ABSTRACT
Although African American and postcolonial feminist film theory are distinct categories of feminist film scholarship, they share so many ideas and concerns that it seems useful to think of the two approaches together. Although African American theory focuses on the representation of Black women in U.S. films and postcolonial criticism concentrates on a global context, both put race at the forefront of their feminist analyses of film. African American and postcolonial feminist film theory was born in the late 1980s and early 1990s from a feeling of frustration and disappointment, and that feeling was not just in response to the obvious absence and distortion of images of women of color on the screen. It was also based on the perception that feminist film studies was following in the footsteps of cinema itself and ignoring issues related to race. Race-oriented feminist scholars have set out to show exactly how wrong Toril Moi was when she notoriously asserted in her overview of feminist theory, Sexual/Textual Politics, that the feminist analysis of race could have no real theoretical significance because it deals with the same theoretical problems and uses the same methodology as White feminism (Thornham 1997: 138). Race-oriented feminist film theory argues in particular that feminist film studies as a whole has not only failed to interrogate the images of women of color on the screen, but has actually worked against the investigation of those images. Two interrelated facets of feminist film studies seem to account for this neglect. First is the conception that White feminism speaks for all women regardless of differences of race, nationality, class, and sexuality, and the second is the feminist reliance on cine-psychoanalysis as a major analytical tool, even though Freud's theories are notoriously blind to national and social differences. In response to this critical neglect, race-oriented feminist critics have set out to make their primary subjects of investigation screen images of African American and Third World women, the works of African American and postcolonial female filmmakers, and the distinctive responses to film texts that characterize women of color.
