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Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: decolonizing the gaze, locating subjectivity G.A. FOSTER, 1997
Carbondale & Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press 0 809 32119 X, hb $39.95; 0 809 32120 3, pb $19.95
Gwendolyn Foster's Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora is a welcome contribution to the literatures of black and Third World Cinemas-which have tended to privilege the work of male directors-as well as to feminist film scholarship, which has only recently begun incorporating the work of women of colour. In Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora, Foster provides detailed analyses of selected films by six women directors of African and Asian descent, living primarily in the US or UK. Julie Dash, Zeinabu irene Davis, Mira Nair, Ngozi Onwurah, Pratibha Parmar and Trinh T. Minh-ha are all familiar names to scholars of Third World cinema with, perhaps, the exception of Zeinabu irene Davis, a filmmaker who has only recently begun to receive a well-earned recognition.
The book consists of six detailed essays on each of the filmmakers, and a short section providing brief, one-page descriptions of other women filmmakers of the African and Asian diasporas, a list of distributors from whom the films discussed can be obtained for purchase or rental, and a bibliography.
Foster aims to identify and analyse the strategies utilised by the selected black and Asian diaspora women filmmakers to `decolonize the gaze and ground their films in subjectivity', whether such strategies involve constructing an oppositional gaze or excavating buried histories, interrogating constructions of race, celebrating hybridity or confronting racism, sexism and homophobia.
The introductory essay provides a brief theoretical framework that draws on theories of subject formation and spectatorship. However, since Foster uses the terms `black feminism' and 'womanism' through the text, the introduction would have benefited from a clarification of the conceptual and methodological issues raised by the feminism/black feminism/womanism debates. In addition, a brief definition of terminology would have been useful in explaining Foster's use of such descriptions as `Black Indian woman filmmaker of the Asian diaspora' (referring to Mira Nair, director of Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala and The Perez Family), which may be confusing in the US context where the terms 'black' and 'Asian' are usually seen as mutually exclusive, as...