Challenging Representations by Celebrating Difference

In her Words. YouTube.com. 2011. Web.

The predominant stereotypes of Asian identity in Hollywood have been framed by Caucasian cultural producers. Typifying this approach is a fundamentally Marxist ideology whereby the boundaries of identity, be it positive or negative, provide justification for social control and normative models of thought and power.

Identities, Woodward observed, are “forged through the marking of difference” (1997, 29). These are often forged on the basis of binary difference, like, for example, Durkheim’s sacred/profane distinction, or “white”/“not-white”, “civilized”/“barbaric” and “us”/”them”, where the former takes precedence over the latter. The representation of Asian identity in accordance with this binary marking of difference is complicit to the policing of oversimplified differences between white and non-white, and in the segregation and degradation of those who are different (Shah, 2003, 2).

Resistance to this model of representation have generally come from outside of Hollywood by Asian directors.  Their primary concern was neither political nor necessarily framed in terms of building as sense of Asian community. Directors like Wayne Wang wanted to give a sensitive and realistic depiction of Asian-American life incorporating symbols and markers of a range of Asian communities.  The power of doing so is not from merely seeking to subvert the binary opposition of power, but deny it utterly by a celebration of difference. 

The power of representation in building intercultural difference is clear. A movement towards this approach in Hollywood would liberate identity from the binary logic that has defined cross-cultural relationships since the dawn of time.

References

Woodward, K. 1997. “Concepts of identity and difference”. In Woodward, K (ed.). Identity and Difference pp. 7 – 50. London: Sage.

Shah, H. “’Asian Culture’ and Asian American Identities in the Television and Film Industries of the United States”. Studies in Media and Information Literacy Education 3.3, August 2003: 1 – 10. 

The Danger of the Dominant Gaze: A Case Study

The portrayal of Indigenous Culture in 

The Gods Must be Crazy

Marx describes dominant ideology as when one ideology is deemed paramount over another through inherent social/ power relations. When these ideologies make their way into mainstream media they are cast into a broader consciousness and redistributed as truths. The identities of the indigenous subjects of The Gods Must be Crazy are reconstructed through the dominant lens of the Western, white subject and give way to a false narrative that supports a specific power structure. Namely, the San people are cast as backward, ignorant and undeveloped.

The film was directed by James Uys, a Caucasian South African filmmaker in 1980, during the heat of the anti-apartheid movement. The film follows a member of the San tribe of the Kalahari desert on his journey to return a mysterious Coke Bottle that fell from the sky back to its rightful owners, “the gods”.

The anthropomorphic style of filming automatically positions the subject as the other, and the viewer as an outsider looking in from the dominant perspective. In this case, the Western/colonial perspective represents the dominant gaze. The cultural differences of the San are explained as deficiencies in social and technological progress. The subject has no agency, and no control over the formulation of his/her identity.

The denial of coeavalness found in mainstream films depicting indigenous cultures from a Western perspective exemplifies how this binary opposition of power is out of touch with the material processes of history. Coeavalness is a Fabian term describing the mistake of cultural differences for differences in time and space. In reality, the dominant gaze of the Western world in the film is integral to a propaganda campaign to do exactly this, deny coeavelness. The film peddles its own brand of reality where the indigenous people are cast as backward, out of touch and unaware of the “real-world” socioeconomic processes of the dominant West.

Richard Lee outlines these solutions to intercultural and international communication in his article “The Gods Must Be Crazy”: The Challenge of the Intercultural. He advocates the necessary recognition of the instability and ambiguity of cross-cultural signifiers. Culture is a changing construct, not a fixed boundary of identity. It must be understood as a plurality and mixture of spatiotemporal realities. Ultimately, cross-cultural communication must be understood as dialogic.

References

Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.

"Coca-Cola Bushmen: Social Politics." 2010. YouTube. Retrieved 15 May 2013.

Kolker, Robert. Film, Form and Culture. Boston: McGraw-Hill College, 1999. Print.

Lee, Richard. “The Gods must be Crazy.” Reviews. June 1985. Web. 15 May 2013.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen. Autumn 1975. Web. 15 May 2013. 

Identity owes itself to the Media: When does News become Politics?

Recent political demonstrations from spilling over into social life, from the Cronulla riots to protests over the Innocence of Muslims film last year, polarized Arab-Australians in a binary mentality of “us” versus “them”. Arguably, the media capitalized on these (among other) events to further a political prerogative, namely to seek to villanise the Muslim world as inextricably linked to the terrorist events of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

News coverage of Muslims in Australia equates Islam with the Lebanese national identity and Arabic ethnicity (Hopkins, 2008: 41).  This demarcates the boundaries of Muslim identity according to artificial criterion based on a sectarian understanding of Islam. That is to say, it excludes non-Arab Muslims from the popular discursive conceptualization of Muslim identity and links the faith with the socio-politics of the Middle-East.

Consequently, discourse in Australia tends to make Arab identity synonymous with a single identity category of ‘Muslim’, when in fact 11% of Australian Muslims are born in Lebanon and 9% in Turkey (ABS, 2007). In so doing, Islam is linked to the political agenda of the Middle East, and interpreted according to Australia’s relationship to those politics.

The rise of political Islam is not passively accepted as community norm, even in Muslim majority countries. Media discourse needs to be problematized to recognise the fundamentalist politics of few do not, by any stretch, represent the sacred beliefs of the majority.

 Islamic protestors face-off with police in Sydney.

Source: WikiCommons

Islamophobia in the media is fuelled by the notion that Islam is counterintuitive with the goals of democracy. Followers arguably invert the principle of multiculturalism, according greater weight to submission to sacred laws than to national laws (Hage, 2006). Consequently, there stems the crude deduction that Muslims are ‘un-Australian’. This consciously overlooks the clear intuition that, as with any religion, followers may not always believe the same things or to the same extent (Hopkins, 2008: 44). Cultural Muslims, for instance, can adhere to religious tradition and maintain obedience to the laws of a secular state.

Who is really un-Australian?

Source: WikiCommons

Identity is contextual. Any blanket interpretation that does not recognise the unfixed, contingent, malleable nature of culture will inevitably exclude and narrow what it means to claim an identity.

References

Australian Bureau Statistics (2007). Year Book 2007. Retrieved May 5, 2013, from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/bb8db737e2af84b8ca2571780015701e/7056F90A147D09D3CA25723600006532?opendocument

Hage, G. 2006. “The doubts down under”. Catalyst: Journal of the British Commission for Racial Equality: pp. 1 – 7.

Hopkins, Liza. 2008. “Muslim Turks and anti-Muslim discourse”. Australian Journal of Communication 35.1: pp. 41 – 55.