Ethnocultural Voices and African Aesthetics in Trinh Minh-ha's Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen

Current scholarship in African literature does not always transcend the insider-outsider perspectival binarism. The critical engagement of non-African intellectuals on African cultural issues is invested with authority and credibility when it demarginalizes difference and relocates the gaze. Through the theoretical paradigm of the afrocentrist theory, this article analyzes the ways in which the film by the Vietnamese filmmaker and postcolonial theorist Trinh Minh-ha, Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen, captures the oral foundations of African aesthetics. Ethnically derived and culturally instituted, the aural voices discussed in the essay exude a counterhegemonic ethos, where fragmentation and plurality constitute the valuable markers and sites of difference. The disjointed structure of the film, in tandem with its arcane signifiers, challenges the linear and monolithic mandate of dominant cultural inscriptions. Trinh's use of a Western medium to subvert the anthropological I/eye is aporetic, yet uncontaminates her aesthetic purpose.