ABSTRACT
Although issues of race and ethnicity are culturally omnipresent, we have been arguing, they have often been filmic ally submerged. This textual repression exists on a continuum with the repression of race in other areas. The American constitution, for example, by speaking as if all Americans were equal and free, "submerged" the presence of enslaved Blacks and dispossessed Native Americans, much as today the buried labor of Third World people (migrant labor, "illegal aliens," groundskeepers, nannies) is camouflaged, literally "undocumented." At the same time, the constitution "veiled" White patriarchal domination in falsely universalist language, normalizing the power of White male institutions and identities. l This tension between presence and absence points to a possible reconceptualization of race and ethnicity in the media. Rather than restricting our attention to the texts' explicit racial discourse, we will see even the "non-ethnic" text as a field for excavation and reconstruction. And instead of the traditional "image" analysis applied to an unproblematized notion of "minorities," we will explore the ethnic and racial undertones and overtones "haunting" the text. The challenge, then, is to render visible, or at least audible, the repressed multiculturalism even of dominant texts.
