Who's Looking? Who's Laughing?: Of Multicultural Mothers and Men in Percy Adlon's Bagdad Cafe

At the time of its release Bagdad Cafe was praised as a subversive comedy with utopian characteristics, lightheartedly contesting sexism and racism, sketching out sisterhood and multicultural bonding. Our reading identifies the ideological gloss that allows the film to disregard social and cultural disparities, as well as to blur the audience's awareness of neo-colonial and pseudo-feminist strategies of representation and narration. Our inquiry into the film examines the comic use of stereotypes as a device for generating pleasure and acceptance, which veils both a particularly oppressive definition of femininity centered in traditional notions of the maternal, and an unmistakable allegory for the process of colonial expansion and neo-colonial domination. (K.S./K.S.)