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<p dir="ltr">In her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey analyzed mainstream cinema as a patriarchal technology of looking, catering to heterosexual male scopophilic desires. Her uncompromising “destruction” (1975, p. 7–8) of Hollywood’s visual pleasures was aimed at dissecting the symbolic (patriarchal) order of cinematic visuality. Reformulating this critique of cinema’s politics of representation, Black feminist thinkers addressed the visual practices of reproducing racial ideologies on film. As American film scholar Terri Francis explains, the emergence of cinema as mass cultural visual entertainment is intricately connected to colonialism, policies of racial segregation, and racist doctrines: “Motion pictures as a multifaceted cultural institution were […] instrumental in generating, disseminating and romanticising the ideological aspects of European imperialism as well as America’s expansionist projects and racial conflicts” (Francis, 2012, p. 330).</p>
<p dir="ltr">For Black feminist film studies, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of “intersectionality” was key. In her inquiries into discrimination against Black women in the workplace, Crenshaw considers the multiple categories that define our social location in hierarchies of power and privilege. To think through cinema’s representations in terms of intersectionality means to analyze the interdependence between systems of subordination (e.g., sexism and racism). In film history the mastering ‘male gaze’ is by and large a ‘white gaze’—and often a colonial and racist gaze.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Since the early 1990s Black feminist film studies and critical race theory have addressed racist stereotypes in mainstream cinema and analyzed the hegemony of ‘whiteness’ in film and visual culture (cf. hooks, 1992; Diawara, 1993; Guerrero, 1993; Dyer, 1997; Smith, 1997). On the one hand, research on the visual and narrative representation of race and ethnicities has profoundly enriched the methodologies of film analysis. On the other, archival research and publications have recovered the history and wide range of African American film productions: from early pioneers to the ‘race’ films, to Blaxploitation, to the New Black Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, to commercially successful hood films and to contemporary independent or artists’ films (cf. Stewart, 2005; Bowser, Gaines & Musser, 2001; Massood, 2003, 2007; Field, Horak & Stewart, 2015; Ramanathan, 2020). In recent years, insightful projects have probed into the relationships between films of the African diaspora and the traffic of ideas between Europe, Africa, and the Americas or tackled questions of Black expressive performances in popular culture and the dynamics of cultural appropriation (Boyd, 1994; hooks, 1996). In Europe, scholarly debates on race, ethnicity, and film often focus on image archives of migration, colonial histories of early film production or contemporary decolonizing documentary practices (cf. Nwonka & Saha, 2021; Eshun & Sagar, 2007; Ba & Higbee, 2012).</p>
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LusofonaX:
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Diversity in Film & Media
LusofonaX:
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Diversity in Film & Media