Traces and Visions of In-Betweenness

  • Laura Fantone
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture book series (CSGSC)

Abstract

This chapter explores the shift to video and experimental filmmaking in the 1980s and early 1990s, as embraced by two Asian American artists. It discusses the work of Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha in their resonating trajectories. The author embraces a feminist, postcolonial perspective, arguing that the two artists offer a uniquely transnational sensibility: they do not present themselves as simply Asian American. Their work poses questions on Asianness in the West, questions of gender, marginality and colonialism. The chapter concludes that Trinh and Cha embrace a poetic based on “becoming other,” short-circuiting fixed identities like ethnicity and nationality, while escaping a celebratory cosmopolitanism through an ontological and aesthetic shift.

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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Laura Fantone
    • 1
  1. 1.Gender and Women’s StudiesUniversity of CaliforniaBerkeleyUSA

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