Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media

Edited and With an Introduction by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, NJ USA, 2003
ISBN 0-8135-3235-3
paperback, 335 pp

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher <mosher@svsu.edu>,
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA.

This is a volume in Rutgers’ Depth of Field Series of books on the cinema, historic and contemporary. Its essays investigates media culture around the globe. Co-editor Robert Stam writes on "Fanon, Algeria and the Cinema: the Politics of Identification" and the impact of the Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon's deconstruction of imperial racism in his country during The 1950s and its urban guerrilla war of independence. Brian Larkin writes, in "Itineraries of Indian Cinema: African Videos, Bollywood, and Global Media", of how the experience of being pictured with a movie star from India–in a composite photograph created in the photographer's studio–is enjoyed by conservative young Moslem men in northern Nigeria. This audience also enjoys the romantic songs in Indian movies, for the men an women are chastely separated as they sing and emote.

Ana M. Lopez discusses, in "Train of Shadows': Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America", the region's silent cinema of 1896 to 1920, appreciating foreign importation of this medium of modernity as well as indigenous practitioners like Affonso Segreto of Rio de Janeiro and Eugenio Py of Buenos Aires. At times European models were adhered to closely, perhaps too closely, the Mexican film La Luz (1917) consciously imitated the Italian film Il Fuoco (1915), both titles meaning "The Light". Meanwhile its leading lady Emma Padilla imitated the Italian actress Pina Menichelli, star of the earlier film.

Several essays discuss diverse film cultures within the United States, the grand warlike nation of which this citizen increasingly realizes may be the strangest land of all in its complexities and ethnic interplay. Edward D. Castillo locates significant instances of the white hero's sympathetic interface with Native Americans in Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves. Yet often in the United States of America its most interesting commercial movies are lesser known than those achieving blockbuster status and staggering ticket sales. Julianne Burton-Carvajal unravels complex personal and ethnic interrelationships in "Oedipus Mex/Oedipus Mex: Triangulations of Paternity, Race and Nation in John Sayles' 'Lone Star." Binita Mehta follows one movie's displaced Indian immigrants Emigrants Twice Displaced: Race, Color, and Identity in Mira Nair's 'Mississippi Masala".

One rich unravelling of an American film and its ethnicity is "My Names is Forrest, Forrest Gump': Whiteness Studies and Paradox of Particularity" by Robyn Wiegman of Duke University. Her 1999 essay cites the 1996 anthology White Trash by Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, and related work by scholars Noel Ignatiev and David Roediger, that decodes majoritarian imagery and its class signifiers as deftly as scholars in African-American and other ethnic studies have their own groups. Wiegman shows how some symbols in the portentous movie featuring actor Tom Hanks as gentle Gump was codified for southerners and other defenders of a dangerously exclusionary Euro-American heritage.

Other essays discuss black diaspora documentary, cinema vanguards under Philippine and Brazilian dictatorships, global womanism, the impact of French immigration policies, and Turkish and Iranian transnational genres. More than one laments, with insight and melancholy, the disturbing, distorting condition of liminality that many directors suffer in exile from their native lands. This reviewer might include in this transitory category those Americans fleeing the McCarthy-era Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s, such as the late Joseph Losey. An essay of interest to artists constructing digital, interactive multimedia--rather than narrative cinema–is"The Appended Subject" Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage" by Jennifer González though it seems to be about a very different medium and from a different book (it is, first appearing in the 2000 volume Race in Cyberspace), here it serves the purpose of showcasing artists pursuing a myth of a non-specific and de-ethnicized audience. The filmmakers celebrated in all other essays in the book draw strength in their difference and particularity.