Peripheral Visions

Looking for the Other responds to the charge that white feminist film theories, especially psychoanalytic ones, neglect issues of race. In this ambitious project, E. Ann Kaplan defends a psychoanalytic approach to the racialized subject through examinations of gender and race in mainstream and independent film. Targeted at liberal arts students, the text is a useful introduction to these issues within film, women’s studies, and postcolonial/cultural studies. Unfortunately, Kaplan sometimes sacrifices quality of critique for quantity, and subtlety of argument for scope, in an attempt to satisfy her audiences. The result is a text which ultimately surveys and summarizes more than it stakes out new ground in the ongoing debates about whiteness and feminist film theory.

The book is divided into two main sections. Part I, “Theories of Nation, Psychoanalysis and the Imperial Gaze,” primarily explores the male and imperial gazes in Hollywood film. Part 2, “Travelling Postcolonialists and Women of Color,” examines the ways in which independent film offers the alternative of “inter- and intra-racial looking relations.” Throughout, Kaplan argues by analogy, risking oversimplification of a number of key concepts. For example, Chapter 1, “Travel, Travelling Identities and the Look” depends on the assumption that race, like gender, operates through internalized binary oppositions. She offers examples from Fanon, DuBois, hooks, and Appadurai which support theories of “a network of diasporic black peoples dislocated around the globe in the late twentieth century who share experiences of the alienating gaze” (10). Kaplan’s theory layers colonialism on top of discourses of the gaze initiated by Laura Mulvey. Thus situated non-dialectically, racial difference becomes little more than another instance of split subjectivity. Combined with the constant deferral of her explanation to later sections in the book plus numerous editing errors, such oversimplifications undermine her argument.[1]

Chapter 2, “Theories of Nation and Hollywood in the Contexts of Gender and Race” surveys “male theories” of nations as modern, industrial concepts linked to the rise of literacy and popular culture (29). Kaplan continues her reliance on binary oppositions, countering these male ideas of nation with a feminine sphere of culture. Most significant for her later analysis of Hollywood film is the concept of nation as a fiction, and of America as a construct divided between European cultural allegiances and American national ones. Kaplan relies on Jane Flax to support a claim for a womanly perspective on global history, one in which “problems might not be framed as debates about First, Second or Third Worlds but rather in terms of ongoing struggles to connect or not connect with an Other,” to juggle public and private roles, to link local and global concerns, and “to make oneself a subject within national struggles” (46). These are important questions, and Kaplan offers a sampling of fascinating alternatives to the narrow conception of national identity at work in Hollywood film. However, we wonder why her discussion of these alternatives runs to three pages, in comparison with the eighteen or so pages of “male theory.” If it is because, as she states, “the problematic relation of ‘woman’ to ‘nation’... urgently needs more research” (46), we would add that the binary opposition of male nation to female culture also needs deconstructing.

In Chapter 3, “Hollywood, Science and Cinema: The Imperial and the Male Gaze in Classic Film,” Kaplan tackles D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation, notably its anxieties about the black man’s rape of the white woman, to illustrate interlocking structures of masculinity and whiteness in the imperial gaze. According to her reading, stereotypes of lascivious black men and pure white women “image forth” white supremacy and male supremacy respectively. Through these stereotypes, the film appeals to Southerners to see themselves as part of an American nation preparing for World War I (68). Similarly, masculinity and imperialism collude in a series of 1930s ape movies—King Kong, Tarzan the Ape Man, and Blonde Venus. Devices such as the map of the “dark” continent penetrated by the explorer/hunter, the sexual objectification of the white woman, and the feminization...