Page 215 - Cultural Theory

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••• Ann Brooks •••

the accomplice of imperialist discourse, a discourse that, according to Homi
Bhabha [1994], does nothing but search, in the analysis of the other, for the
construction … of a ‘regime of truth’.
(Curti, 1996: 137)

Curti’s analysis of Jane Bowles’s work and her representations in literary and filmic
discourses highlights the difficulties of establishing a ‘fixed’ speaking position that
‘ignores the multiple and shifting sites occupied by the speaking subject’ (ibid.). It
also highlights the inescapable interrelationship of the imperial and the ‘male gaze’.

Travelling, inter-racial looking relations and women film-makers

Diasporic groups and movements have established patterns of transculturalism and
transnationalism in relation to a range of discourses and have made debates on sub-
jectivity, representation and identity, a much more contested one. Kaplan notes that
in the hands of diasporic feminist film-makers, ‘travel’ takes on a very different set
of ‘looking relations’. She shows how ‘black American, British and Asian women trav-
eling on film and with cameras’ have established very different ‘inter-gender’ and
‘inter-racial looking’ relations in the 1980s and 1990s. Kaplan claims that ‘[m]any of
these film makers turn the gaze back on whites, imagine a world in which whiteness
is irrelevant, or begin thinking differently about inter-racial looking – imagining it as
a process, a relation rather than a gaze’ (1997: 15). Kaplan identifies a number of
women film-makers whose work has been pivotal in advancing debates in these
areas, including Julie Dash, Clare Denis, Pratibha Parmar, Hu Mei, Yvonne Rainer,
Alison Aders and Trinh T. Minh-ha among others.
The work of these film-makers is too extensive to be comprehensively covered here
and their work can be seen to have particular resonance for the culture they are writ-
ing out of or in which they are ‘travelling’. Kaplan shows how some ‘film makers (e.g.
Trinh, Parmar, Denis) at times literally travel with their cameras; others (e.g. Dash,
Rainer, Anders, Denis) “travel” within their own cultures, in the sense of moving out
to imagine other identities, the struggle of other “Others”’ (ibid.: 16). Films such as
Claire Denis’s Chocolat which locates the story in postcolonial Africa with flashbacks
to 1950s French colonialism suggest possibilities in which both imperial and male
gazes can be contested and raise opportunities for a reworking of postcolonial con-
cepts such as Homi Bhabha’s ‘ambivalence’ in relation to the colonial gaze.
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s pioneering work in film combines a number of theoretical
dimensions and practices. Her work addresses ‘how we can “know” the other’ and
combines postcolonial, post structural and feminist theoretical dimensions:

Trinh T. Minh-ha is one film maker who has struggled in her theories and prac-
tices in film, writing, photography and music … to work out from the level of
subjectivity, not from that of broad abstractions. Perhaps more than any …
Trinh focuses on ‘how to make one-self a “subject” within struggles against the
State and make women’s concerns central; how to link the specificity of one’s

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