Representing ‘otherness’ in African popular media: Chinese characters in Ethiopian video-films

Abstract

This article focuses on the recent phenomenon of Ethiopian films that prominently feature Chinese characters as a point in departure to readdress debates on the role media plays in the construction and representation of "otherness". The commercially driven digital film industry in Ethiopia has emerged as a by-product of recent social and economic changes in the country, with local productions proving hugely popular within Ethiopia and in the Ethiopian diaspora. These films crucially claim their success on their ability to represent and articulate the desires, anxieties, fantasies and uncertainties of lived Ethiopian experiences. Building on recent scholarship committed to understanding the growing influences of China in Africa, we explore Ethiopian representations of China in these films and their significance in terms of their broader social and cultural impacts. As the success of these films relies on representing a stereotypical Chinese "Other", and in reference to China's ever growing presence in African countries, we pose broader questions relating to the place of ethnicity, race and national identity in popular cultural productions emerging from the continent. Keywords Ethiopian cinema, Chinese people in Ethiopia, representation of otherness, popular culture in Ethiopia, autochthony and ethnicity, Ethiopia-China relations. Debates on media representation of "otherness" have occupied a central position in media studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies debates over the past thirty years. The work of scholars such as Edward Said (1978) and Stuart Hall (1997), coupled with those of, among others, Michel Foucault (1980), Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) and Charles Taylor (2004), have been adopted and reinterpreted by media scholars to reveal the tight connection between power dynamics, social imaginaries, and mediated constructions of difference and otherness. Media today are powerful agents in the construction of collective ideas and perceptions of reality; they work at different levels, shaping our imagination in subtle ways, "producing 'truth effects' and legitimising certain discursive regimes, while rendering others illegitimate, deviant and 'false'" (Orgad 2012: 28). Within this context, by playing a sort of "boundary work" (Silverstone 2007: 19, quoted in Orgad 2012: 30), media representations of otherness are in many ways central to processes of collective identity formation. Studying them can thus reveal important aspects of how societies respond to the questions that globalisation processes posit to their existence as imagined "homogeneous" collectivities. Most of the existing research on these issues are based on a North-South perspective that privileges the analysis of Western representations of "its" others (Africa, the "Orient", and the "New World"-see for instance Said 1978; Mudimbe 1988; Mignolo 2005; see also Hallam and Street 2013; Loshitzky 2010) or, more rarely, the gaze of the "Other" toward the West (see for instance Kaur 2002; Okoye 2010). Works focusing on images and imageries that...

The New Americans? The Sino-African Relationship on Chinese and Ethiopian Screens

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