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To date, no text exists that focuses exclusively on the concept of postcolonial film as a framework for identifying films produced within and outside of various formerly colonized nations, nor is there a scholarly text that addresses pedagogical issues about and frameworks for teaching such films. This book borrows from and respects various forms of categorization - intercultural, global, third, and accented - while simultaneously seeking to make manifest an alternate space of signification. What feels like a mainstream approach is pedagogically necessary in terms of access, both financial and physical, to the films discussed herein, given that this text proposes models for teaching these works at the university and secondary levels. The focus of this work is therefore twofold: to provide the methodology to read and teach postcolonial film, and also to provide analyses in which scholars and teachers can explore the ways that the films examined herein work to further and complicate our understanding of "postcolonial" as a fraught and evolving theoretical stance.
About the author
Elizabeth Heffelfinger is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Motion Picture Studies program in English at Western Carolina University. She specializes in film and cultural studies. Her articles have appeared in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Journal of Popular Film and Television. Her PhD is from Carnegie Mellon University.
Laura Wright is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Western Carolina University, where she specializes in postcolonial literature and theory. She holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her first book Writing «Out of All the Camps»: J. M. Coetzee¿s Narratives of Displacement was published in 2006; a second, «Wilderness into Civilized Shapes»: Reading the Postcolonial Environment, was published in April of 2010.
Summary
Focuses on the concept of postcolonial film as a framework for identifying films produced within and outside of various formerly colonized nations, nor is there a scholarly text that addresses pedagogical issues about and frameworks for teaching such films. This book provides the methodology to read and teach postcolonial film.
Report
«Intercultural cinema has entered the mainstream, and we can neither celebrate it as resistant nor dismiss it as complicit. If a movie you see at the cineplex is an international co-production, its director is a Western person of color, and part of its proceeds go toward charity, does that make it a 'good' movie? Through impressive case studies and close viewings, Heffelfinger and Wright show that intercultural cinema's power relations take place not only within the films but also in the complex materiality of production, reception, and cultural impact.» (Laura Marks, Associate Professor and Dena Wosk University Professor in Art and Culture Studies, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University)
