Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema

Abstract

The critique of colonialism within cinema studies, meanwhile, has tended to downplay the significance of gender issues, thus eliding the fact that (post)colonial discourse has impinged differently on the representation of men and women. This chapter explores Western cinema's geographical and historical constructs as symptomatic of the colonialist imaginary generally but also more specifically as a product of a gendered Western gaze, an imbrication reflective of the symbiotic relations between patriarchal and colonial articulations of difference. Cinema, in this sense, enacted a historiographical and anthropological role, writing (in-light) the cultures of others. Western cinema, from the earliest anthropological films through Morocco to the Indiana Jones series, has relied on map imagery for plotting the Empire, while simultaneously celebrating its own technological power-implicitly vis-a-vis the novel's reliance upon words or static drawings, and later still photographs-to illustrate vividly the topography.

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