ABSTRACT
Working with a wide range of intellectual traditions, often testing them against personal experiences, Third World critics like Edward Said and Homi Bhabha critique dominant representations of racial and/or ethnic difference. In Orientalism, for example, Said deconstructs racist stereotypes as the products of Orientalist dogmas. This chapter shows how and where Said and Bhabha’s theoretical models may be used to analyze cinematic representations of otherness. As touchstone for evaluation of the paradigms Said and Bhabha profer the author measures their models against three of Marguerite Duras’s experimental films marked by her childhood experiences in French colonial Indochina: India Song, Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta desert and Les Mains negatives. Bhabha, though more sensitive to “the complexity of the question of gender difference,” nevertheless chooses to treat racial difference as equivalent to sexual difference when he posits the racial stereo-type and the sexual fetish as analogous psychic operations.
