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••• Ann Brooks •••
the differentiated nature of diasporic groupings represented in different genders, classes
and ethnicities. This approach enriches the monovocalism of sociology’s traditional
modernist metanarratives around class, gender and ethnicity. In addition to the inter-
section of feminism and postcolonialism which has already subverted sociology’s tra-
ditional boundaries, there has been an extension of these debates into the area of filmic
and media discourse, in particular, links between theorizing ‘travel’ and its implications
for deconstructing colonial representations and the ‘imperial gaze’ within cinemato-
graphic discourse.
The politics of representation and the construction of identity – cultural studies as a site for
reconceptualizing colonial representation, subjectivity and identity
Feminist and postcolonial theorists have interrogated historiographical and cultural
discourses in the process of reconceptualizing colonial representation, subjectivity
and identity. An important body of work has emerged around theorizing ‘travel’ as
developed in the work of James Clifford (1992). An important additional and related
area is that of critical ethnography. An example of a critical ethnographic approach
to Chinese transnationalism is expounded in the work of Ong and Nonini. They are
critical of ‘the American cultural studies approach that treats transnationalism as a
set of abstracted, dematerialized cultural flows, giving scant attention either to the
concrete, everyday changes in people’s lives or to the structural reconfigurations that
accompany global capitalism’ (Nonini and Ong, 1997: 13).
While they recognize the valuable work contained in the journal Public Culture in
the area of transnational mass media, publics, and cultural politics (see Gole, 2002),
in carving out a new idea for anthropological investigation, they express concern
about what is left out of this analysis in terms of describing the ways in which peo-
ple’s everyday lives are transformed by the effects of global capitalism. As Nonini and
Ong (1997: 13) observe: ‘While we have learned much from and value the focus on
social imaginaries, new globalized literary and aesthetic genres, and abstracted cul-
ture flows, we are apprehensive about the limitations of what might be called lite
anthropology.’ They highlight the work of Clifford in considering ‘travel’ as an alter-
native to ‘the village’ for contemporary ethnography.
Travel, the ‘imperial gaze’ and colonial representation
There are a number of dimensions to the conceptualization of ‘travel’ and its impli-
cations for the constitutive role of culture in the formation of ‘imperial relations’.
This has been captured in literary and filmic discourse.
Benedict Anderson has persuasively argued in his analysis of the development of
vernacular print culture, visual and literary culture played a crucial role in the con-
struction of the ‘imagined’ national communities in Europe that underpinned the
imperial ideologies and administrations of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (Lewis, 1996: 13).
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