptions [le regard] and categories. There is nothing in the republican model itself that requires the prohibition of religious insignia in schools or that prohibits an effective multiculturality. The Battle of Algiers offers a particularly vivid example of the ways that films are received differently over time as they are interpreted through different national contexts and changing ideological grids.
In August the film was screened for generals at the Pentagon as a lesson in how not to go about counter-insurgency. Sponsored by the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, the flier inviting guests to the Pentagon screening declared: [H]ow to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range.
Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.
Audience members were dragged off to the Gendarmerie by French officers and interrogated, in French, about their links to terrorism. Spectators peeked in at torture scenes through the bars of prison cells. Although set in the s, the spectacle had powerful allegorical resonances in the age of torture, the War on Terror, and Abu- Ghraib.
Three decades later, in the wake of the civil war in Algeria and ethnic tensions in France, an exclusive focus on a cohesive nation became impossible, while religion, ethnicity, and sexuality came to the fore. When the film was first released, the Islamic dimensions of the revolution were scarcely visible to many spectators, but in the s, with the civil war in Algeria and terrorist attacks in France, those dimensions became painfully visible.
What was a conflict between two nations, during the Algerian War of Independence, became transformed in the post-independence period into tensions within both nations. In France, ethnic tensions with colonial overtones are also becoming more and more obvious.
The footage of Parisian rebellions at the beginning of La Haine seems like a direct continuation of the demonstrations at the end of The Battle of Algiers. The colonial fracture is now to be found on both sides of the colonial divide. The Battle of Algiers, perhaps more than any other film, crystallized the anti-colonial nationalist moment, while giving only brief glimpses of issues — such as religion and ethnicity — which would become more divisive during the postcolonial moment.
France, for its part, also comes to be seen as itself multi-ethnic and multi-faith, with a population that is one-fifth Muslim. While The Battle of Algiers was an Italian-Algerian co-production at first banned and even bombed in France, Hors-la-loi was a French majority production with co-producers in Algeria, Tunisia, and Belgium.
This killing triggers the entire narrative of the dispersal of the three brothers around the colonies and the metropole — one brother goes to Vietnam to fight with the French, another becomes a pimp and boxing promoter in France, and the third becomes a National Liberation Front NLF activist who tries to recruit the other brothers.
The war is thus portrayed as taking place both in France and Algeria. Structured around two massacres, the Bouchareb film moves from the massacre in Setif to another massacre, 16 years later, of hundreds of Algerians, a massacre that was long excised from public memory, even though it was the gravest case of organized state murder in the post-war period, and even though it took place in the center of Paris on October 17, The rise in the UK of directors of Caribbean background like Isaac Julien, of African background like John Akomfrah, of South Asian back- ground like Hanif Kureishi, and of directors of North African background in France, is evidence of an encouraging trend in the cinema, one that has only grown since — a movement toward self-representation and a cer- tain democratization of voice.
All these changes in cinematic representation were nurtured by, and inseparable from, the social movements that fostered political repre- sentation — the indigenous rights movements, the Black Consciousness movements, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and so forth. This paradigm shift is reflected not only in the trajectories of individual directors such as Eduardo Coutinho, but also through a comparison of two versions of the same film project, one from and the other from In films such as Macunaima in Brazil, and Zelig in the US, as we noted in the book, chameleonic characters literally change in a trope of racial metamorphosis that renders literal and external the internal, psychic effects of ethnic synchresis and transcultural interaction.
One of the most massively dramatic historical examples of racial trans- formation on a broad scale is the process by which millions of indigenous people, Africans, Europeans, and Asians in the Americas were reciprocally and unevenly transformed by asymmetrical contact with people different from themselves.
Geronimo de Aguilar joined the Mayans in the fight against Cortez and was killed by other Spaniards. The empowered mutate into the dis- empowered: human beings become animal, men become women, Whites become minor, and so forth, in a one-way process which risks reproducing entrenched hierarchies of social power.
Historically, it was the Jew who internalized the gentile gaze, the women who internalized the male gaze, and the colonized who had to identify with the colonizer in order to survive. The process of becoming, then, is not equal and reciprocal; hybridity and syncretism, as we pointed out, are asymmetric and power-laden.
Global elites can generally cross borders of race, gender and class without suffering the usual real-world consequences. Together, they open up new avenues for studying the relations between social identity, scriptural interpretation, and religious authority. The past four decades have seen the Spanish film industry rise from isolation in the s to international recognition within European and World Cinema today. Exploring the cultural and political imperatives that governed this success, this book shows how Spanish film culture was deliberately and strategically shaped into its current form.
Multiculturalism is one of the most controversial topics in both the United States and Germany. This interdisciplinary collection of essays by German scholars in American Studies and American scholars in German Studies analyze the other from this dual perspective and from their respective disciplines such as literary and cultural studies, political science, anthropology, and history.
More particularly they examine multiculturalism in terms of national and ethnic identities, as well as gender and race, and look at the disciplines and institutions that produce and legitimize discourses on subjects such as minority literatures, feminism, and the notion of foreignness itself.
What becomes clear is the fact that careful attention must be paid to the particular conditions and different ideological concepts that shape this term, i. Contributors: G. Welz, T. Brennan, B. Ostendorf, R. Hof, S. Lennox, A. Koenen, F. Hajek, C. Gersdorf, G. Lenz, F. Trommler, H. Seeba, A. Seyhan, A. Hornung, B. Thomas, G. Kvistad, H. While Israel has seemingly been a minor presence in Hollywood cinema, Reimagining the Promised Land argues that there is a long history of Hollywood deploying images of Israel as a means of articulating an idealized notion of American national identity.
The mobilization of Israel that pervades this eclectic group of films effectively demonstrates one of the more surreptitious ways in which Hollywood has historically constructed and circulated dominant notions of American national identity. Moreover, in examining the most notable Hollywood representations of the Jewish state, the book offers an informed historical overview of the cultural forces that have contributed to popular understandings within the United States of the state of Israel, Israel's Arab neighbours, and also the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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