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February 2008, Volume 1 Issue 5

Center for Race and Ethnicity

Race, Ethnicity, & the Moving Image

This event was featured in the Center for Race & Ethnicity's recent bulletin (Volume 1 Issue 5, February 2008). Click here to download.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Seeing and Subverting Hollywood Stereotypes

Viewing Africa Through the Lens of U.S. Race Relations

Using Problems as Pedagogy

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

Greetings from Asbury Park

A conversation about the representation of racial and ethnic groups in film (February 1, 2008, held at CRE)

This wide-ranging roundtable explored the ways images of race, place, and identity take on a special power through the medium of film.

SEEING AND SUBVERTING HOLLYWOOD STEREOTYPES

Showing a clip from the documentary Reel Bad Arabs, Deepa Kumar noted that Orientalist stereotypes about Arabs dating back to the European colonial era remain ubiquitous in Hollywood movies.  In order to read the constructed nature of these images, she argued for the need to “take seriously the artifacts that come out of popular culture; [we must] look critically at how race, gender, or ethnicity is represented in these artifacts and not only read them as entertainment.”

Jim Jarmusch’s film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) consciously defies such Hollywood stereotypes by departing from previous depictions of urban black culture.  As Carter Mathes pointed out, the film’s story of an African-American man (Forest Whitaker) on permanent retainer to an Italian-American mobster in Jersey City, “introduce[s] complex characters that resist simple classifications.”  The film’s coupling of a hip-hop soundtrack (Wu Tang Clan’s RZA co-produced the film) and Samurai codes further refigures the way in which Orientalist representations of Eastern thought are received and circulated, with Ghost Dog’s Samurai practice evoking “a conscious move…to portray an alternative space of empowerment that challenges static representations of race and cultural identity.  The film's dynamic fusion of sound and narration challenges us to constantly rethink the permanence of racial and ethnic stereotypes.”

VIEWING AFRICA THROUGH THE LENS OF U.S. RACE RELATIONS

Media depictions of Africa and its peoples are shaped by American preconceptions about the continent and its peoples, notes Barbara Cooper—a historian whose work focuses on the Hausa-speaking region of Niger in the west African Sahel.  Cooper explained that the Henry Louis Gates documentary The Wonders of the African World has frustrated many Africanist scholars because it fails to acknowledge decades of historical work on the African populations Gates visits, and imposes American views of race and African history on Africa’s diverse peoples.

An informal and chatty interviewer, Gates tells one Persian man that if he came to Boston he would be black; and responding to another woman’s personal history expresses amazement that Africans sold other Africans into slavery. Cooper suggested that such flat-footed assumptions might be read less as naïve, than as a performance.  “The visual images…may move beyond what Gates actually presents,” Cooper argued.  “By including himself in the frame of the documentary and asking uncomfortable questions, [Gates] is playing the trickster by pushing the context of race.” 

USING PROBLEMS AS PEDAGOGY

As Cooper’s reading suggests, the problematic nature of images may be the very thing that make them useful in teaching, a point about which each of the panelists agreed.

“It’s very hard to talk about race in the classroom – but film passages allow us to talk about it, because we are talking to the screen and not to one another.”  -Barbara Cooper

Documentaries like Reel Bad Arabs are similarly helpful.  “They put together a series of images from various sources that establish a pattern of representation that is racist," Kumar explained.  “When fifteen or twenty clips are strung together, students are more clearly able to see the problems of stereotyped representation.”

Posing the challenging question of how students might approach a collaborative film like Ghost Dog from the perspective of black film history could also open up conversation about the mediated nature of race and representation, Mathes added.