Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Black looks/black light: Med Hondo's Lumière Noire 1

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13696810902986425

1469-9346

Patrick Williams,

Cinema and Media Studies

Abstract While 'the gaze' and 'the look' are familiar concepts in film studies, the idea of a postcolonial Black Gaze is more unusual and potentially more problematic. In dialogue with a range of theorists from both film and postcolonial studies, this article analyzes in detail one film by the radical African film maker Med Hondo which highlights the problems of looking. Renowned as a 'difficult' director, Hondo's first foray into more mainstream film making presents its own array of difficulties in its representation of the hidden face of the contemporary African diaspora. Notes This paper is intended in part as a brief discussion of a major, and frequently neglected, diasporic film maker, who, despite being one of the first generation of African directors alongside Ousmane Sembene and almost as productive as his famous contemporary, receives little of the kind of acclaim bestowed on the latter. It is also an attempt, on the part of a relative non-specialist, to address some questions around the spectatorship of 'difficult' films. For a more general discussion of Hondo than this essay can attempt, interested readers might wish to consult the chapter on him in Murphy and Williams (, 71–90). Part of the impetus for this essay was the excellent conference on 'The Black Gaze', held at Birkbeck College, where the emphasis was on the altogether positive, liberatory dimension of the reclaiming of 'the gaze' by and for black people. I am aware that a brief discussion of a complex area risks being worse than no discussion at all, but it seemed necessary to raise these issues. Brennan uses 'look', whereas I have used 'gaze'. While some critics (not Brennan) use the terms interchangeably or imprecisely, it seems to me there are good grounds for clearly discriminating between them in the way that Ann Kaplan does. Hondo is not one of the discursive or 'formal' radicals (among whom a number of post-colonial critics could also be counted) who believe that simply changing the language or form of texts constitutes a subversive, even revolutionary, act. Homi Bhabha, for example, though he is less euphoric than some about such subversive possibilities, notoriously champions the idea that 'slippage' at the level of colonial discourse undermines the authority of colonial rule (Bhabha , 102–22), and has been criticized by Anne McClintock for a 'fetishism of form', involving 'the projection of historical agency onto formal abstractions' (1995, 63). Despite that, they do in fact raise some important questions of gender politics, patriarchy, and community politics. At the same time, some critics would argue that their success is precisely attributable to the absence of overt politics. Even in Soleil Ô, the cafe is a significant topos for Hondo, a place of hybrid and uncertain cultural moments: a black musician singing of 'Les trois sauvages' – is this an instance of complete cultural alienation; a satire directed at a white audience who might regard it as 'just a jolly song'; a paradoxical statement about shared 'savagery'? The resistant potential of mimicry is, however, open to the same kind of criticisms as those levelled by McClintock and mentioned in note 5 above. Though Sarraounia would stand as a powerful exception to that generalization – not least because Sarraounia is a woman. Anne McClintock makes some illuminating, and historically grounded, use of the notion of abjection.