to mark the recent death of ousmane sembene, i moved xala to the top of our netflix queue, and we watched it last night. it is based on his own novel (which, by the way, was one of two texts fredric jameson referred to in his notorious argument about all third world fiction comprising nationalist allegories). apparently, sembene moved from writing to film so as to be able to reach a larger audience than that of elite literary culture in senegal. keeping this in mind may be useful in making sense of the film’s aesthetic which is a blend of modes: beginning with a satirical parable and then moving in and out of a realist framing of events if not of psychology (by which i mean that character development, motivations, consistency etc. are not major concerns). all of this may makes it sound avant garde as opposed to populist, but i suspect that what is also being utilized is the structure and logic of folk forms. not being familiar with senegalese narrative traditions i am unable to confirm–though there do seem to be elements which bear such a reading out: a group of peasants and beggars who function as a kind of chorus and then make a substantial narrative intervention at the end, occasional comic interludes etc..
or perhaps that’s a multicultural copout on my part. but it did make me think of the international reputation of the great bengali director, ritwik ghatak, whose films, unlike ray’s did not fall into either a recognizable universal humanism in their thematics nor structurally resemble the international (really, european) art film–and who consequently is not as well known as ray. his films too often featured a realist frame sutured with the logic and structural elements of other forms, particularly folk theater.
but enough formal speculation. what i am partly trying to say is that this is not a formally accessible film in the way that something like tsotsi or hotel rwanda, which partake of that international aesthetic, are. to make an analogy that will likely not make sense to anyone else on this blog: it is to films of that kind as ngugi’s later novels are to his early ones. but watch it and articulate this better.
thematically, the film anticipates the kinds of objections i’ve made on the blog about recent films “about africa” like hotel rwanda, the constant gardener etc.. that is to say it’s interests, unlike those films’, lie not so much in the european part of the neo-colonial equation as they do in the senegalese part. the opening parable that i referred to is wonderful: as a voice speaks inspirationally about the abolition of colonialism and the move to a genuine african socialism, we see a bunch of senegalese men throw three frenchmen and the various emblems of empire out of a govt. building. they are replaced by senegalese men and paraphernalia; the frenchmen walk out, shrug, disappear and then return clutching briefcases which they put down in front of the senegalese politicians and businessmen, and then sit back down behind them. but the film’s focus from that point on is not on the corrupting frenchmen (though they are always silently visible), but on the already corrupted senegalese elite.
the film’s critique of this neo-colonialism is not predicated on binary cultural terms either. on the one hand, there is a kind of africanist critique of the french speaking, evian drinking elite men, which is located partly in language. the juxtaposition/opposition of french and wolof is clear–delineated most clearly in a scene between the protagonist and his eldest daughter: he speaks to her in french, she replies only in wolof. elsewhere, a character’s fall from grace is marked by his switching from french to wolof (something which is not psychologically consistent, but follows a critical logic). at the same time, there is no romanticising of a non-european culture either. the event at the center of the narrative is the protagonist’s taking of a third wife, which he describes to his first wife and their children as part of their patrimony, and which is also subject to the film’s critique. also, as becomes quickly apparent, the elite who namecheck european brands and seek to remove “natives” from their presence, are as invested in traditional belief structures as those “natives”. the film thus takes as its object of critique not only the lingering structures and ideologies of colonialism but also senegalese patriarchy–both have to be overcome. one of the film’s most consistent critical identifications is with the feminist eldest daughter of the protagonist.
the other is with the folk, as represented by the “chorus” of beggars/peasants referred to above. given that this is likely the audience the film is addressing, it is not surprising that they are idealized somewhat. they exist on the margins of the film for the most part–something that was troubling me as i was watching–but then they take over for the startling denouement of the film, which moves suddenly from satirical observation to a ritual denunciation and exorcism.
i do hope more people will watch it and come back to discuss it. i should warn you though that only about 3/4 of the dialogue is subtitled. i don’t understand french or wolof, but it did seem like more of the wolof stuff was flying by.
nice review, arnab.
i have ngugi’s latest, wizard of the crow, on my night table (i don’t have a night table, but if i had one that’s where it would be). i meant it as my introduction to his work, as i haven’t read anything else by him. have you read it? will its import escape my uneducated, european mind?
i haven’t read wizard of the crow. the analogy i was trying to make has to do with the fact that ngugi started out writing socialist-realism of a familiar kind (in english). and then in the mid-70s, as part of his call for african writers to move away from european languages to african ones, he moved not only to gikuyu but also to a new hybrid of the european novel form with gikuyu oral traditions. the most dazzling of these books is devil on the cross. like xala it articulates a mostly feminist critique of both neo-colonialism and traditional patriarchy. the career of the great somali writer nuruddin farah is similar–his later books have been memorably described as pre-islamic and post-modern at the same time. haven’t read his latest either, but the “blood in the sun” trilogy (maps, gifts and secrets) is stunning, and articulates a similar critique of the state of post/neo colonial africa–one that refuses to shift responsibility (and agency) to ex-colonial europe.
I don’t think you’re being a copout, Arnab. I had the opportunity to judge an independent study project last Spring, and the topic was similar to the one you address here: the oral tradition and its influence on contemporary West African cinema. Unless she was being a copout too, the student’s conclusion was similar to yours. I noted that there were similarities between avant-garde European cinema of the 60s and the films the student was looking at, which included Sembene’s Xala. I know very little about African cinema, so I came to the project through my interest in Christian Metz, who argued that Classical Hollywood cinema works to mask discours as histoire–that is, a traditional film “works” insofar as it is successful at effacing all marks of enunciation.
It seemed to me that the opposite seemed to be the case with Xala (and, to a greater and lesser extent, with films by Sissoko, Drabo, Kabore, Dangarembga). The emphasis was, as it is in the oral tradition, on enunciation. Since I was, at the time, teaching the Hollywood musical, I also began drawing connections between “art” cinema and musical comedy texts like Singin’ in the Rain, which shows the marks of enunciation in order to create the illusion of discours, and to give the spectator the impression that the film was in the process of creation.
How does this relate to European art cinema of the 60s? Well, they (the films of Godard, Truffaut, for instance) too are self-reflexive. They foreground marks of enunciation in order to remind you that you are watching a movie, that you are not passive viewers of a non-discursive narrative. The purpose, of course, was draw attention to the cinematic apparatus, to demystify cinema, and to establish a new kind of film spectatorship. Obviously, that’s not what the Hollywood musical was doing–Jane Feuer notes that musicals demystify the producton of entertainment (by taking us “backstage” so to speak) only to “remythicize at another level that which they set out to expose” (these are her words).
With filmmakers like Sembene, it seems that they arrive at an aesthetic similar to that of the “art” film (and even the Hollywood musical comedy) but for different, primarily cultural, reasons. Sembene comes from a specific mode of storytelling, the tradition of the griot. Demystifying cinema (either for conservative purposes, as with the musical, or for radical purposes, as with the French New Wave) is not his aim. This is why I think Arnab’s first thought is right:
I think it’s a really fascinating idea, to compare these two traditions (the French New Wave or “art” cinema of Europe and contemporary African cinema). I wish I new more about the latter.
thank you arnab for breaking your own rule and talking about literature. this is a particularly striking sentence:
attributing responsibility without relinquishing agency seems one of the most fraught and discussed balancing acts of recent feminist, african american, and post-colonial discourses (and undoubtedly others as well). i seem to be of an apparently old school in thinking that blaming the oppressor does not equate with relinquishing responsibility for one’s implicit or explicit collaboration in one’s oppression. there is definitely, it seems to me, a place for downright anger and blame, especially in such obviously noxious enterprises as the colonization of africa. clearly, such anger and blame should not come in the form of soteriological narratives (constant gardener, blood diamond, blah blah blah) in which the white man is still the agent of african fortunes, for good or for bad. still, i wish we were all allowed to be unmitigatedly, uncomplicatedly angry at the imperialist pigs who fuck the poor.
okay, i just read your comment, john, and i wish you had something equally fabulous to say about my sutble investigation of lacrimation in spectator-response theory.
i didn’t mean to suggest that in either sembene, ngugi or farah there is any effacing of european culpability in the sorry political state of much of postcolonial africa. in all the texts i’ve cited this is very much kept visible. in xala a frenchman who is equal parts ridiculous and threatening is always with and behind the president–working both as his servant and as an unspoken power. ngugi and farah similarly highlight these kinds of power relations. but what both say forcefully is that in kenya and somalia, respectively, only blaming the ex/neo-colonials both shifts responsibility away from the native elites that replaced them, and defuses resistance to the regimes of native elites (who are supported by the ex/neo-colonials); that this kind of thinking can constitute its own form of permanent psychic colonialism. well, that’s my reading of it anyway.
john, your point about the french new wave and films like xala being similar in their enunciatory mode is a great one and would suggest that i am wrong when i said this about ghatak (and sembene):
you suggest that while the specifics of the enunciatory folk traditions sembene is working with are obviously different, the enunciatory mode is not obviously alien to european art cinema in the 60s.
perhaps my statement would be more accurate with regard to the general paradigm of neo-realist cinema, which is really what ray comes out of.
a couple of thoughts for discussion:
Do theorists, with a stake in the modernist distinction between classical narrative and the avant-garde, overstate the distinction between discours and histoire? The first problem is that most–in fact, all–films do include overt traces of enunciation–credit sequences, voice-overs, noticeable strategies of editing, etc.? The issue is that these features may be assimilated to an ideological point of view (concerning “realism” I suppose)–the theorists too often take this ideology as an effect of a formal strategy, rather than as part of a nexus where formal qualities are not any more prominent than other factors.
Genres are brought in as exceptions to the rule–as though genres are subsequent to the development of the overall “classical” strategy of effacement. With equal justification, we could take genre as “the rule” and speculate as to why other films do not make use of the enunciatory tactics of certain genre films. The theorists fall into a questionable pattern of idealism: the “classical system” is the pattern according to which individual texts are judged. Of course, I understand that theorists can point to an industrial model of production and to a widely accepted code for direction (determining spatial relations and the relationship to characters to space, etc.). But I have yet to understand why this “code” or “system” is not regarded as simply a certain kind of enunciation rather than as a renunciation of enunciation entirely (chew on that phrase!).
Do the theorists believe that the “classical” system actually achieves the effect of turning discours into histoire, or does it merely deploy a strategy which reliably reproduces an effect of realism? Is this a relevant distinction? When I read some theory I am hopelessly confused over the question of whether the classical system is a guiding principle for a film, a goal toward which the film directs itself without ever “reaching it” successfully, because it can’t of course reach this status of complete effacement and “invisibility.” Or whether the classical narrative is successful in becoming histoire.
The question doesn’t seem meaningless to me, because two different conceptions of ideology are at stake. One proposes an entirely effective ideological effect, what the film theorists like to call grandly an effect of “subject-positioning” within ideology. The other proposes that any strategy can never be successful entirely–formal strategies are broken by the different conditions of the audience, personal, historical, psychological, etc. To put this problem more directly, does the classical system create passive spectators who (mis)take what’s before them as non-discursive, as histoire? How does it achieve such a totalizing and seamless effect? Many theorists I’ve read, especially the psychoanalytically-inclined ones, operate in a certain kind of bad faith, taking the passive spectator as an unproblematic reality when discussing the ideological effects of the classical system, while also imagining an ideal open subjectivity poised for imminent liberation by alternative systems. My own view is that the passivity assumed by many of these theories is never obtained–though it might seem like nitpicking, it’s a very different matter to discuss the active but only partially successful construction of an ideology with the features of passivity than to assume an ideal passivity as a result of a formal system.
“Resistant” and “Transgressive” texts-particularly in certain genres where “enunciatory” elements are regarded as more prevalent–multiply but their impact is always constrained by the implicit connection to the Classical System to which they are related. Histoire always seems to achieve the ultimate victory, despite all the local skirmishes. If I was cynical I would say this state of things can play very well into the situation of the “middle management” of knowledge (me included, at the lower end) at the universities, who create dramas of agency against the backdrop of an increasingly ideologically rigid institutional structure. gesundheit.
So I think there may be a problem with evaluating films like Sembene’s against this discours/histoire division, especially as it implicitly makes primary the question of the relationship to the so-called classical model. Once again the classical model sets the terms for discussion, even if it is only in its negative role as that which enunciation fights against. In this way it plays the same role as the European colonialists in the analyses of national development Arnab critiques.
But a second problem occurs once the film has been brought into this classical/enunciatory distinction….the tendency is to identify those elements of enunciation as manifestations of “culture” and “tradition.” So-called folk culture is romanticized as a kind of unconscious force of resisting, ‘enunciating’ naturally whereas the Europeans and Americans must labor intensively and consciously to undermine the classical precepts. Again, to borrow from Arnab’s discussion, this seems to place the film into the same position as the colonized–not responsible because without agency,but nevertheless radiating a kind of mystical organic opposition that is not intellectually articulated.
I can’t imagine that the use of “folk elements” in an African film is necessarily that much different from, say, the use of generic narrative conventions in a European film. Why would one be necessarily more organic, more tied to a cultural tradition, than the other? In fact, it would seem that the use of folk traditions in a film indicates that a process of alienation has already made substantial progress. Identifying enunciatory elements in an African film as matters more related to the use of “folk traditions” than to avant-garde strategies of opposition has a whiff, to me, of the notion that Africa generally is ruled by the occult forces of blood and tradition.
In the past film studies used to be concerned with “Third Cinema.” Now, if the job lists are any indication, departments are concerned with “the cinema of globalization” and something called “new media.” To me this indicates that the academy follows the jargon (and money, of course) of the corporate world, that its terms are set by forces outside of itself rather than witin itself. I wonder if an approach can be adopted that refigures this notion of “Third” so that the dominant/opposition paradigm has its uses without becoming the domineering model of all analysis.
I could be very wrong. But whaddya think?
Wow.
Great comments, and then an ass-kicker of an essay by Michael–how on earth could I contribute here?
I side with Michael on the false dichotomies–the illusory ‘poles’–of discours and histoire. And I’d love to say something profound, but I’ll stick to a quick’n’dirty citation of de Certeau: it’s a false opposition, when the work of the text is always establishing possible relations between what is known and ways of knowing, the text engaging in specific but multiply-changeable structures of that relationship (like, in his comparison, Chaplin in The Pilgrim “running along the Mexican border between two countries both chasing him in turn, with his zigzags marking both their difference and the seam joining them”). In other words, to posit that certain (classical) texts seek to erase the conditions of discourse is not to really discuss those texts but to discuss the social conditions which allow the idea of such textual practices to flourish. In one part of his book on _The Writing of History_ he notes that “[p]roducing a text amounts to making a theory,” and elsewhere he notes how the specific tangles/structures of historical discourse in a given reading “makes a social identity explicit”…
…in my meager sense of these ideas, then, he’s trying to avoid this kind of classifying which posits certain texts as doing it right and others as getting it wrong. The (very) interesting problem is rather in the practices of reading texts–our attention to “African” cinema versus cinema about Africa might misplace the emphasis on object/structures ostensibly “within” these texts, when what we’d need to examine more critically is the ways that we define, assume, produce a sense of the “real” or “authentic” (or “resistant” or “agentive”). I don’t know Xala (yet), so let me go back to either of Meirelles’ films, where the project and problem of enunciation is explicitly foregrounded as suspect–even as both City of God and Constant Gardener may foreground a protagonist who informs to or is a member of the “Euro”/colonial presence, Rocket’s storytelling in City is constantly disrupted by techniques which emphasize a plurality of ways of knowing, and which more than suggest but explicitly invoke the impossibility of collapsing discours into histoire. The closing credits show ‘real’ footage of Knockout Ned speaking to a reporter, footage we’d seen enacted earlier with the actor playing Ned, on a tv set Rocket was watching — this is but one of many instances where the film foregrounds the way the dynamics of representation are skewed by those ‘reporting’ and those to whom reported, let alone the complex relations in narrative structure between what is said and what really happened.
I think it’s harder to make the technical case for Gardener, but I think the same relations must apply. In short, even if the negotation between colonizer and colonized is subtly or forcefully reconfigured in Xala, the negotation of that relationship is now part of the way we produce and read texts — so even a Blood Diamond will enact an explicit negotiation of these relations.
Which is all far more confusing than Michael’s post, but I’ve gotta run, so it’ll have to do.
michael is right to point out that the use of folk traditions in a senegalese film should not be viewed as definitively different from the use of folk traditions in european cinema (think bergman, for instance). but i don’t think john is suggesting either that they are, or that the fact that the enunciatory mode is apparent both in films from the french new wave and in films like xala means that they are therefore similar in their interests or attitudes to cinema–which, i think, is what michael is critiquing.
i think it is useful to keep the comparison john makes in mind because it guards against our positing a simple modal division between something called “african cinema” and something called “european cinema”. michael adds a second corrective as a corollary: we should also guard against the tendency to consign the “african” elements to the bin of “tradition” as opposed to art as a means of concealing our difficulty in dealing with texts that are at least in some ways other. this is partly why i made the comment about my reading of folk elements in xala possibly being a multicultural copout. to engage with a film like xala involves an additional amount of work, a certain amount of dislocation on the part of the critic–the alibi for the non-performance of which is to (admiringly) gesture to a generalized “folk tradition”, usually invoked as museumized rather than as articulating a politics of its own. which ironically is sort of the position that michael too seems to take up, though from a completely different direction, in his suspicion of the invocation of “folk traditions” in discussions of african film.
at the same time, we should also remember that writers and filmmakers like sembene (and ngugi and farah) are not separate from european modernist traditions but often count them as part of their formative influences. their deployment of folk elements in storytelling is not separable from their deployment of avant garde techniques. sembene is not himself a griot.
mike, i’ll be interested in your reading of xala once you get around to it. in the meantime, i am not sure what this means:
Yeah, confusing. I’ll see the film. What I was trying to get at is reception, rather than text: we live in a moment when the relationships between colonized and colonizer have been contested, that the relationships between the discours and the histoire of the imperial narrative are not the same as they used to be. So I don’t think we can say that simply because what is told in Diamond resembles a colonial narrative displacing (or erasing) the “African”, our tools for reading–even the broad and unwashed sense of “our”–make the narrative more complicated than Haggard or Kipling. We have different tools for reading; I’m skeptical that because the French are thrown out of the building that the film is more complicatedly decentering colonial authority than a film like Diamond. I’d be more sold by the arguments (that you and others have been making) about who gets to tell stories, how stories do or don’t circulate globally, etc. And I wonder how we read a text from 1974 Sembene (versus a 2006 Diamond) — what’s different in the social conditions which shape our reading practices, regardless of who made those texts?
Blah blah blah.
the point about the depiction of (neo)colonialism in xala is not that it shows the french being thrown out–it also shows them immediately returning–but that it refuses to make it a story about french badness oppressing senegalese goodness (let alone focalizing it through the narrative of a bad frenchman redeemed through contact with lots of good senegalese). it is simply not very interested in the french: senegal is not a metaphor for france.
and the point about the form is that what is also being overturned in the film is our (and here i use “our” to refer to all of us with our allegiances to various american and european schools of filmmaking) expectation of how a political narrative of this kind is aesthetically articulated. it takes us out of our usual frame (in a way that something like city of god does not). where john and michael’s correctives hit home with me is in their cautions about playing too fast and loose with this question of aesthetic difference.
all of this reminds me of michael’s comments about contemporary african music. it doesn’t make it into the contemporary american pop music scene (outside of the small “world music” section of the store) in even the limited way that a politically resistant manu chao does because it really isn’t very interested in rock and roll as its defining frame. there’s no clear entryway for us without our doing some work.
and, by the way, kipling is more complex than meirelles, leave alone blood diamond.
I get you in para one, and buy the argument.
Para 2 still has me stuck. Is it really so easy to differentiate the aesthetic and political forms of, say, the French and the Senegalese? The music analogy in para 3 doesn’t seem to track as neatly as you imagine — first, a musical tradition might carry on through, might probably predate colonial interventions. (Or at least you could posit traces of such pre-colonial form, but… an argument about that might be worth pursuing as well.) But film? Is there such a thing as an authentic film tradition in Senegal which evades Western/Northern/Euro influence? Or a novel?
I’m more caught up in South African narrative forms, so maybe my point of consideration is particular, but: when Zakes Mda writes _Heart of Redness_, he carefully and playfully deploys the sign of the classic Colonial text and then refuses ever to make anything of that sign. (The idea of a heart of redness is absolutely unexplored in the novel.) Following your point about Xala, that’s displacing the centrality of the colonial narrative about the colonizer — but nonetheless the absence speaks volumes, and throughout the novel Mda deploys complex connections between an IMAGINED authentic precolonial Xhosa culture (and an equally IMAGINED Afrikaaner identity) and carefully maps how bound up each are with the shared history. His isn’t a reading centered in an alternative tradition; his is a narrative which performs the interactions of various traditions, the polyglot and polyvocal–and both skeptically *and* with sincere interest examines whether, how, why we might imagine some “true” pre-colonial identities….
My point isn’t that we can’t draw distinctions between Sembene and Zweig, but that the distinctions don’t make sense to me if they’re defined as expressions of some pre-existing formal and cultural and political separateness. I would argue, rather, that Mda’s novel is meant to produce some semblance of the relations between the imperial and pre-imperial traces based on current social conditions and needs. So to argue that City of God uses recognizable Western/Euro forms and is therefore (simply or merely) reproducing a colonial center is, I think, misguided; I think you’re trying to rescue a clarity about aesthetic difference in the object.
i’m not actually positing an authentic senegalese film tradition. my point in my earlier post was exactly that it is not as straightforward as it might seem to talk about this kind of a pure aesthetic difference. your reading of mda (who i have not read) is pretty much in line with what i said about farah, ngugi and sembene in my earlier post, and is what i meant when i said that sembene is not himself a griot. so, no, i’m not positing an african “expressions of some pre-existing formal and cultural and political separateness”.
that said, i don’t think something has to exist pure and whole in some edenic pre-colonial state and continue unchanged past the colonial stage to be different. and it should be possible to talk about difference without inevitably falling into the trap of pure ontological/epistemological difference. otherwise you might end up in a conceptual framework where there is basically one universal film tradition playing out in different places with different kinds of local colour distinguishing them from each other.
my point too is about reading/viewing not writing/filming. in xala the logic of folk traditions which enters into the structure of the film makes the experience of the film for an audience less directly accessible than that of something like city of god which conventionally is still familiar (despite all the marks of enunciation that you listed). there’s a reason why city of god gets marketed in the u.s whereas films like xala don’t. this is not a question of authentic culture, but it is a question of other (not better) ways of telling stories and articulating politics. (and it doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to culture in the anthropological sense. in other words, you could make a similar argument about someone like lars von trier, say.)
so the point i’m making is not that xala is a product of some other pure tradition that is definitionally opposed to the euro-american colonial mainstream*, but that there is nonetheless an act of cultural translation that non-senegalese audiences must make to grasp its formal/political strategies. and this involves a translation of the audience, not just of the text, to paraphrase the indian translator, a.k ramanujan. it is the resistance to this kind of translation, which films like city of god do not require at the formal level (though they might at a thematic level) that might be termed colonial, not the structure of city of god itself.
*and similarly, i was not suggesting that contemporary african popular music is untouched by rock and roll. this is patently untrue for a lot of what i have heard (which is not very much). my badly stated point is that it does not treat this influence with any particular anxiety or reverence (in the same way in which popular indian cinema is completely uninterested in american audiences’ bafflement). it isn’t simply african rock and roll, but music whose own (hybrid) grammars and vocabularies need to be learned in order to truly engage with it.
Well, okay then.
Seriously, I was probably over-reading your critique in order simply to make sense of my own position, so — sorry. But look what I got: further, careful readings and claims. I’ll have to accuse you of stuff more often. John, if I overdetermined your point, you deserve it.
And I’m with you on needing tools for defining difference without the j’accuse of essentialism. I am curious when we–and I mean the “we” here, myself fully included–name those films that give good difference and those that fail. I was intrigued by Michael’s suggestion re Blood Diamond that perhaps the sentimental retro narrative might itself serve some useful political functions. And I think I dig City not least because when I teach it to students debates about representation, in all the ways that you and Gio and John and Michael’ve named, come so quickly and forcefully to the fore — and it strikes me that its structural familiarity never escapes a sense of uncanny displacement, estranging my students (and me) from that seemingly-clear narrative structure and reconstructing my sense of both that form and this film’s “content.”
In short, I guess I was poorly wandering around trying to say that the differences in political dimensions to the real but not reified aesthetic differences in these films are not necessarily simply hierarchical — the politics of reading Meirelles may be different in kind but not in concern.
But now I shall whisper only to myself until I’ve seen the film, which is coming from our library. More concrete talk later.
great exchange between Arnab and Mike–far beyond the rather limited point I was trying to make in my long posting–if I was going to make a kind of glib summing up of my recommendation it would have to be that theorists and critics need to start revealing the work that goes into the supposedly “invisible” classical style (which they set up as dominant in formal terms, whereas I think the dominance comes more from distribution, availability, etc)–I don’t mean revealing it just in that magical way where the theorist reveals the “real forces” at work but to reveal it as the complex of all forces taking place in the moment of reception with the spectator (I think I am repeating Mike’s point here) where formal considerations are not necessarily primary. And “third” or “avant-garde” cinema should not necessarily obtain some sort of cachet merely from being differentiated from the supposedly totalizing system of classical cinema. I agree with Arnab that we must work harder often to understand texts from other unfamiliar sources–but why do we oten privilege the category of “culture” in those instances. do we attribute an organicism to what we are unfamiliar with, while giving “our” texts an excessive autonomy? and, if you were a giant hot dog, would you eat yourself?
that’s a great question, michael. the one about the hot dog i mean. i would totally eat myself.
i think the work has to be in both directions: demonstrating that the structures of “our texts” too are cultural (as opposed to playing out implacable formal structures), as well as trying to grapple with formal systems from other cultures that may or may not be (somewhat) other–a determination that we cannot make if we don’t also engage in the kind of cultural translation (of ourselves and the text) that i referred to above.
to return to the jameson essay on third world literature i referred to in the original post, he makes a point there (and i may be mis-remembering) about a distinction between first world and third world literature being like the distinction between freud and marx; that contemporary first world writing is libidinal whereas the social persists as a central structure and concern in the third world writer’s world-view. his argument is not as reductive as this paraphrase of a bit of it makes it seem, but it is susceptible to your critique as well. to read third world literature as national allegory (as jameson does) is helpful in some ways, but it also seems like a way of assimilating unfamiliar thematic and structural concerns into a familiar interpretive framework. personally, i suspect that jameson is not particularly concerned about this because his real interest is not in theorizing third world literature but in using it as a stick to beat first world writers with.
Arnab, what is the title/source of the Jameson essay? it sounds intriguing if flawed, just like his famous essay on postmodernism.
“third world literature in the age of multinational capitalism”–maybe the “third” got added later in a revision. it was originally published in social text in the late 80s. santiago colas has a very good critique of the place of the third world in the postmodernism essay as well, imaginatively titled, i think, “the third world in jameson’s ‘postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism'”. this in the famous double issue of social text on postcolonial studies (no. 31/32) which also might contain some critiques of the third world literature essay–there was some back and forth in social text about it. and aijaz ahmad has a particularly exhausting takedown of it, reprinted in his own colletion in theory–where he mostly takes issue with jameson’s reliance on three world theory.
here’s a link to the first page of the colas essay which states his critique quite succinctly. you should be able to read the rest in a library.
a library? fuck that!