Decolonizing Visual Anthropology: Locating Transnational Diasporic Queers‐of‐Color Voices in Ethnographic Cinema

Abstract

The American ethnographic film canon remains dominated by straight white men. As anthropology takes on the task of confronting the riddle of white supremacy, this might be a good time to consider who remains missing from popular taxonomies of anthropological cinema and to bring them into the canon. Unsurprisingly, the voices of immigrant diasporic queers of color are absent. By revisiting the ethnographic cinema of four such filmmakers—Marlon Riggs, Pratibha Parmar, Frances Negrón‐Muntaner, and Richard Fung—I call for an expansion of existing histories and a renewed focus on queers‐of‐color erasure. Their films challenges orthodox definitions of visual anthropology. Making films around the same time that some of the most canonical ethnographic films were released, these filmmakers anticipated current discussions of affect and autoethnography. Their work offers unique and productive insights into our understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and power relations. Questioning the limits of what counts as “documentary,” these filmmakers rethink colonial frameworks of ethnography itself. Confronting the patriarchal white supremacy of anthropology demands attention to these important works. [ethnographic film, visual anthropology, transnational, diaspora, queers of color]

Peasantry and appearance at work: a study of the allochronic bias of a photographic practice

“…L'immersion et l'accent mis sur les sensations produites par les premiers documentaires ethnographiques gonflaient alors l'esthétisation des terrains étudiés dont l'anthropologie contemporaine a longtemps peiné à se distinguer (Ruby, 1991). Cette esthétisation, sous le couvert d'une ontologisation culturelle pré-construite de l'Autre, a alors eu tendance à invisibiliser la diversité de genre, de classe ou l'hybridation culturelle (Gill, 2020).…”

Extending the Frame

“…2 This review is important in continuing to make a case for the academic legitimacy and intellectual seriousness of the ethnographic film. With the rise of multimodal anthropology and the growing resistance to a genre considered deeply compromised (Shankar 2020, Gill 2021, there are new challenges in arguing for ethnographic film as an important mode of contemporary practice. As the discussion below reveals, the genre is more diverse than is often acknowledged by its critics.…”

Pedagogies of the Senses Multimodal Strategies for Unsettling Visual Anthropology

“…These films and photos produced by the formerly colonized, such as Malick Sidibe's photos of Bamako, Mali, and Kidlat Tahamik's (1977) film The Perfumed Nightmare , offer an alternative engagement with meaning making through the image, one that centered the representational impulses and theoretical sophistication of those who have been seen as the subjects of anthropology rather than its authors. In so doing, he joins anthropologist Harjant Gill (2021), who, in a recent article, pushed for a recovery of Marlon Riggs, Pratibha Parmar, Frances Negrón‐Muntaner, and Richard Fung as a way to expand the history of visual anthropology by offering a different set of makers to engage with and unsettle the coloniality (and whiteness) of the discipline.…”

“…The coloniality of the film was rendered present in ways that were palpable, felt. As Gill (2021) explains in his recent critique of Forest of Bliss : “Gardner's refusal to offer context personifies the ‘theological problem of white supremacy’” (Rana 2020, 101) within anthropology, which renders non‐Christian religious practices, and by extension its practitioners, as racial objects to be salvaged and gawked at but not be contextualized and understood.” What we suggest in this article is that it is not enough to say this to our students, to offer critique, but to direct their senses to what (some) already feel as uncomfortable, awkward, and unsettling in the film through active intervention.…”