Reading Comments on Kidlat Tahimik (Chow, Jameson, Russell)
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11 Responses to “Reading Comments on Kidlat Tahimik (Chow, Jameson, Russell)”
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March 16th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Much of what Rey Chow said in “Films as Ethnography” resonated with me, particularly Benjamin’s explanation of translation as a process of “putting together”, whose task is to elevate the two languages involved to something larger (”…making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a great language”, 188). Also powerful for me was Chow’s notion that the translation of ethnic cultures into contemporary mass culture is “European colonialism’s foremost legacy in the non-European world” (191), and the idea that any given translation involves so much more than verbal languages. Instead it is a process that encompasses everything from the transition from tradition to modernity, literature to visuality, academia to mass culture, etc – in other words, it is a hugely complex process, to which verbal language is only the first point of access. Taken at face value, it’s a convincing argument that makes one wonder how we’ve come to understand other cultures to any meaningful degree at all. In fact, it might lead one to believe that we actually don’t understand other cultures on a meaningful level, but just think we do. On the other hand, one might read this argument as evidence of some greater, universal human understanding – if we’re able to understand another culture, despite what a complex (and therefore easy to mess up) process translation is, there must be universals that allow people from different cultures to understand one another on a innate, fundamental level. But how will we ever know if we really do meaningfully understand another culture? Even the privileged few who have lived, full immersed in two cultures could arguably be said to inhabit a separate, third sphere. So who can judge?
As I said, a lot of this article resonated with me, and I found myself nodding my head in agreement. But then I came to the last page, when Chow says, “Meanwhile, the ‘original’ that is film, the canonically Western medium, becomes destabilized and permanently infected with the unforgettable ‘ethic’ (and foreign) images imprinted on it by the Chinese translators” (202). I did a double-take here, because throughout the entire article I was conceiving of the “original” as Chinese culture – as I would presume most people were, considering Chow is exploring how the “cultural essence” of China is translated by Chinese filmmakers, some say problematically. I suppose it doesn’t really matter which is the “original” – the filmic medium or Chinese culture – because Chow thoroughly problematizes the concept of origins, and argues convincingly that the process of translation is one in which both “languages” (whether verbal or not) mutually complement and affect one another. By subtly switching the angle from which we’re looking at the translation process in this particular instance, Chow makes the reader reconsider the concept of the original in a concrete sense for herself – what a brilliant way to bring the point home.
March 17th, 2008 at 2:09 am
In response to Film as Ethnography.
I was thinking about this the other day when we all saw the candidate who spoke about dubbing. Why is there an anxiety that translation will result in the loss of something from the text? I mean it sounds pretty simple that, when translating things must be changed in order to suit a another language, but does this always entail a loss? Why can’t it just be a change? After all, isn’t art always about being interpreted and therefore meaning is subjected to the knowledge base of the viewer regardless?
I enjoyed the article but I think it focused to much on the assumption that translation was lingual. Although it says it is about more than simply words, I didn’t find that the article focussed much on images.
I think that when we are discussing films, its true that some translation will probably be different from its original, but is it really important if we don’t catch every nuance of cultural meaning if we understand the underlying message and emotions it conveys?
Moreover, in response to the beginning of the article, where it talked about the filmmaker being criticized for not being authentically Chinese enough, (the text implies this itself) does that not already burden the filmmaker with an otherness, which he or she (or ze) must be limited to ignoring the western gaze that allows the watcher (white discourse creators) to remain invisible and holds the filmmaker responsible for speaking for all Chinese instead of for their own story. (This sentence was brought to you by the people against punctuation association or PAPA.) I write that it burdens them with an otherness in the sense that they are required to justify their otherness and speak for everyone, whereas white European film makers can just make what they want. I am pretty sure this is Chow’s sentiment too.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
I was kind of at cross-purposes with this week’s readings since I’m one of those poor unfortunate monolingual people, and on top of that I have absolutely no background in anthropology – not even a first-year undergraduate course, not even a high-school course just taken for the credit.
Thus, the only really original insight I can offer is that as long as we’re talking about the triumvirate of Asian cinema, language issues, and Chinese national pride, Chow could have done worse than mention that Bruce Lee film Fists of Fury (nee The Chinese Connection) where the slimy and supercilious traitor villain is Wu – the translator of Chinese into Japanese. This reifies things on the most simple, immediate surface level possible as far as I’m concerned.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Jameson’s opening statement, “…The Perfumed Nightmare is scarcely to be thought of as paradigmatic of Third-World film in general…” made me guess that he must be using films such as The Hour of the Furnaces and accompanying manifesto as an example of classically Third World cinema. But I wondered if Kidlat’s approach in The Perfumed Nightmare was not a natural evolution or alternative from the strident convictions and methods of the Hour of the Furnaces period to a more nuanced, ambiguous, whimsical and silly mode of assault on assumptions about progress and power, similar to the way the poetic, postmodern, pro-indigenous missives from Commandante Marcos would seem to represent a strategy that may have learned from the Central American guerrilla movements of the 80’s and decided to try some new ideas.
I did not have the same strong objections to Jameson’s suggestion that “something like cultural nationalism is implicitly revealed when the option of advanced technology is taken away” (207), though it seemed vague or overly generalized. But it did seem like it may hint at an insight. Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time in Cuba, and the famously still-functioning American cars from the 50’s have been declared “patrimonio national”. What was born of necessity and a scavenger’s creativity has become a point of national heritage, and in this instance becomes integrated into a cultural nationalism whose parameters are continually declared in contrast and opposition to the American system.
Where I struggled most with Jameson was pg 198, in the middle of the page, around the area of “…Western relativisms – however internally jarring and contradictory – have always seemed to take place within some essential class homogeneity: the most dramatic eruptions of otherness – as in race or gender – always ultimately seeming to fold back into conflicts on the inside of a sphere whose true other or exterior eluded representation altogether”. Umm…fold back inside a sphere? I just could not make this into a picture in society that made sense.
Within the chapter by Rey Chow, there was one ignorant question I had about the way she consistently cast deconstruction as not only “negative” (187, 193, etc), but also as “nihilistic” (188), and I wondered if these were widespread and agreed upon conclusions or if this was her personal interpretation of affairs.
Her emphasis on translation as “betrayal” was fascinating, a fantastic metaphor that immediately brought to mind the story of Malinche and the shadow of betrayal to the conquistadores cast over Mexican history, as well as the story of Norval Morrisseau’s early successes with his art in the white art world and the emphatic criticism from his home community.
Where the metaphor leads, to the translation of Chinese culture into “the canonically Western medium” of film, made total sense, but also (like Christina) made me pause. Not that film isn’t born in the West and ruled by hegemonic Hollywood economics and fancy French film festivals – just that, maybe it won’t always be that way. And if it isn’t, maybe there is nothing inherently Western about it???
March 19th, 2008 at 3:32 am
I agree with Chow’s argument that a two-termed, uni-directional theory of translation is a big problem, especially if we are trying to get afield of the imbalance of power exemplified in past modes of translation. Many of us are probably familiar with the major crimes of “orientalism,” the hegemonic practice of ethnography (and thereby translation, as Chow states) which ultimately seeks to exoticize the East and assert the “superiority” of the (more modern, or civilized) West. Chow, however, widens the scope of the ethnography/translation problem by subjecting both the East and West, and the very idea of essentially “original” and “translated” texts, to scrutiny. For instance, Chow illuminates for us how the concept of a privileged “original” in the common theory of translation can not only lead to an orientalization set against colonial-Western standards of value and culture, but also to a nativist attempt to ossify “tradition,” “even as tradition is disintegrating” (396). Evidently, Chow wants to level the field in ethnography and translation; thus, she criticizes the model of translation that aims to capture “meaning,” a concept all too susceptible to ideological deformation and dominance, and also disapproves of the kind of auto-ethnography of the “other” that holds fast to “tradition” at the expense of a clearer picture of the present situation, or “a context of cultural translation in which these ‘other’ cultures are equally engaged in the contradictions of modernity, such as the primitivization of the underprivileged, the quest for new foundations and new monuments, and so forth, that have been blatantly exhibited by Western nations” (405). For Chow, “genuine cultural translation is possible only when we move beyond the seemingly infinite but actually reductive permutations of the two terms - East and West, original and translation - and instead see both as full, materialist, and mosty likely equally corrupt, equally decadent participants in contemporary world culture” (404). It is this “world culture,” this “violence,” which should be easily translatable from culture to culture, and which will “mark the passages that head not toward the ‘original’ that is the West or the East but toward survival in the postcolonial world” (408).
It seems to me that as the world becomes increasingly globalized, as violent and oppressive this fact is, cultures across the world are brought closer together, and become more translatable, in their sympathy to each other. One could see this as a gateway to homogenization of culture and experience, as globalization rides roughshod over everybody. Is it with heartbreak then that we realize how “related” we’re all becoming as global citizens? Will it not be a terrifying and depressing day when all world cinema is instantly familiar to all areas of the globe? When translation is no longer necessary?
The heartening thing I’m learning is that it remains struggle and confrontation, rather than complicity, with the present global situation - presented in personal or localized frameworks, or in cross-cultural terms, as in Perfumed Nightmare - that one finds everywhere in the best of world cinema. These confrontations register loud and clear, regardless of language. At least that’s my experience: my outrage, sadness, laughter, etc. in watching many contemporary “foreign” films (by filmmakers as diverse as Tsai Ming-Liang, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach [surely foreign is not exclusively a linguistic category]) all have some connection to my own awareness that the material conditions of the modern world are becoming increasingly difficult to connect with on a fundamental human level, that these conditions are not meeting some of our basic needs as a human race.
March 19th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
I was thinking about Sharlene’s comment on “Art Naif.” In regards to: ” The very archaic nature of these figures [bridges] is in fact what saves them, for here, as in naif art generally, the gap between the image and the intended meaning lies open as innocently as in the child’s or a schizophrenic drawing.” I agree that the language Jameson uses implies condescension but we must return to the child’s drawing from “Cachet” for a point of comparison. There was something so disturbing and mysterious embodied in such a simplistic drawing. “Cachet” struggles between two conflicting realities: the simple truth about the past and the desire to intellectually rationalize the past to escape responsibility. The childlike drawings create a bridge between the past and the present as it is symbolic of a past trauma and exist in the present as if they came from the hands of the child from the past.
The childlike pictures say everything without saying anything specific. The simplicity of the drawings offers an emotional impact, a sense of responsibility and guilt that rejects the world of the main character and all his intellectual rationalizations from his parties to his television show. The film asks specific questions about personal responsibility. Are we to be held responsible for things that occurred in our childhood? At what point in our growth in maturation do we become responsible for our actions? These questions posed between the main character and the man he wronged can even be translated into national terms in regards to the current and historical repercussions of colonialism. At what point are nations responsible for the people they have colonized. What right does a nation have to occupy another cultures space/land, take from it what they want, and then abandon it ignorantly leaving destruction and destitution in its wake? Or what right does a nation have to reject/deny the immigration of a colonized (Algerian) people from obtaining the same privileged access and rights that the colonizing people within their own countries maintain (France). Do future/present governments have the right to ignore the past mistakes of past governments?
The idea of the drawings can be reflected on the use of the “naïf” bridges in “Perfumed Nightmare” as well. Jameson is making direct comparisons between Jaques Tati, Godard, and Kidlat. I think what he really means is that the simplicity of the visual representation allows for a complexity that could not be achieved by any other means. I was thinking about the performance piece in “Pierrot Le Fou” where Karina and Belmondo must sing for their supper and they create a play embodying the Vietnam War. They both utilize cultural essentialism and visual stereotypes in order to create recognizable symbols of each side. Belmondo says “Yah” and “New York” over and over while Karina paints her face yellow and screams a very racist interpretation of the vietnamese language .
This scene is so simplistic that its message is obvious. Godard could have spent a lot of time having them rehearse big speeches and including radio edits from both sides or including real footage from the war. Instead he goes to the roots of the childishness in cultural stereotyping and the problems of translation between two bodies in direct contact (although being racist in the process makes this method very problematic). It seems that if sticking only to your own understanding of your own culture can be somewhat limiting and exclusionist. Whereas, seeing your culture through the eyes of another culture can strengthen your own understanding and appreciation of your own culture by broadening your own situated cultural position through experiencing another’s world view.
And now back to Kidlat’s use of the bridge. The bridges become a metaphor that Jameson argues must be simplistic in order to effect affect as well as evoke the kind of symbolic force that pure cinema must have through the old saying that the greatest cinema must “show, and not tell.” Bridges are universal. They are used in every country as a means to traverse between two geographical areas. The also protect the loads that we carry whether they be our bodies, personal experiences and intelligence, or our commodities. Bridges connect spaces that nature has deemed to separate—including the separation from the personal mind to connect with a global community of minds (internet).
I agree that in the process of analyzing race and racist discourse, language can become a tricky wire to cross successfully. I by no means promote Godard’s blatant use of racial stereotypes a means to achieve this end, but rather appreciate Kidlat’s journey to another country to further strengthen his appreciation of own cultural identity while at the same time appreciating another culture—through visual representations. I agree with Sharon in that the film never essentializes any part of either culture. I think it is wonderful that “The Perfumed Nightmare” was received so critically for it suggests that the film helped strengthen a sense national identity—even if though opposition. It is hoped that any film would help all people realize new ways of appreciating and representing their culture. Isn’t there an age old saying that you only appreciate something until there is a threat of losing it?
March 23rd, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Sorry it took so long for me to post this- some points that I thought were important from Ananya and my presentation: Theories on Translation, from Rey Chow’s article “Film as Ethnography”
Benjamin:
Chow discusses Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator.” In which Benjamin says what needs to be translated is the intention of the original text.
Ben states that the translation is primarily an act of putting together, which shows that the original has also been put together, and displays the way in which the original has been put together through the words which are used, rather than the sentences (185).
Benjamin’s idea of the literal= In the English language the literal connotes a certain lack of imagination, metaphor- something that is superficial or crude. This sense of the literal brings out the sense of Ben’s Wortlichkeit, which is best translated as a “word-by-word-ness”: “a real translation is not only that which translates word by word but also that which translates literally, depthlessly, naively” (186).
Ben states in translation the “original’s intention” can only be understood as what is added when translating- In all language there remains in addition to something that can be conveyed, something that cannot be communicated. The translator’s job is to communicate this additional meaning, which doesn’t simply lie in the “word-for-word-ness” of the text, but also in the figurative sense.
What Ben is saying of translation, the deconstructionists say of language: That the original is Self-differAnce .
Ben says that the “original’s intention” is not only a “dissemination of the self,” but also a process of standing in for something other than the self. Therefore, the act of translation is a liberation of the thing that cannot be communicated in the text, b/c it is trapped in its own language. The only way this trapped “symbol” can escape is through the language in which it is being translated.
Chow likes Ben’s notion of translation to apply to a “translation of culture” because it is not only deconstructive, it is also a liberation that is reciprocal between the original and the translation. They both liberate each other from the confines of their own “trapped” languages and meanings (188). He holds both up on a pedestal, not just the original as De Man does. Ben states that the translation makes the foreign sound more native, where the native is the original point of reference- but he says that translation should let the foreign “infect” the native, and vice versa. (189) – they should play off each other. This is what people say makes Ben’s theory “anti-ethnocentric,” which is a movement that doesn’t want translation to be self enclosed, but rather out towards the other.
Benjamin’s theories of mass culture are crucial to cultural translation- predominant one being the asymmetry of power relations between third and first worlds. He attempts to dismantle the notion of the origin (west) and alterity (east/other), and consider the intersemiotic transformations that have happened to both east and west due to mass culture. “The mass culture of our media, into which even the most primitive societies have been thrown, makes this coevalness ineluctable. The primitive is not of another time, but is our contemporary” (194).
This is where the need for a third term comes in, so that translation and interpretation exit from the first two terms subjectivity (194).
Niranjana:
Niranjana’s version of translation: She bases her ideas on a poststructuralist model.
Translation must be seen within the context of Western imperialism and colonialism. (190). To her, translation is an interlingual practice- the exchange of ideas, beliefs and information between different languages (and thus cultures).
She believes that translation is a form of “cultural resistance”, therefore it is fundamentally a philosophical proposition
The idealist status of the term is what allows her to think of translation as good & bad. The bad: is where trans. Is mostly Orientalist, and the good: where Europe’s colonized peoples can use translation- she says it is an act of resistance when “natives” use it to produce their own ethnographies (190).
She focuses more on the text than anything- and does not consider verbal translation. – Which Chow says is not adding anything new to the discourse on translation.
But after he disputes her, Chow goes on to redeem her and say that the under-privileging of the verbal text challenges the scholarly mode of reading a text, and that this is what a cross-cultural translation does- challenge the verbal text. (191 end of page).
Chow states that what Niranjana attempts to do with her theory on translation is to reverse asymmetrical power between the east and west, but not the asymmetrical power relations between translation and original. In an attempt to do justice to the East she points the finger at the West as the “traitor” (translator) who did a bad job translating the “original” (east.)
-Niranjana demonizes the west and therefore the power relations are still asymmetrical. (192).
-More problems: the original texts do not create an east/west divide, but a class divide based on literary and non literary social standings. Furthermore, he states again, that the east west divide is not so much based on a cultural binary, but is more so to do w social class- the Orientalizing of the other done by the oriental himself. (197).
Deconstructionists:
“Derrida and De Man, for instance, literal is a problematic word that designates ‘proper’ in a way that is opposed to (their preferred) metaphoric or figural” (186).
She then shows what De Man makes of Rousseau’s idea of the literal which is figural. Chow does not agree with either definition of literal, the “proper” (Deconstructionists) or “figural” (Rousseau), but addresses a third area (186
De Man states that all translation is a failure, and this failure is also present in the original, which shows it as an essential failure. His concept is interesting because it de-canonizes the original, but still does not depart from the view that there is an original, even if the original is an illusion (188). Chow states that there is a problem with this reading of translation because it focuses too much on the original and therefore translation is a one way process which all comes back to the deconstruction of the original. The example Chow gives is in De Man’s critique of Ben’s translators who she claims do no justice to Ben’s text- But in doing so, places a form of sacredness in the original. Therefore, his reading does not differ from those who place such import on the original. And it would be pointless, or cyclical to use De Man’s reading in a “translation of culture” because we would always put the origins of that culture on a pedestal.
What she wants us to take away from the Deconstructionists notion of translation is that the original is almost always valued over the translation, and that this original is differAnce, and always already translated
Chow introduces Gianni Vattimo in the essay, and discusses the ways in which Vattimo’s writing paved the way for hybrid cultures of contemporary society (195).
Points of Vattimo’s argument which Chow finds to be most useful is 1) that the deadlock of the anthropological situation that has resulted from Western hegemony has led to the disappearance of the other. 2) He refuses to think through the deadlock and start at a new beginning. 3) he doesn’t conceive of the cultures as cynical and negative (west) or idealistic (east).
I find him to be most important of all the theorists we have discussed thus far because he doesn’t seen the “other” cultures as being lost or disappearing, but sees them as transforming and translating into the present- which is important because it doesn’t demonize the west and idealize the east.
This “new” notion of the “other” allows for “a context in cultural translation in which these other cultures are equally engaged in the contradiction of modernity, such as conceiving of the underprivileged as primitive, the quest for new foundations and new monuments, and so forth that have been blatantly exhibited by western nations” (196).
Using this notion of translation- of east and west as co-existing, translations have to move beyond literary and verbal languages to include media such as radio, tv, film, music etc, without writing such events off as “mass indoctrination” (197).
A topic which I did not address is that of Benjamin’s Arcades Projects and how it relates to translation. This one just flew over my head… does anyone else want to take a stab at it?
March 26th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
What enjoyed about Rey Chows article was the linguistic attention he have to not only the word translation, but the cultural context in which translation takes place. As some one who speaks and comprehends both French and Greek in addition in English, I’ve spent the majority of my life translating and even trying to explain to friends who don’t speak these languages our any other languages the difficulties involved in translation. This becomes very obvisous in two ways. The first being when I watch a film in French or Greek, the second comes when I use a phrase that simply cannot be properly translated, and I then have to explain the context of that phrase. Examples “O Elios Exi Dondia”, which translate to the “the sun has teeth”, but what it actually means, is to not be deceived by appeaeances (specifically, during the winter when its sunny outside and it seems warm or cold, until you get outside and freeze your butt off). Chow also mentions that that translation is related to tradiation. He states, “Tradition itself is nothing if it is not a transmission.” Indeed to translate something is to pass on something to someone else, and with example I provided I passed on not only some wisdom, but a part of Greek culture. Chow continues, “How is tradition to be transmitted, to be passed on, if not through translation?” So not only is there a intra-cultural filter but there is a personal filter that must taken into consideration when it comes to how we translate tradition to those within the sphere and outside the sphere. This phenomenon becomes much more prevelant with transnationality. In an essay I wrote, I discussed how immigrant culture is passed on culturally and specifically through language and how sexuality presents a problem in relation to both tradition and translation. What is interesting is how translation in and of itself because an ethnography, in that it must present itself ax coherent in order express itself in such a way that it is understandable to the “other”, and yet, there is an interesting power relationship that Chow discuss with respect to how one presents itself as “one” rather than “other” in regards to who and how one translates oneself.
March 30th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Presentation Notes
Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self by Catherine Russell
…Dealing with the subjective origins of ethnography as it is practiced by those who were previously ethnographized, and now have taken up the task of ethnographizing their own cultures through what is being called Ethnic Autobiography
Ethnic Autobiography deriving from:
Ethnography –study of other cultures, and associated with anthropology, thus evoking imperialist power structures (who studies, and who is the object of study)
AND
Autobiography – art of preserving your own memory and doing so where “self representation is in constant flux.”
Ethnic Autobiography is the “art of memory” that “serves to protect against the homogenizing tendencies of modern industrial culture,” and the essentializing, totalizing and exoticizing tendencies of anthropology.
The “ethnic” part of the title for this genre is not limited to race, culture or civilization, but extends to all kinds of identities that exist at the margins, such as queer, women, immigrants or refuges, and so on…
In this type of filmmaking the personal history (the autobiography) is addressed and understood by the filmmaker to be part of “larger social formations and historical processes.”
An Ethnic Autobiography produces commentary that is uncertain, tentative and speculative, and does so through certain characteristics, that run across the genre.
- Ethnic Autobiographies participate in a metadiscourse
o The narrator, or the main figure, often the filmmaker him or herself, uses linguistics and narrative to call attention to power structures.
o Merge self critique with cultural critique.
- Politicizing the Personal
o By “staging a subjectivity” – representing the self through performance which manifests in the formal qualities of: 1) Voice (voice over) 2) Origin of the gaze (perspective) and 3) the Body Image (the on screen performance)
• Here the filmmaker is the “speaker, see, and the seen” and can play with the different identities that he or she takes on themselves (through speaking and representing, seeing and perceiving), as well as the identities that have been thrust upon them by those who look at them.
o They blur the distinction between the Ethnographer and the Other, taking the role of the Inappropriate Other (IO), who has a perspective on both the “inside” and the “outside” positions of an identity, as this IO belongs to both and neither at the same time.
- Identifying with their technologies of representation
- Invokes history and memory (“invokes imbrications of history and memory, the authenticity of experience functions as a receding horizon of truth in which memory and testimony are articulated as modes of salvage.”)
Kidlat Tahimik as an ethnic-autobiographic filmmaker…
Makes diary films within a discourse of postcolonial critique.
MetaDiscourse
- He is the main character who drives the narrative, and the construction of his subjectivity is revealed as a means of creating metadiscourse.
- Tahimik allows us to see his desires, the elements that shaped his desires and gave them articulation (ex. His desire to travel abroad influenced by the radio) and finally, he shows us how his desire, once acquired is destroyed/ or dissipates because he realizes the complexity of its context.
- “It is the movement of disillusion that leads from the first enthusiasm for Western technology… to their ultimate renunciations, after the experience of the real First world itself” (198). Connection to Zizek…
Politicizing the Personal
- Films made for western film festival market, and Tahimik aware of himself as native informant.
- He moves between culture making him the exemplary I.O
- All three of the voice, gaze, body image is present in his films in order to explore all sorts of identities, and process of identity creation
- Where he is complicit in encouraging that desire (starting and chairing the club), and self as an agent of good and bad things.
Identifying with their technologies of representation
- Cinema for him provides him with a language in which he can inscribe himself as a dispersed and multiple subjects.
- His relationship and identification with his radio, and later his camera radio is part of Perfumed Nightmare
Invokes history and memory (“invokes imbrications of history and memory, the authenticity of experience functions as a receding horizon of truth in which memory and testimony are articulated as modes of salvage.”)
- Tahimik attempts to transform the salvage paradigm where memory is used to construct a discourse of a layering of cultures, and not a discourse of vanishing cultures
March 30th, 2008 at 10:13 am
I’m not sure if this is going to be helpful, The following are my notes from Dipesh Chakrobarty’s “Provincializing Europe” that I used to speak about “Perfumed Nightmare”
Provincializing Europe – as it relates to “Perfumed Nightmare”
To “provincialize” Europe was precisely to find out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity? 14
Critique of historicism – a way of writing history – that emphasizes transition (and not translation) – two concepts that exist in tension in the film
Historicism is the theory that social and cultural phenomena are historically determined and that each period in history has its own values that are not directly applicable to other epochs
Modernity and capitalism originated in Europe and then spread elsewhere…”first in Europe, and then elsewhere” structure of global historical time was historicist; different non-Western nationalisms would later produce local versions of the same narrative, replacing “Europe” by some locally constructed center. 7
The creation of the “waiting room” where the natives were not civilized enough to rule themselves. 8
Subaltern historiography questions the assumption that capitalism necessarily brings bourgeois relations of power to a position of hegemony. 14
The problem of capitalist modernity cannot any longer be seen simply as a sociological problem of historical transition but as a problem of translation as well.17
THIS IS BECAUSE
European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and Provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought –which is now everybody’s heritage and which affect us all –may be renewed from and for the margins.
Efforts towards provincial zing Europe must recognize that Europe’s acquisition of the adjective “modern” is an integral art of the story of European imperialism within global history and secondly, the understanding that this equating of a certain version of Europe with “modernity” is not the work of Europeans alone…
To attempt to provincialize this “Europe” is to see the modern as inevitably contested, to write over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from dreamed-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of “tradition” that “modernity” creates.
March 30th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
In a sense, we are all amateur ethnographers studying our own culture, as well as other cultures, through art, media, and even leisurely travel. The difference between studying culture through art or media and through travel is that the latter is more class specific. Capitalism and a growing globalization through mass communication (i.e. McLuhan’s ‘global village’) has made the act of watching television and films extremely comfortable, thus making the following question hard to answer. Why would an amateur ethnographer pay a great deal of money visiting a foreign culture, exert mental energy understanding the language and spend weeks observing their surroundings when they could easily pay very little to watch a film depicting a foreign culture, with dialogue pre-translated though subtitles, for no longer then two or three hours of their day? The illusion is cheap and easy, while ‘reality’ is expensive and arguably unachievable. Christina, in her blog, rightfully questions “how we’ve come to understand other cultures to any meaningful degree at all. In fact, it [a quotation for Chow’s Films as Ethnography] might lead one to believe that we actually don’t understand other cultures on a meaningful level, but just think we do.”
Therefore, capitalism seems to be selling us the belief that we understand other cultures with ease. To simplify this “cross cultural exchange” (using ill-defined terms West and East), the West is selling an illusion of itself and an illusion of the East to both itself and the East through art and media. With this said, does this mean that the East is selling an illusion of itself and the West to both itself and the West? In Chow’s article Films as Ethnography he discusses the films of Yimou Zhang, for instance, Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), and points out that they sell “oriental exoticism to a Western audience” (176). The West, as I have mentioned, does the same. Hollywood directors and producers sell the myths or stereotypes of its culture to an Eastern audience, for example the myth created by the Western genre. Is there a difference? Well, I think that the difference is that since the West, and more directly America, as a hegemonic power, it can carefully control how it is perceived (or its looked-at-ness) and does not sell the Eastern stereotype of itself to itself, making the “cross cultural exchange” unbalanced. For me, this brings up two concluding questions: Is the medium of film a natural creator of myth, since moving images on screen are merely illusions? And, how are films like Perfumed Nightmare an exception?