Critical Writing Index

Fantasies of Oppositionality

by Coco Fusco

Afterimage, Dec. 1988, v. 16, no. 5, pp. 6-9

The essay examines the importance of film as a medium for people of colour to present realities that are not otherwise located with any accuracy in the media. There is also the worry that we have yet to engage with those on the 'periphery' if we, as colonial empires did, continue to name any non-white reality 'other'. Fusco critiques the current wave of cultural interest and government investment in the Other. The ways in which the 'pre' and postcolonial other is absorbed into the capitalist machine simply as a product. The packaging of Hispanic and Black cultural works is exposed as simply 'fashionable'. Fusco argues that this regurgitation of this Other is counterproductive in its negation (in any real sense) to critique this notion of otherness'.

ITEM 1988.060 – available for viewing in the Research Centre