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4: Tourism and Trafficking
- Ohio University Press
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4 Tourism and Trafficking Views from Abroad in the Transnational Travel Movie In “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality” (2001), Simon Gikandi describes the convergence of postcolonial and globalization theories, which he refers to as “the cultural turn in global studies” (634), a turn taken by scholars of globalization in search of a vocabulary to describe the transnational cultural flows and formations that have appeared in the last fifty years. Postcolonial theory, according to Gikandi, has provided a theoretical language for describing cultural transactions that have exceeded the geographical boundaries of the nation and rendered obsolete the modernization narrative, which envisioned the postcolonial nation-state as the engine driving social change. and progress in the Third World. The confluence of globalization studies and postcolonial theory has resulted in the privileging of literary texts as narratives of globalization and, even more problematic , in the occlusion of local narratives rooted in the material realities of the postcolony.1 These are discourses that do not neatly align with the field’s dominant theoretical framework. To underscore this point, Gikandi quotes, in its entirety, a letter found in the cargo hold of an airplane in Brussels in 1998 alongside the bodies of two young Guinean stowaways, who died seeking passage to a better life in Europe.2 Gikandi’s inclusion of the letter emphasizes the limits of postcolonial theory in accounting for and narrating globalization. Invoking “the very logic of the Enlightenment that postcolonial theory was supposed to deconstruct” (Gikandi 2001, 630), the letter reveals “a powerful disjuncture between the global narratives and images that attract postcolonial critics and another set of narratives and images which do not exactly fit into a theoretical apparatus that seems bent on difference and hybridity” (639). As a consequence, what we know 130 / Tourism and Trafficking about globalization and the multiplicity of cultural articulations it has generated has been limited by what Gikandi calls the restrictive “postcolonial scene of interpretation” (640). Critics reliant on postcolonial theory have ignored cultural articulations that germinate from Third World settings, or that speak in ways that are alien to the dominant paradigm. Gikandi’s critique, although not directed at the field of film and video studies in particular, is nonetheless instructive. Postcolonial film, like postcolonial literature, has been understood as an exemplar of globalization, and yet, the postcolonial film-texts held to represent and speak on behalf of the Third World are those that have been produced for and circulate within Western centers of knowledge production and consumption. Their creators, by and large, are the Third World intellectuals and artists who have been “transformed” into the “émigré native informants” of the postcolonial university (Gikandi 2001, 646). Located in the same institutional spaces, the scholars of transnational film, for the most part, have been attuned to the cinematic forms attached to academic and artistic global networks.3 These are cinematic texts such as Ousmane Sembene’s early film La Noire de . . . (1966) and Jean-Marie Teno’s more recent Clando (1996), which take up Third Cinema or other oppositional discourses. They tend to reiterate what Achille Mbembe, in another context, refers to as “nativist and Afro-radical narratives” (2002, 635), narratives that normalize the idea that the “encounter between Africa and the West resulted in a deep wound: a wound that cannot heal until the ex-colonized rediscover their own being and their own past” (635). Such narratives adopt what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih call the “binary model of above-and-below” (2005, 7), representing Africa’s relationship with the West as principally antagonistic. Among the multiplicity of new cultural forms rendered invisible to postcolonial and transnational cinema studies have been commercial, transnational African video movies. Like the letter from the stowaways discussed by Gikandi, popular African travel movies are incompatible with the postcolonial paradigm. They deal with some of the same issues that animate literatures and cinema of migration and displacement (Dawson 2010), but in language, tone, and aesthetics, the movies are awkwardly unfamiliar and inconsistent. In the movies, the tourist gaze disrupts any attempts at political critique or even didacticism, and melodramatic excess and improbability distort the stark realities about which the movies aim to raise awareness. Constrained by low [34.200.248.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:55 GMT) Views from Abroad in the Transnational Travel Movie / 131 budgets and the expense of producing a movie at home and abroad, and under intense pressure to make a return on their personal investments , videomakers are pulled...