Multiculturalism and diaspora culture

1. Multiculturalism and diaspora culture • The renewed interest in debates on Third Cinema: from decolonialization to globalization. • Erosion of the binary logic of political modernism. • realism / modernism • Hollywood / counter-cinema • First World / Third World • object (text) / subject (spectator) • center / margin • (white) self / other

2. Multiculturalism and diaspora culture • Recognizing the historical and cultural specificity of ethnic communities, whether in the First or Third world. • Creolization: the dialogical relationship between minority and dominant cultures. • Acknowledging the activity of spectatorship as a complex dialogic relationship.

3. Multiculturalism and diaspora culture • The consequences of decolonialization: the hybridization of culture. • The end of ideologies of assimilation. • Identity politics vs. multiculturalism: “‘Identities’ are not fixed essences expressing a ‘natural’ difference; they emerge from a fluid set of historically diverse experiences, within overlapping, polycentric circles of identities. . . . In this sense we are less interested in identity as something one ‘has,’ than in identification as something one ‘does.’ The concept of crisscrossing identification evokes the theoretical possibility and even the political necessity of sharing the critique of domination and the burden of representation. It even involves making representation less of a burden and more of a collective pleasure and responsibility.” (UE 346)

4. Three aspects of multicultural theory • Cultural theories of the postcolonial or subaltern subject. • Edward Said. Orientalism (1978). • Gayatri Spivak. In Other Worlds (1987). • Homi Bhabha. Nation and Narration (1990). • Critiques of anthropology and ethnology. • Clifford Geertz. Local Knowledge (1983). • James Clifford. The Predicament of Culture (1988). • Donna Haraway. Primate Visions (1989). • Diaspora culture and filmmaking in the U.K. and U.S.A.

5. Diaspora culture and filmmaking in the U.K. • Stuart Hall and the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Culture in Birmingham. • Channel Four and the creation of the "Black" Workshops. • Paul Gilroy. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987). • 1988. ICA Conference: “Black Film/British Cinema.”

6. The activities of spectatorship • The relation between text and spectator is one of dialogue and negotiation rather than determination. • Resistant or oppositional readings or films are not necessarily grounded in the identity of the spectator or filmmaker. • Stuart Hall/David Morley: • Preferred readings (dominant) • Negotiated readings (mediated by class position). • Resistant readings (mediated by ethnic or racial position).

7. The activities of spectatorship • The multiple registers of spectatorship. • Narrative address of the film. • The technological apparatus. • Social and institutional context of viewing. • The spectator as constituted by ambient discourses and ideologies. • The actual spectator as historically and culturally formed by race, gender, age, nationality, class, sexual preference, etc.).

8. “Different readers make different readings” • A resistant or oppositional spectator does not imply an essential outsider. • Idea of an “essential” identity suppresses the cultural differences characteristic of all communities. • Does not recognize the multiple and complex identifications within every individual. • Socially imposed “epidermic” readings do not strictly determine personal identifications and political allegiances. • Resistant readings depend on cultural and political preparation that “primes” the spectator to read critically.