Page 212 - Cultural Theory

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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

Kaplan develops this idea in relation to filmic discourses and illustrates ‘Hollywood’s
modernist fascination with white male and female explorers and entrepreneurs as well
as with British colonialism’ (Kaplan, 1997: 15). What is clear from the writings of white
women colonial travellers, in their cinematographic representation, and in the con-
struction of the ‘imperial gaze’ in film, is that western women were complicitous in the
‘Orientalist vision’. In Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (1996),
Reina Lewis explores the position of European women as active agents in cultural pro-
duction within imperial discourses. She examines a number of historical studies which
have explored ‘Western (mainly middle-class) women’s experience of, and involvement
in, imperialism’. Lewis maintains that:

This was for the white scholar a painful but necessary journey, allowing us to
grapple with the multiple contradictions of a female imperial subjectivity. For
black and other scholars of colour, it marked the entry or re-entry, of the colo-
nial and postcolonial repressed – speaking of the iniquities of the colonial past
and the continued epistemological violences of ideologies of racial and sexual
difference.

(1996: 2)

Kaplan explores another dimension of theorizing travel, captured in the work of dias-
poric women film-makers, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, conveying very different
conceptions of ‘the imperial gaze’ and ‘looking relations’. Kaplan draws parallels in her
work between the ‘imperial’ and ‘patriarchal’ gaze although many feminist writers, the-
orists and practitioners are critical of the continuing usage of conceptual frames of ref-
erence such as ‘patriarchy’. A further dimension of ‘travel’ theory outlined by Kaplan is
the area of growth of new digital technologies and the implications of this for issues
of subjectivity and representation. As Kaplan notes: ‘[i]n the new cyber age, problems
relating to modernist inter-racial and inter-gender looking in relations and power
imbalances may be subordinated to larger changes in cultural organization (or disorga-
nization) brought about by new technologies’ (1997: 22).
Deconstructing colonial representations and theorizing travel and its links with
the ‘imperial gaze’ is one way to interrogate the nature of inter-racial and inter-
gender looking relations. bell hooks draws out some powerful connections between
travel and imperialism, establishing links between this and conceptions of ‘white-
ness’ in the black imagination. As hooks notes: ‘Searching the critical work of post-
colonial critics, I found much writing that bespeaks the continued fascination with
the way white minds, particularly the colonial imperialist traveler, perceive black-
ness, and very little expressed interest in representations of whiteness in the black
imagination’ (1992: 339).
In the process of theorizing black experience, hooks ‘seek[s] to uncover, restore, as
well as to deconstruct, so that new paths, different journeys are possible’ (ibid.: 342).
hooks explores Said’s (1983) and Clifford’s (1992) work on theorizing travel and
notes that both offer stable, fixed conceptions of theory. Said claims that theory can
‘threaten reification, as well as the entire bourgeois system on which reification

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