Thi Minh-Ha Trinh

Trinh, Thi Minh-Ha Trinh

Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism

Woman, Native, Other

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Constance Lewallen

Lawrence Rinder

Berkeley Art Museum

Performance art, video, ceramics, mail and stamp art, artist's books, and works on paper are part of the range of pioneering and influential work by Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha that are showcased with scholarly essays in this exhibition catalog.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982)

The Dream of the Audience

"An image is powerful not necessarily because of anything specific it offers the viewer, but because of everything it apparently also takes away from the viewer." --Trinh T. Minh-ha Vietnamese filmmaker and feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in independent filmmaking. In her writings and interviews, as well as in her filmscripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the "infinite relation" of word to image. Cinema-Interval brings together her recent conversations on film and art, life and theory, with Homi Bhabha, Deb Verhoeven, Annamaria Morelli and other critics. Together these interviews offer the richest presentation of this extraordinary artist's ideas. Extensively illustrated in color and black and white, Cinema-Interval covers a wide range of issues, many of them concerning "the space between"--between viewer and film, image and text, interviewer and interviewee, lover and beloved. As an added bonus, the complete scripts of Trinh's films Surname Viet Given Name Nam and A Tale of Love are also included in the volume. Cinema-Interval will be an essential work for readers interested in contemporary film art, feminist thought, and postcolonial studies.

Cinema Interval

... methodologically innovative... precise and perceptive and conscious... " --Text and Performance Quarterly Woman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color." --Chandra Talpade Mohanty The idea of Trinh T. Minh-ha is as powerful as her films... formidable... " --Village Voice ... its very forms invite the reader to participate in the effort to understand how language structures lived possibilities." --Artpaper Highly recommended for anyone struggling to understand voices and experiences of those 'we' label 'other'." --Religious Studies Review

"In this collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, award-winning filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha offers new challenges to Western regimes of knowledge. Bringing to her subjects an acute sense of the many meanings of the marginal, Trinh examines Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology. In one essay, taking off from ideas raised earlier by Zora Neale Hurston, Trinh considers with astonishment the search by Western "experts" for the hidden values of a person or culture, a process of legitimized voyeurism that, she argues, ultimately equates psychological conflicts with depth, while inner experience is reduced to mere personal feeling. When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. Feminist struggle is heterogeneous. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to 'beat the master at his own game'." -- Back cover.

Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics

When the Moon Waxes Red

Jean-Paul Bourdier

The dwellings of hundreds of African ethnic groups offer a variety of conceptions and building practices that contradict the widespread image of the primitive hut commonly attributed to rural Africa. Each house or group of houses is designed not only to shelter the members of a family, but also to enable intimate communication with ancestors and divinities and to harmonize with the forces of nature. Such an architecture thrives in a community context where it is simply not acceptable to plunder resources from the earth, and resources are used only in accordance with their availability, in quantity, and at times of year that minimize environmental impact. This cultural dimension and its realization through different architectural practices are illustrated in this work with examples taken from dwellings across numerous ethnic groups in sub-Saharan West Africa. Drawings, plans, axonometric projections, and photographs show the beauty and complexity of this architecture that is a spiritual praxisâe"as much place of life as work of art.

Thi Minh-Ha Trinh

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