Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology

3: Cinematic Time and Visual Economy

3 y Cinematic Time and Visual Economy Does the proliferation of audiovisual media among indigenous communities respond to a change in the way literacy, literary representation, and power have congealed in Latin America? Urban elites in Latin America have enacted power relations by constructing an opposition between the realm of literacy and civilization, on the one hand, and the rural expanses inhabited by oral cultures, on the other. The opposition is at once spatial and temporal , where oral culture has become associated with stasis and literacy with progress and development. The Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento famously called this the clash between civilization and barbarism. Already in the mid-nineteenth century he called for a literature that could fuse the two by integrating oral traditions into the lettered culture of the newly independent nation-states (59–78). The realm of civilization and literature formed the lettered city; its history is a narrative of coercion and colonial power, “where writing eventually looms over all human liberty, because new emerging groups can effectively assail positions of social power only on a two-dimensional battlefield of line and space” (Rama, Lettered 37). Since the conquest, native speakers of indigenous languages have opted for the book and the essay as one important means of bringing subalternized indigenous perspectives to the forefront.1 The alphabet, whether used by individual authors or through the collaborative form of testimonio, has been a privileged though certainly not the only venue for speaking back to power. The Aymara Fausto Reinaga wrote (and struggled to find publishers for his) books and essays in the sixties, severely criticizing Bolivia’s National Revolution for framing indigenous people as a social class of peasants or campesinos. As Reinaga vindicated the racial identity of Indians, he also bid for inclusion 86 ndianizing ilm in the lettered city. Change is to be affected from within. Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Rigoberta Menchú in the seventies and eighties sought out editors who adapted their stories and thoughts to the book form. Others have preferred to communicate their positions and research findings back to the communities they have worked with, often opting for community radio or inexpensive publications directed at indigenous readers.2 Indigenous media in Bolivia largely bypass the realm of literacy, while the CRIC uses video parallel to alphabetic and other visual and aural media in their bilingual education program. Indigenous authors in Ecuador are prolific publishers, but the CONAIE is also seeking to expand its use of video. Opting or emphasizing audiovisual media may not seem surprising. Some argue that the lettered city as a configuration of power and analytic concept has recently come into crisis . At the end of the twentieth century, Jean Franco suggests, “radical change for most people came about not through armed struggle but from unanticipated changes as media and the new information economy were consolidated . . . the printed book, once the instrument for acquiring cultural capital, now encountered powerful rivals in radio and television” (Decline 11). While some highlight the democratic openings mass media has offered, others maintain that media are not automatically democratic or emancipatory .3 Octavio Getino, like indigenous media producers, insists that for audiovisual media to become true expressions of the people the current logic of access, production, and distribution must be profoundly reshaped (Cine y televisión 251–63). Cinema and photography, moreover, prolong a colonial gaze inaugurated with the conquest of the so-called new world (cf. Shohat “Imaging”; Shohat and Stam, Unthinking). Alexandra Halkin, founding director of the Chiapas Media Project, and Amalia Córdova, from the National Museum of the American Indian, argue that indigenous communities are often on the frontline of corporate globalization and government efforts to privatize natural resources. Rarely does mainstream media address scenes of inequality so prevalent in these communities. When they do, they present the people as stuck in poverty and unable to draw on their own communities and cultures. Alternatively, media representations often include romantic portrayals and superficial analyses of culture. Through silence and misrepresentation, mainstream media contributes to economic injustice and lack of respect toward indigenous communities. (1) inematic ime and isual conomy 87 One might more adequately understand the lettered city as invested with a visual economy that has enacted a teleological effect, where humanity is seen to develop from what Dipesh Chakrabarty called the “imaginary waiting room of history,” characterized by oral culture toward...