The Resisting Screen: Multicultural Politics in a Global Perspective

Diaspora 5:3 1996 The Resisting Screen: Multicultural Politics in a Global Perspective Maurizia Boscagli University of California, Santa Barbara Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. London: Routledge, 1994. "Given the eclipse of revolutionary metanarratives in the postmodern era, how do we critique the dominant Eurocentric media while harnessing its undeniable pleasures?" (Shohat and Stam 340). "What would the Third World nationalist narrative entail for First World minoritarian struggles?" (340). And again: How can radical politics be integrated into the mass-mediated pleasure of contemporary culture? Can mass culture be politically correct? Can it reinscribe and promote multiculturalism without incurring the charge of a reified identity politics? These are some ofthe central questions that Ella Shohat and Robert Stam pose in their important book Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media. This is a book with a purpose, where discussion and critical analysis are never academic. Through their examination of a vast array of Third World, First World, diasporic, and minoritarian texts, the authors identify the terms of a possible aesthetic of resistance and outline a praxis for the cultural worker inside and outside the academy. With their insistence on the importance ofthe active and interactive spectator, Shohat and Stam call attention not only to how resistance to dominant culture can be signified, but also to how it might be articulated in the media, in the museum, in the classroom. Their question is not simply "Can culture contribute to social change?" but how, through which channels and modalities, can mediatized cultural representations contribute to and promote the emancipatory project through which the West's others, across a global and diasporic axis, acquire visibility and produce change at the social level. The book announces itself as a work of postcolonial critique of the ideological forces through which the West and its past and present empires have imposed their power, and as such it zeroes in on how Eurocentrism continues today to do Western imperialism's and supremacism's dirty work in a pervasive and often imperceptible , because naturalized, manner. Initially a tool of European 497 498 Diaspora 5:3 1996 colonial power, Eurocentrism has for a long time informed (European and American) mainstream cultural production: as such it has become "a bad epistemic habit" (Shohat and Stam 10), as the authors claim, deeply entrenched in our everyday ways ofthinking and in dominant media representations. The book contributes to the multicultural and postcolonial attempt to decolonize the global mind and complicate the binaristic thinking through which otherness is formulated and understood in Western thought. Writing at the time ofmassive cultural and economic globalization and oftransnationalism , the authors study a series of localized forms of resistance in media texts in order to outline an oppositional theory ofrepresentation , in which the history of the other, the exile, the emigrant, the postcolonial and multicultural subject is no longer considered a minor subplot of the history of the West. The critical focus on multiculturalism, the postcolonial, identity politics, and political correctness shows how inadequate the grand narratives of the rationalist and imperialist West have become at the era of global decolonization. The very nature of media production, circulation, and reception, as well as its crucial participation in the everyday of masses of people, makes it the privileged site where these local resistances can find a space and an audible voice: "Since all political struggle in the postmodern era necessarily passes through the simulacral realm of mass culture, the media are absolutely central to any discussion of multiculturalism" (Shohat and Stam 11). More precisely , the media, and media spectatorship, deeply and complexly intervene in the process of identity production. While the high modernist Frankfurt School adage pointed out how the media and the "massified" culture it processes destroy the sense of community and ofindividual identity alike, Shohat and Stam look at the media as potentially capable both ofdefamiliarizing and contradicting the racism and the sexism circulating in dominant culture, and of preparing the ground for the articulation of new forms of coalitional, inter-/intra-cultural communities. If popular culture, à la Gramsci via Raymond Williams, is indeed a fissured space, a variegated field where the dominant, the residual, and the emergent interweave and clash...