4.14.2006
Unthinking Eurocentrism, Excerpts (Film and Media Studies)
Title
Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
From Eurocentrism to Polycentrism:
This chapter maps colonialism's legacy on technologies of racism and discusses modes of representation in the Third World. "Colonialism is ethnocentrism armed, institutionalized, and gone global." (16) Neocolonialism is "a conjucture in which direct political and military control has given way to abstract, semi-indirect, largely economic forms of control whose linchpin is a close alliance between foreign capital and the indigenous elite." (17) Discourse is "a transindividual and multi-institutional archive of images and statements providing a common language for representing knowledge about a given theme." (18) (Foucault) "Racism invokes a double movement of aggression and narcissism; the insult to the accuses is doubled by a compliment to the accuser. Racist thinking is tautological and circular; we are powerful because we are right, and we are right because we are powerful." (19) "Racism, then, is both individual and systemic, interwoven into the fabric both of the psyche and of the social system, at once grindingly quotidian and maddeningly abstract. It is not a merely attitudinal issue, but a historically contingent intistitutional and discursive apparatus linked to the drastically unequal distribution of resources and opportunities, the undair apportioning of justice, wealth, pleasure and pain. It is less an error in logic than an abuse of power, less about 'attitudes' than about the deferring of hopes and the destruction of lives." (23) "Racism thus juggles two complementary procedures: the denial of difference and the denial of sameness." (24) The authors believe in the term Third World, a term that came about Post-Bandung and has to do with "protracted structural domination." (25) They mention Trinh T. Minh-ha's point about the third world within and state, even though it seems an unfashionable, militant relic, they will retain the use of TW: "to signal both the dumb inertia of neocolonialism and the energizing collectivity of radical critique, but with the caveat that the term obscures fundamental issues of race, class, gender and culture. At the same time, we would call for a more flexible conceptual framework to accomodate different and even contradictory dynamics in diverse world zones." (27) They then disucss Third World Cinema which emerged from the Cuban revolution, Peronism, and Cinema Novo in Brazil. Some take it to mean film produced by Third World countries (Roy Armes) others mark it by its political project (Willemen). The authors look at in overlapping circles, the core is by third world peoples for political purposes, then just stuff by third world peoples, then stuff about third world peoples with political purposes, and then diasporic hybrid films. They propose a way of decentering Eurocentrism/Hollywoodism by multiculturalizing the film studies curriculum with third world cinema. They comment on media imperialism: "Noe the central problem becomes one of tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization, in which hegemonic tendencies...are simultaneously 'indigenized' within a complex, disjunctive global economy. At the same time...discernable pattersn of domination channel the 'fluidities' even of a 'multipolar' world; the same hegemony that unifies the world through global networks of circulating goods and information also distributes them according to hierarchical structures of power, even if those hegemonies are now more subtle and dispersed." (31) They also discuss the Fourth world and its' cultural productions. The Fourth World is the indigenous world colonized within the 1st-3rd worlds (ok does this feel silly to you too?) They discuss the documentation of the Fourth World from without (anthropology) and from within (the native with the camera). They also critique the term and usage of "postcolonialism" and its celebration of hybridity. "Despite the dizzying multiplicities invoked by the term 'postcolonial,' postcolonial theory has curiously failed to addres the politics of location of the term 'postcolonial' itself." (38) "A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated with questions of historical hegemonies, risks sanctifying the fait accompli of colonial violence...Hybridity, in other words, is power-laden and asymetrical." (43) The authors propose a "ploycentric mulitculturalism." "the word 'multiculturalism' has no essense; it points to a debate. While aware of its ambiguities, we would hope to prod it in the direction of a radical critique of power relations, turning into a rallying cry for a more substantive and reciprocal intercommunalism." (47) "The notion of 'polycentrism' in our view, globalizes multiculturalism."
Tropes of Empire:
The chapter looks more at film and the ways others are troped in film representations. "The idea of race...can be seen as less a reality than a trope...of difference...Tropological operations thus form a kind of figurative substratum within the discourse of empire." (137) They discuss animalization, vegatalization, and naturalization: "Animalization forms part of the larger, more diffuse mechanism of naturalization: the reduction of the cultural to the biological, the tendency to associate the colonized with the vegetative and the instinctual rather than with the learned and the cultural." (138) Infantalization: "The Third World toddler, even when the product of a thousand years of civilzation, is not yet in control of its body/psyche, and therefore needs the guiding hand of the more 'adult' and 'advanced' societies, gently pulling it into modern times." (140) They discuss the world of the other as viriginal, ready to be penetrated by colonizing Adams. Of course gendering and orientalization play in here. Penetration is linked with discovery. "Eurocentric cinema narrates penetration into the Third World through the figure of the 'discoverer.'" (145) They also discuss cinema's capacity to show the unknown of the dark places of the earth, exemplified in mummy films. "The films thus reproduce the colonialist mechanism by which the orient, rendered devoid of any active historical or narrative role, becomes...the object of study. Any possibility of representing dialogic interaction is excluded from the outset." (148) Rape and rescue also play a role colonial discourse and filmic representation. "When literalizaed through the rescue of a woman from a lascivious Arab, the rescue fantasy not only allegorizes the rescue of the orient from its own instinctual destructiveness but also addresses a didactic bildungsroman to women at home, perpetuating by contrast the myth of the sexual egalitarianism of the West." (170)
Other Thoughts
"Cinema has often used map imagery to plot the topographies touched by its adventurer heroes, implicitly celebrating its own technological superiority both to the novel's mere verbality and to the staic nature of drawings and still photography...Cinema thus represents itself as the contemporary heir of a more ancient visual medium: cartography." (147)
On the production code outlawing the portrayal of miscegenation: "This exclusionary ideology explains the Production Code's blanket cencorship of sexual violence and brutality, thus foreclosing any portrayal of racial and sexual violence towards African-Americans and implicitly wiping the memory of rape, castration, and lynching from the American record. The Production Code, in other words, forstalled the possibility of a denunciatory counter-narrative from the perspective of people of color, for whom sexual violence by Whites has often been a core historical experience." (160)
Other QE Works Cited
Bordwell et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema (Film and Media Studies)
Said, E. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
From Eurocentrism to Polycentrism:
This chapter maps colonialism's legacy on technologies of racism and discusses modes of representation in the Third World. "Colonialism is ethnocentrism armed, institutionalized, and gone global." (16) Neocolonialism is "a conjucture in which direct political and military control has given way to abstract, semi-indirect, largely economic forms of control whose linchpin is a close alliance between foreign capital and the indigenous elite." (17) Discourse is "a transindividual and multi-institutional archive of images and statements providing a common language for representing knowledge about a given theme." (18) (Foucault) "Racism invokes a double movement of aggression and narcissism; the insult to the accuses is doubled by a compliment to the accuser. Racist thinking is tautological and circular; we are powerful because we are right, and we are right because we are powerful." (19) "Racism, then, is both individual and systemic, interwoven into the fabric both of the psyche and of the social system, at once grindingly quotidian and maddeningly abstract. It is not a merely attitudinal issue, but a historically contingent intistitutional and discursive apparatus linked to the drastically unequal distribution of resources and opportunities, the undair apportioning of justice, wealth, pleasure and pain. It is less an error in logic than an abuse of power, less about 'attitudes' than about the deferring of hopes and the destruction of lives." (23) "Racism thus juggles two complementary procedures: the denial of difference and the denial of sameness." (24) The authors believe in the term Third World, a term that came about Post-Bandung and has to do with "protracted structural domination." (25) They mention Trinh T. Minh-ha's point about the third world within and state, even though it seems an unfashionable, militant relic, they will retain the use of TW: "to signal both the dumb inertia of neocolonialism and the energizing collectivity of radical critique, but with the caveat that the term obscures fundamental issues of race, class, gender and culture. At the same time, we would call for a more flexible conceptual framework to accomodate different and even contradictory dynamics in diverse world zones." (27) They then disucss Third World Cinema which emerged from the Cuban revolution, Peronism, and Cinema Novo in Brazil. Some take it to mean film produced by Third World countries (Roy Armes) others mark it by its political project (Willemen). The authors look at in overlapping circles, the core is by third world peoples for political purposes, then just stuff by third world peoples, then stuff about third world peoples with political purposes, and then diasporic hybrid films. They propose a way of decentering Eurocentrism/Hollywoodism by multiculturalizing the film studies curriculum with third world cinema. They comment on media imperialism: "Noe the central problem becomes one of tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization, in which hegemonic tendencies...are simultaneously 'indigenized' within a complex, disjunctive global economy. At the same time...discernable pattersn of domination channel the 'fluidities' even of a 'multipolar' world; the same hegemony that unifies the world through global networks of circulating goods and information also distributes them according to hierarchical structures of power, even if those hegemonies are now more subtle and dispersed." (31) They also discuss the Fourth world and its' cultural productions. The Fourth World is the indigenous world colonized within the 1st-3rd worlds (ok does this feel silly to you too?) They discuss the documentation of the Fourth World from without (anthropology) and from within (the native with the camera). They also critique the term and usage of "postcolonialism" and its celebration of hybridity. "Despite the dizzying multiplicities invoked by the term 'postcolonial,' postcolonial theory has curiously failed to addres the politics of location of the term 'postcolonial' itself." (38) "A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated with questions of historical hegemonies, risks sanctifying the fait accompli of colonial violence...Hybridity, in other words, is power-laden and asymetrical." (43) The authors propose a "ploycentric mulitculturalism." "the word 'multiculturalism' has no essense; it points to a debate. While aware of its ambiguities, we would hope to prod it in the direction of a radical critique of power relations, turning into a rallying cry for a more substantive and reciprocal intercommunalism." (47) "The notion of 'polycentrism' in our view, globalizes multiculturalism."
Tropes of Empire:
The chapter looks more at film and the ways others are troped in film representations. "The idea of race...can be seen as less a reality than a trope...of difference...Tropological operations thus form a kind of figurative substratum within the discourse of empire." (137) They discuss animalization, vegatalization, and naturalization: "Animalization forms part of the larger, more diffuse mechanism of naturalization: the reduction of the cultural to the biological, the tendency to associate the colonized with the vegetative and the instinctual rather than with the learned and the cultural." (138) Infantalization: "The Third World toddler, even when the product of a thousand years of civilzation, is not yet in control of its body/psyche, and therefore needs the guiding hand of the more 'adult' and 'advanced' societies, gently pulling it into modern times." (140) They discuss the world of the other as viriginal, ready to be penetrated by colonizing Adams. Of course gendering and orientalization play in here. Penetration is linked with discovery. "Eurocentric cinema narrates penetration into the Third World through the figure of the 'discoverer.'" (145) They also discuss cinema's capacity to show the unknown of the dark places of the earth, exemplified in mummy films. "The films thus reproduce the colonialist mechanism by which the orient, rendered devoid of any active historical or narrative role, becomes...the object of study. Any possibility of representing dialogic interaction is excluded from the outset." (148) Rape and rescue also play a role colonial discourse and filmic representation. "When literalizaed through the rescue of a woman from a lascivious Arab, the rescue fantasy not only allegorizes the rescue of the orient from its own instinctual destructiveness but also addresses a didactic bildungsroman to women at home, perpetuating by contrast the myth of the sexual egalitarianism of the West." (170)
Other Thoughts
"Cinema has often used map imagery to plot the topographies touched by its adventurer heroes, implicitly celebrating its own technological superiority both to the novel's mere verbality and to the staic nature of drawings and still photography...Cinema thus represents itself as the contemporary heir of a more ancient visual medium: cartography." (147)
On the production code outlawing the portrayal of miscegenation: "This exclusionary ideology explains the Production Code's blanket cencorship of sexual violence and brutality, thus foreclosing any portrayal of racial and sexual violence towards African-Americans and implicitly wiping the memory of rape, castration, and lynching from the American record. The Production Code, in other words, forstalled the possibility of a denunciatory counter-narrative from the perspective of people of color, for whom sexual violence by Whites has often been a core historical experience." (160)
Other QE Works Cited
Bordwell et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema (Film and Media Studies)
Said, E. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
# posted by SMRT : 5:03 PM
