Women Filmmakers of the African & Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity

by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

Overview

Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood’s constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking.

Foster provides a voice for Black and Asian women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asian women filmmakers. She also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian filmmakers.

Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, "one of a growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are actively constructing [in the words of bell hooks] ‘an oppositional gaze’"; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British Black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity; cultural displacement, lesbianism, and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the "voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker"; and Mira Nair, a Black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809321209
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	05/01/1997
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and is the author of fourteen books. Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema, was named an outstanding title in the humanities for 2004 by Choice. Foster's most recent book is Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Classed, and Gendered Bodies in Film.​

Editorial Reviews

This book sheds a necessary light on women film­makers and videographers whose existence and works have been overlooked in previous book-length studies of women filmmakers.”—Mark A. Reid, author of Post-­Negritude Visual and Literacy Culture

From the Publisher