Page 216 - Cultural Theory

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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

particular context and struggle with those of women in different natural,
cultural and geographical locations’.
(ibid.: 196)

Her work, in whatever form it takes, literary, visual, filmic, addressing cultural and
contextual specificities, aims to destabilize and deconstruct ‘the apparently secure
positions that mainstream western culture has established for itself ’ (ibid.: 197). In
addressing these dimensions in her essay (1995) and in her film Reassemblage
she challenges previous constructions of inter-racial looking relations, which, …
begin with the subject-object structure, but come into particular tension in
regard to how western thought has constructed the relation so as to emphasize
people of color as the deplored ‘object’… What Trinh does, however, is begin
to move toward another conceptualizing of inter-racial looking relations. She
aims to practice from a place beyond the usual subject-object western binary
by moving toward the notion of multiple ‘I’s’ confronting ‘multiple I’s’ in the
Other’

(Kaplan, 1997: 199)

The work of these feminist film-makers counters the framing of inter-gender and
inter-racial looking relations in terms of Western binary models based on the ‘male
and imperial gaze’. Their work deconstructs westernized conceptions of representa-
tion and identity and establishes women of colour as artists and cultural producers.
The link between the ‘male gaze’ and the ‘imperial gaze’ has been highlighted in
Kaplan’s work, she also shows how they ‘collide and conflict depending on the speci-
ficities of context’ and she points to the need for an understanding of the links
between these gazes and how national identities are constructed.
The positioning of women within this conception of the ‘national imaginary’ is a
problematic one. Homi Bhabha discusses the issue of nation as an ‘imagined com-
munity’ in much the same way that Benedict Anderson does, and specifically in
terms of his position as a ‘postcolonial Indian/British citizen’. Bhabha provides an
analysis of the relationship between travelling and issues of nation, particularly in
relation to confronting Britain’s imaginary of itself, captured in its ‘imagined com-
munities’ in which he is not included. However, Bhabha’s analysis has no space for
a conceptualization of gender within ‘the imagined community’ and it is Kaplan who
shows how diasporic women film-makers such as Pratibha Parmar, Gurinder Chanda
and Ngozi Ohwurah frame a different conception of the ‘British imagined commu-
nity’ which has no place for them.

Conclusion

Shohat states that the globalizing aspects of both colonial and cultural processes oblige
‘the cultural critic to move beyond the restricting framework of the nation-state’

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