ABSTRACT
The most remarkable things about the work of Trinh Minh-ha are the continuity between her writing and her film making. Trinh Minh-ha addresses the objectifying, comparativist discourse of anthropology, and the relationship of the language to power. Trinh Minh-ha discusses a shot of a man carving wood in Reassemblage as an example of an image which is constructed in terms of a dominant anthropological discourse, in that it seems to be exactly the sort of image which is so familiar from hundreds of documentary and ethnographic films. Trinh Minh-ha correctly identifies a discourse on the other which classifies, dichotomizes and essentializes in its depiction of other people, and which performed, and continues to perform, a significant role in the exercise of colonial and post-colonial domination. African societies constructed their own discourses on otherness and they used them to engage with and deal with colonial rule, and these discourses continue to develop and evolve in the post-colonial context.
