Peripheral Visions

E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze.New York: Routledge, 1996.

 

 

 

•      Looking for the Other responds to the charge that white feminist film theories, especially psychoanalytic ones, neglect issues of race. In this ambitious project, E. Ann Kaplan defends a psychoanalytic approach to the racialized subject through examinations of gender and race in mainstream and independent film. Targeted at liberal arts students, the text is a useful introduction to these issues within film, women’s studies, and postcolonial/cultural studies. Unfortunately, Kaplan sometimes sacrifices quality of critique for quantity, and subtlety of argument for scope, in an attempt to satisfy her audiences. The result is a text which ultimately surveys and summarizes more than it stakes out new ground in the ongoing debates about whiteness and feminist film theory.

   

   

•      The book is divided into two main sections. Part I, “Theories of Nation, Psychoanalysis and the Imperial Gaze,” primarily explores the male and imperial gazes in Hollywood film. Part 2, “Travelling Postcolonialists and Women of Color,” examines the ways in which independent film offers the alternative of “inter- and intra-racial looking relations.” Throughout, Kaplan argues by analogy, risking oversimplification of a number of key concepts. For example, Chapter 1, “Travel, Travelling Identities and the Look” depends on the assumption that race, like gender, operates through internalized binary oppositions. She offers examples from Fanon, DuBois, hooks, and Appadurai which support theories of “a network of diasporic black peoples dislocated around the globe in the late twentieth century who share experiences of the alienating gaze” (10). Kaplan’s theory layers colonialism on top of discourses of the gaze initiated by Laura Mulvey. Thus situated non-dialectically, racial difference becomes little more than another instance of split subjectivity. Combined with the constant deferral of her explanation to later sections in the book plus numerous editing errors, such oversimplifications undermine her argument.[1]

   

   

•      Chapter 2, “Theories of Nation and Hollywood in the Contexts of Gender and Race” surveys “male theories” of nations as modern, industrial concepts linked to the rise of literacy and popular culture (29). Kaplan continues her reliance on binary oppositions, countering these male ideas of nation with a feminine sphere of culture. Most significant for her later analysis of Hollywood film is the concept of nation as a fiction, and of America as a construct divided between European cultural allegiances and American national ones. Kaplan relies on Jane Flax to support a claim for a womanly perspective on global history, one in which “problems might not be framed as debates about First, Second or Third Worlds but rather in terms of ongoing struggles to connect or not connect with an Other,” to juggle public and private roles, to link local and global concerns, and “to make oneself a subject within national struggles” (46). These are important questions, and Kaplan offers a sampling of fascinating alternatives to the narrow conception of national identity at work in Hollywood film. However, we wonder why her discussion of these alternatives runs to three pages, in comparison with the eighteen or so pages of “male theory.” If it is because, as she states, “the problematic relation of ‘woman’ to ‘nation’… urgently needs more research” (46), we would add that the binary opposition of male nation to female culture also needs deconstructing.

   

   

•      In Chapter 3, “Hollywood, Science and Cinema: The Imperial and the Male Gaze in Classic Film,” Kaplan tackles D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation, notably its anxieties about the black man’s rape of the white woman, to illustrate interlocking structures of masculinity and whiteness in the imperial gaze. According to her reading, stereotypes of lascivious black men and pure white women “image forth” white supremacy and male supremacy respectively. Through these stereotypes, the film appeals to Southerners to see themselves as part of an American nation preparing for World War I (68). Similarly, masculinity and imperialism collude in a series of 1930s ape movies–King Kong, Tarzan the Ape Man, and Blonde Venus. Devices such as the map of the “dark” continent penetrated by the explorer/hunter, the sexual objectification of the white woman, and the feminization and oversexing of the black man illustrate Hollywood’s continuing attempts to manage America’s sexual and racial anxieties. Kaplan also notes that these films may be seen as attempts to come to grips with national guilt about slavery, or to console “a generation of white males without sufficient opportunities for heroism” (74).

   

   

•      Kaplan also discusses interesting complications of the stereotypical view that the imperial gaze is solely male. In looking at Black Narcissus (1946) and Out of Africa (1985), she notes that “white women become the surrogates for men when there is a need to show male power waning” (81)–in this case British power in India. The white nuns in Black Narcissus are bearers of the imperial gaze on their mission into Nepal, but that gaze is destabilized by the orientalized sensuality of the place: the nuns’ repressed sensuality emerges at the same time that their strength and independence from men begins to crack; a heterosexual narrative asserts itself. Kaplan argues, following Laura Kipnis, that the construction of “colonialism as female megalomania” rationalizes colonialism’s failures (88). Here, Kaplan participates in ongoing critiques of white womanhood and its interlocking privileges as shown in the work of Jane Gaines, Mary Ann Doane, Rey Chow, Donna Haraway, and others.

   

   

•      How disappointing then, to read that the main difference between the stereotypes in Black Narcissus and the less offensive depictions in Out of Africa seems to be a matter of characterization: Karen Blixen “cares about [Africans] as individuals” and her “main servant is individualized” and allowed to return her look (89). Kaplan’s assumption that this treatment remains a viable alternative to stereotyping troubles us in its allegiance to liberal humanism. She notes that “something else is going on in these films in regard to images of white women” and wonders “how can [white] feminists enjoy their empowerment” through these images “at the expense of women of other colors?” (92). One answer may be the rewards and pleasures of individualism which structure the major liberation movements of the West, including white liberal feminism. Nevertheless, Kaplan makes an important contribution in Chapter 3 with her understanding that these films forge American identity through European colonial narratives.

   

   

•      Chapter 4, “Darkness Within: Or, The Dark Continent of Film Noir” further investigates the effect of psychoanalysis on American film when dealing with issues of “othering” that cross race and gender. The chapter starts by briefly describing the possibilities of psychoanalytic readings of film, especially the value of British transcultural psychiatry, and summarily explaining the racist, sexist, and homophobic origins of psychoanalysis. Kaplan then performs a close reading of Home of the Brave, Pressure Point, Candyman, and Cat People. Oddly, considering the chapter’s title, only the latter falls within the normal definition “film noir.” All four films use psychoanalysis within their plots; especially important to this reading is the claim that psychiatry is a “science,” the authority of which is either supported or destabilized by these films. Kaplan attempts to analyze the psychoanalytic readings both of and within these films, which all blur, or attempt to blur, characters’ race and gender. However, Kaplan’s readings rely heavily on plot and character description, possibly because, as Kaplan notes, these older films are likely not to have been seen by her readers.

   

   

•      Black and white interaction in mainstream film sets up Kaplan’s ensuing discussion of independent films. Before Part II, “Travelling Postcolonialists and Women of Color,” she clarifies her use of psychoanalysis and reads its use in film to construct the white subject. Kaplan argues that “the formation of the white subject as white, as it depends upon difference from blackness, is one area for study” (129). Though not theoretically innovative, Kaplan’s readings of film related to this question and her working through the problematics of psychoanalysis facilitate entry into the second part of Looking for the Other.

   

   

•      Kaplan asserts that Part II intends “to open a window on how women directors imagine and create fictional worlds about issues of sex, race and the media. And how, in so doing, they dramatically challenge Hollywood male and imperial gaze structures to begin the hard work of moving beyond oppressive objectification within the constraints of inevitable looking structures” (16). Kaplan selects Hu Mei, Claire Denis, Mira Nair, Pratibha Parmar, Alice Walker, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Julie Dash, and Yvonne Rainer for discussion in Part II because, though they all deal with sex, race, gender and class in “cinematic forms deliberately in opposition to classical commercial film” (16), they approach their projects differently.

   

   

•      Yet Kaplan only partially delivers on her promises for Part II. In Chapter 5 she explores the relationship between white theorists/theories and China. Stressing that cross-cultural exchange is possible both from West to East and East to West, yet not ignoring the power differential, Kaplan uses Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of “approaching” to assert that there is a way if not to “know” the Other, at least to “speak nearby.” In her discussion of the relationships between Western and Asian critics and their views toward Western readings of Asian culture, she summarizes the debate between Fredric Jameson and Aijaz Ahmad regarding the possibility of the West “knowing Chinese or Indian culture and politics (17).” Jameson’s construction of three worlds in which First-World texts are related to the public/private split while in Third-World texts all libidinal desires are politicized, is critiqued by Ahmad who posits only one postcolonial world constructed of economic, political, and historical links. Kaplan rereads this debate to show that both Jameson, particularly in his comments regarding allegory’s inherence in Third-World texts, and Ahmad, in underlining Western critics’ arrogant assumption that they can understand an Other culture through partial knowledge, make valuable contributions to the discourses of “knowing the other.” She locates herself between her readings of Jameson and Ahmad, but directs her criticism more strongly toward Ahmad, whose position she calls an “overreaction.”

   

   

•      From her assumed position of subject-in-between, Kaplan’s second focus in Chapter 5 addresses criticism of her 1989 article “Problematizing Cross-Cultural Analysis: The Case of Woman in the Recent Chinese Cinema.” She argues effectively that in this essay she attempted to position herself as an “outsider” whose readings might untangle one of many strands of meaning to be found in Chinese film texts. Included among Western critics censured for perpetuating cultural colonization, Kaplan reads Yoshimoto Mitsuhira’s criticisms as a reconstruction of Asia as feminine or victim. By turning to the complexities of subjectivity, as many feminists do, Kaplan stresses the possibility of showing “how resilient peoples are to such cultural and capitalist ‘invasions,’ and how they find strategies to divert their impacts” (152). Kaplan is constantly aware that histories of colonization and appropriation cannot be ignored. Her consistent attention to the complexities of the history, economics, and politics of intercultural “knowing” creates, at times, an apparently disjointed argument, but one worth teasing out by engaged readers.

   

   

•      Kaplan’s selection of Denis’ Chocolat, Parmar and Walker’s Warrior Marks, and Nair’s Mississippi Masala to search for an answer to the question “Can One Know the Other?” is most appropriate. All three non-American films illustrate her desire to explore the possibilities of inter-racial looking and to challenge the dominance of the male and imperial gazes. These challenges contribute to a form of looking which exemplifies a desire to know rather than to dominate. Kaplan astutely explores the processes of looking that occur between spectator and film and between characters within films. In these “looking relations,” Kaplan indicates ways in which women directors alter the subject-object binary; when traditionally subjugated characters look back, stereotypes are challenged, and the gaze, with its inherent anxieties and domination, becomes a mutual process of looking.

   

   

•      Kaplan states: “There has surely to be a way between the alternatives of an oppressive Western application of humanism to the Other and surrendering any kind of cross-cultural knowing” (195). She sees that for women travelling outside their cultures, the best way to accomplish cross-cultural knowing is “speaking nearby.” She explores Trinh’s Reassemblage and Shoot for the Contents with emphasis on ideas that inter-racial looking relations should be reconstructed as a meeting of multiple “I’s” with multiple “I’s” in the Other. For Kaplan, the women’s bodies that Trinh presents are not objectified but instead become sites for discussions of subjectivity, nationhood, and transnational feminism. She looks conscientiously at the work of Hu Mei, Denis, Parmar and Walker, Nair, and Trinh, all women “in postcolonialism travelling to foreign cultures” (216), revealing ways in which imperial and male gazes are and can be disrupted, finding new ways of knowing, of seeing, and of looking for the Other.

   

   

•      Chapter 8, “‘Healing Imperialized Eyes’: Independent Women Filmmakers and the Look,” continues to explore how women filmmakers rework the “look” in an attempt to redefine colonial images. Kaplan reads two of Julie Dash’s films, Illusions and Daughters of the Dust, as attempts to redefine audience perceptions of blacks in film and films’ assumptions about audience. Kaplan then moves on to examine Mi Vida Loca, a film on Chicana “gang girls,” by white director Allison Anders. Finally, she argues that Yamazaki Hiroko’s Juxta uses themes of generation and immigration to complicate racialized images.

   

   

•      Kaplan argues that these films do not confront the imperial and male gazes in an attempt to reverse or undo their effects, but instead involve themselves in an entirely different project: “Other films I call ‘healing’ because they seek to see from the perspective of the oppressed, the diasporan, without specifically confronting the oppressor’s strategies” (221). She suggests that these filmmakers occupy the position of the hybrid, furthering her argument for the subject-in-between. Caught between cultures, their films concern themselves in constructing “‘intra-racial’ looking relations rather than inter-racial ones” (222). Kaplan asserts that while white women suffer from “too much visibility” in Hollywood, black women remain largely invisible or consigned to a narrow range of stereotypes. Her inquiry into Dash’s Daughters exposes the construction of black images that step outside the Hollywood mainstream: Dash creates a strong intelligent matriarch to oppose the traditional “mammy” image. At stake in the idea of healing, therefore, is the possibility that seeing from the perspective of the oppressed produces new points of identification for film audiences.

   

   

•      Kaplan also notes that formal devices can be used to challenge imperial and male gazes. From film speed, to narrative structures, to genre mixing, these films often reposition their audiences in order to step outside the hegemony of Hollywood film. Kaplan reads all four of these movies, sensitively drawing out how this feat is accomplished. She also notes that these films do not necessarily share the same tones: some are celebratory while others are melancholic. The importance of these films is that they do not reproduce the imperial gaze, but rather strive to find power in “healing” its alienating effects.

   

   

•      In Chapter 9, “Body Politics: Menopause, Mastectomy and Cosmetic Surgery in Films by Rainer, Tom and Onwurah,” Kaplan detours from film criticism to medical discourse. Her review of plastic surgery texts reveals how parallel constructions of age or race become associated with disease and deformity. Relying on ideas of nation from Part I, she posits a norm of womanhood: young and white. Though we cannot argue against her notions of this norm, we do note that it relies on a collapse of Western thought into an exclusively American “look.” With this assumption, Kaplan reads Tom’s Two Lies and Rainer’s Privilege in terms of a conflict between an “authentic” immigrant body and the American body assimilated through surgical intervention. Her argument recognizes that the “casualties” of the American look need further attention.

   

   

•      Another important contribution is Kaplan’s argument that aging white women either fall into Hollywood’s typecast characters or do not appear at all. Always careful to acknowledge that these women do not lose all their privileges in aging, Kaplan does however point out that aging further complicates women’s positioning by the male and imperial gaze. By drawing affinities between menopausal white women and women of color, Kaplan invites further discussion of generational differences and their implications for women’s studies.

   

   

•      Kaplan’s research into plastic surgery and aging reveals intriguing concepts in relation to American film, but her sweeping statements often hinder her arguments. For example, she states, “It is in male interest to keep alive the myth that after menopause women have no particular interest and therefore can be passed over for younger women who still depend on men” (286). Like the “male theories” of Part I, the assumption of “male interest” once again collapses a complex argument into a traditional gender category. Throughout her book, Kaplan attempts not to essentialize various groups while arguing that dominant film does; occasionally she missteps and her statements reinscribe the generalizations which she seeks to critique.

   

   

•      The risk of reinscription is addressed in the “Afterword” as Kaplan attempts to negotiate the tricky gaps between white and non-white positions on the emerging field of “whiteness studies.” Cautioning her readers not to conflate varieties of alienation, she insists that it is essential that “one recognizes that whites are not necessarily reinscribing whiteness but taking the lead from the peoples whites have oppressed” (294; original emphasis). Is Kaplan prescribing a point of view here, or offering an anti-colonialist strategy? The ambivalence continues in the statement, “Because of white supremacy, it seems to me that it is the responsibility of whites to start the process of recognition of the Other as an autonomous subject” (299). Does this imply that the process has not yet begun outside of “whiteness studies”? Does the notion of responsibility imply a conferring of subjectivity or authority? We are uncomfortable with the vagueness of such “responsibility” because it implies that if whites do not begin this process of recognition, it will not be done at all. In fact, Kaplan hazards misrecognizing the Other when she concludes her book by asserting a belief “that black women may have an incredibly important role to play at this historical moment…. Hopefully, this is a moment when white women can listen” (301). Having just warned readers not to conflate varieties of alienation she subsumes all non-white women under the term “black women.” In this ostensibly conciliatory gesture, Kaplan falls back on a black-white binary that grounds her global survey in America.

   

   

•      Future discussions surrounding Kaplan’s new work will need to complicate its layered relations between race and gender by adding the undiscussed categories of class and sexuality. Her conception of the imperial gaze largely ignores the dynamics of capitalism within patriarchal and racist structures, and discussions of gay and lesbian contributions are cursory. Nevertheless, we applaud Kaplan’s commitment “to the idea… that the level of signification can impact on the imaginary and produce change in subjects reading or viewing texts” (xv). It is through this ability of texts to change subjectivity that Kaplan sees a possibility for prejudices based on race, ethnicity, color, age, sexual orientation, and gender to be deconstructed. For her, perhaps the best route to change is through the work of women directors of all colors (including white). The value of her text lies in the attention she pays to these women directors, their films, and their changing audiences.

  Department of English
  Universities of Calgary and Victoria
  lhowell@mtroyal.ab.ca
  rrickey@acs.ucalgary.ca
  klaverm@cadvision.co

  

  

  Copyright © 1998 NOTE: Readers may use portions of this work in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. In addition, subscribers and members of subscribed institutions may use the entire work for any internal noncommercial purpose but, other than one copy sent by email, print, or fax to one person at another location for that individual’s personal use, distribution of this article outside of a subscribed institution without express written permission from either the author or the Johns Hopkins University Press is expressly forbidden.
  

  Notes

  1. The editing errors are frustrating. For instance, in Chapter 1 Kaplan claims she will discuss six directors, though seven are listed (15-16); likewise, she announces that Anders’ Mi Vida Loca will be discussed in Chapter 6, but it appears in Chapter 8.