ABSTRACT
I began this book with a discussion of my own pleasure in seeing brown skins on the silver screens, and after more than fifteen years, my pleasure has hardly decreased. These films continue to provide the sense of presence and present that I described earlier coupled with a better understanding of the construction of my pleasure, the architecture of its satisfaction and homely-ness. Certainly, my own enmeshed investment in the success (in the many ways that success can be understood here: commercial, theoretical, and political) of these films is always palpable to me. But during these years, I also have learned that the closure of one narrative is the foreclosure of another, that every representation requires access to the means of production. From this materialist and deconstructive methodology, I have learned
to search for the failure in every success.1 What I mean here is not the failure of inaccurate or negative representation, but the impossibility of completing or “getting right” the project of representation at all, focusing instead on the context and means of representation.
