CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Visual Art and Ethnicity: Lessons from Methodologies

Organiser: Sara Eigen

Eigen, Sara (Vanderbilt University, United States) SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATION AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INVENTION OF "RACE"
This paper investigates the use of portraits and illustrations by natural scientists who contributed to the establishment of a scientific theory of race at the end of the eighteenth century. Specifically, it examines critical instances in which the use of portraits functioned not to illustrate and confirm visible racial difference, but rather to discourage the transfer of such perceived difference from the realm of scientific description into the realm of social signification.

Sojka, Eugenia (University of Silesia, Poland) ETHNICIZATION AND RACIALIZATION IN CANADIAN VISUAL ARTS DISCOURSES
The paper focuses on the examination of selected Canadian visual arts projects that show the process of racialization and ethnicization as one of negative forces shaping the image of Canada. The analysis reveals how visual arts discourses have been constructed on ethnicized racialized foundations and aesthetics, how literary and cultural critics shaped research through ethnicized and racialized frames of enquiry and analysis, how historically and institutionally the arts benefited from the institution of colonialism, how methodologies of various disciplines perpetuate the ethnicization andracialization of knowledges, how Canada's history of conflict and negotiation between indigenous, French, English, and immigrant cultural groups inflect the relationship between the concepts of ethnicity, race, and nation.

Neethling, Bertie (University of the Western Cape, South Africa) CROSSING THE DIVIDE: INTERCULTURAL PERFORMANCES IN SOUTH AFRICA
Through the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, multilingual and multicultural South Africa is still a deeply divided country. One of the biggest challenges that lie ahead is to forge a sense of unity amongst all its people, a sense of South Africanness. The basic viewpoint of Robert Young (Intercultural Communication 1996) is subscribed to : one must make a wager on hope that common ground be found while preserving genuine difference and diversity. The focus in this contribution will be on attempts within the performing arts to work across cultural boundaries and thereby enhancing communication across cultures. The central theoretical problem of intercultural communication, is how to facilitate understanding amongst cultures without one culture surrendering its integrity to the other. I argue that collaboration in the performing arts creates a new intercultural space that succeeds in doing just that. In the long run these projects will play an important role in normalizing South African society at all levels.

Dayal, Samir (Bentley College, USA) THE NEW COSMOPOLITANISM AND IMMIGRANT IDENTITIES IN FILM
In contemporary cultural criticism there is growing call for a new cosmopolitanism to challenge a narrowly national frame of American Studies. Can there be a new cosmopolitanism that is not from the outset stigmatized as a bourgeois or elite perspective--or worse? How do we speak of a cosmopolitanism that does not privilege Euro American modernity, that is to say, a modernity privileging only the axis of European and American cultural representations of progress and achievement? For the sake of limiting the scope of my analysis, in this paper I will briefly consider developments in theories of cosmopolitanism. I will also compare films set in England and North America (all representing South Asian subjects in the context of multicultural European or North American society), to suggest ways that hegemonic "Euro American" aesthetic and existential ideas are challenged in theoretical and creative works. There is a range of theoretical work, for example in Diaspora studies, that argues by way of a kind of "immanent critique," for an expansion of American and European studies into a transnational frame. My paper offers a brief overview of some developments in theories of cosmopolitanism to contextualize my suggestion that films representing immigrant subjects have made it possible for immigrants to Britain and North America (for instance) to imagine other ways of being than what has been scripted for them already in the discourse of Western civil society, and the films I consider here are fascinating illustrations of this emergent phenomenon. If we are to take such a new cosmopolitanism seriously, a prerequisite must be that this it does not forget to be sensitive to effects of globalization across class divides and ethnic and gender lines. Although arguing for a transnational perspective, such a cosmopolitanism must be alert to the fact that it is not only national borders that are transgressed: any account of the new cosmopolitanism must be alert to the social and cultural border crossings that occur within the existing boundaries of the nation-state (whether it be in North America or in Britain).

Seipel, Julia (Carl von Ossietzky-University Oldenburg, Germany) RE-PRESENTING AND RE-CONSTRUCTING GENDERED ETHNIC IDENTITY IN AUSTRALIAN FILMS FROM THE 1990S
Since the end of the 1980s migration and the every day life of 'ethnic' Australians became seriously treated subjects (in the word's double meaning) of films made in Australia. These films are believed to be even more 'authentic' when filmmakers who are defined by their ethnicity - i.e. not being from an Anglo-Celtic background, make them. Even though this can be seen as success of the official policy of multiculturalism there remains the question to what extend these 'legitimate' representations encourage the consolidation of ethnicity as social and cultural category as well as means of differentiation and discrimination. Using some films from the 1990s as examples I am going to discuss correlations between the cultural categories of gender and ethnicity and how representations of ethnic female characters can be used to establish limits for an ethnic group within a multicultural society.

Tranchini, Elina (University of La Plata, Argentina) WHEN THE SLAVE SHIP TRANSNATIONALIZES ITS SELF-DESTRUCTION: PARADOXES OF AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE REPRESENTATION OF BLACK ETHNICITY
Currently, there is a lack of studies about the possibility of visual and film representation of social theoretical categories. What formal and esthetical approaches did the U.S. cinema use to construct a narrative model about black ethnicity? Stigma images and a prototypical rhetoric were globalized by cinema and television, or recycled by a cinema captured by a desperate search of black self-affirmation (Spike Lee). In the opposite view, the very criticized La Amistad by Steven Spielberg, avoids and dissolves the characteristics binaries of colonialist political logic, focusing on the construction of U.S. black ethnicity as the large-scale plantation slavery hegemonic strategy to delete and devastate colonized African and African American subjectivities. This film represents black ethnicity as the embodiment of a forbidden historicity, and it situates the fight against racism out of the no way out circle of ethnic identity, in constitutive full flow of a multiplicity of discursive public spheres.