Postcolonial and Transnational Approaches to Film and Feminism

Abstract

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 Western universalistic framework of patriarchy (see Gaines 1986; Doane 1991; hooks 1992; Young 1996; Kaplan 1997), 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 rep- resentations 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 taxonomies, depicting natives-in documentary or fiction films-as savages, primitive, and outside modernity. Ella Shohat has written extensively on the crucial role of sexual difference for the culture of empire. In her seminal 1991 article “Gender and the Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema,” she discusses how imperial narratives are organized around metaphors of rape, fantasies of rescue, and eroticized geographies. Gender and colonial discourses intersect with Hollywood’s exploitation of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the pretexts for eroticized images of the Other (Shohat 2006a, 47): Exoticising and eroticizing the Third World allowed the imperial imaginary to play out its own fantasy of sexual domination.… Indeed, cinema invented a geographically incoherent Orient, where a simulacrum of coherence was produced through the repetition of visual leitmotifs. Even as cinema itself evolved and changed over a century, The Orient continued to be mechanically reproduced from film to film and from genre to genre.