Third world film: the particular and the global.

One does not have to be a social studies teacher or an economist to bring global concerns into the classroom. Though the mere mention of "globalism" brings to mind thoughts of the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, Free Trade zones, environmental pollution, sweatshops, border-crossings, and media images of violent demonstrators rendered photogenic through fumes of tear gas, the global organization of finance, trade, and labor affects our work as educators much more broadly. The textbooks, supplies, and technologies we use, and the non-instructional labor which eases our work (notably non-unionized and largely immigrant), all participate in global economics, as does the current push towards online teaching and the proliferation of extension colleges and institutes overseas. More obliquely, even when our materials seem quite neutral in this regard--a poem by Wordsworth, for example, or a film comedy--our teaching participates in global cultural flows. Bringing to light the role of the imagination in social life, it shapes attitudes that sustain or question material global developments. While such creeping globalization is true of all areas of instruction, including the supposedly impractical humanities, this essay concerns more narrowly the kind of knowledge humanities courses produce, and their role within the global flow of capital and political spheres of influence. When we teach courses in English, History, Art History, Philosophy, Foreign Languages, Communications, and the like, both the material we select and the way we teach it reflect geopolitical assumptions, usually insular, usually Eurocentric. Though often unspoken and unexamined, the force of these assumptions is to extol our own culture, politics, and economy, and they shape most lecture notes and lesson plans across North America and Europe.

So, for example, the teaching of English literature at all levels usually concern British and U.S. (a.k.a "American") literatures. Except for a smattering of third world authors we hear little of Commonwealth and other anglophone literatures, and even less of post-colonial literatures in translation, let alone entire courses devoted to them. Indeed, the growing hegemony of English is, itself, a global concern, intertwined with financial global interests. In undergraduate education, art history flues even worse than its literary counterpart. Constrained by fewer course offerings and faculty lines, art departments feel hard pressed to devote space to issues in art history; connoisseurship, and exhibition from transcultural, non-western perspectives. Even history; which is more inclusive than the above, primarily focuses on Western history and not the histories of supposedly peripheral others. The reasons for this are familiar: there is no space in the curriculum, it's hard to find qualified teachers, and so on. These claims are true, if one sees the Euro-American tradition as the necessary core of good education. But the benign neglect that sustains them also argues that, ultimately, the culture, history, and ideology of whatever group is powerful enough to claim to speak for all humanity control much of the curriculum. If anything we treat this fact as axiomatic.

In the mid 1980s I had occasion to witness a particularly blatant enactment of a powerful group's staking out its claim to sole ownership of "legitimate" knowledge. The occasion was a faculty seminar on feminist theory hosted by Harvard University. The guest speaker was a Palestinian-American film maker and Ph.D. candidate who questioned the then-influential psychoanalytic approach to feminist film studies. Her point was that, for all the importance of psychoanalysis in unmasking films' patriarchal stance, seen globally, it suffers from cultural myopia. The Freudian and Lacanian models on which it was based, she suggested, are Eurocentric, patriarchal, heterosexual, middle class, white, and erroneously use the nuclear family as a universal model for human development. Still, though the speaker addressed her small all-female audience gently and in a supposedly friendly informal setting, and though she was doing so at a time when our schools, colleges, and textbook publishing were embracing all things "minority " and "diverse," her comments met a strikingly hostile reception. To this audience, the speaker's effort to open up a space for subaltern self-definition and a comparative perspective on difference across nations and continents seemed heretical. Even her choice of the word "trauma" to describe the collective experience of Palestinian dispossession was not granted. Instead, "trauma" was deftly reclaimed and re-privatized as an Oedipal scenario, without relation to her argument that this quintessentially Western perspective does not apply to her culture or indeed most world cultures.

Those attending the seminar may eventually have come to value the visitor's challenge to the universalizing Freudian model of human development as it affected feminist film scholarship during the eighties. Her argument for recognizing other cultures and other modes of social organization now fits in well with the more global perspective put forth by cultural and post-colonial studies. But the fact that this woman's audience could not assimilate this position at a time when awareness of racism, colonialism, imperialism, gender, and class relations had been growing world wide, illustrates my point that our reflexive, self preserving tendency is to sustain a self-serving myopia. Ultimately, at stake in that seminar room was a desire to affirm the Western model of social organization as the "natural" one globally. Ultimately, at stake for our students is often that same desire. As this incident suggests, there is little neutrality in our thinking, teaching, and learning. In this respect, the challenge for radical teachers is to strive to be aware of ways our work can so easily be lured into normalizing existing power relations as a global inevitability.

An invitation I received recently to develop an undergraduate course on Third World Film for a possible visiting lectureship at Tel Aviv University (TAU) led me to think about putting these general observations into practice. Though this is a hypothetical course at present, contingent on a grant, it invites us to think about ways humanities courses can increase students' awareness of global issues. Further, now that the course is on the planning boards, I will also propose a version of it to my own school, the University of Massachusetts--Boston (UMB), where it stands a good chance of being adopted. While thematic emphases are likely to diverge in these different settings, the general framework for each syllabus is likely to remain the same. The idea is to bring third world perspectives from the periphery to the center, to expose the prevailing sway of western perspectives, and to help students think about difference in terms of conflicting interests and injustices. Seen politically, this is a far cry from th e model of providing a "tour" of exotica along the lines of the cold war-era "feel good" Family of Man traveling photo exhibit and elegant coffee table book, or, in a more contemporary vein, the transcendental homelessness Sebastiao Selgado depicts in his exhibition and even more elegant volume, Migrations: Humanity in Transition. (1)

TAU and UMB are two very different institutions. UMB's students are mostly adult learners, ethnically diverse, lower middle and working class, who study under great economic and personal duress and with considerable uncertainty about their occupational futures. TAU's students, many of them veterans of the military, tend to be economically secure, mostly European in origin (i.e. ethnically privileged Jews, in Israeli terms), and take their right to higher education for granted. Their campus is well groomed; ours is utilitarian. Admission to their program is very competitive, ours is not. Overall, TAU students project a sense of a birthright to education that is rare at UMB. But the difference most relevant to my proposed course is political, in that Israel's war with its Arab, Palestinian, and Bedouin neighbors and citizens, and the United States' shifting definition of "spheres of influence," translate rather differently into what countries "matter," including what films (or novels, or music, or other artifac ts) get promoted. Each country draws its own contours of a "Third World." It is no accident that there are more African, Turkish, and Tunisian films available in Israel, and more Latin American and Pacific Rim films available in the United States. A course on third world film taught in Tel Aviv, Boston, Nairobi, or Havana, cannot escape the shaping of "global" to local needs. Indeed, even Florida and California inflect that concept differently, given the different origins of their migrant populations. In face of such local perspectives, our choice as teachers is mainly whether to sustain or destabilize them.

I will return to these differences later, as they can affect the syllabi of our courses, but first let me sketch out the questions which provide the basis and framework for this essay. These questions are as follows: 1) Terminology. What does the phrase "third world" mean? Is "post-colonial" a better term? 2) Rationale: Why make space for such a course in an already crowded curriculum, and what should it offer different student constituencies? 3) Teaching: What pedagogy would work best here, given the heterogeneous materials? 4) Organization: How can one rationalize the grab bag of disparate transnational films (or other materials) which such an introductory overview implicitly requires, and how might one shape a coherent syllabus out of it? 5) Expertise: Are we up to the task of teaching the material in relation to the widely disparate cultural, historic, and political contexts we are engaging? These may seem to be hugely complex questions, but my own experience teaching at UMB and in India and lecturing at TAU reassures me that they can be negotiated.

TERMINOLOGY

Like other supposedly ameliorative (i.e. euphemistic) labels, "Third World" is a questionable term. It loosely refers to a duster of impoverished nation-states also called "developing" and "post-colonial." In practice, these labels refer to non-western and generally nonwhite geo-political entities that are mired in poverty, abjection, and severely unstable politics. In just about all instances, these nation-states are also ethnically heterogeneous, with borders shifting and populations reshuffled over centuries of conquest and tribal conflict. These are the peoples who end up providing the labor and raw materials for the west's newly configured forms of global prosperity. Still, while a general consensus takes this to be what "Third World" means, it is an erroneous term. It is a vestige of a Cold War map that divided the world into three entities: the US and western Europe (including Australia and New Zealand), the USSR, and the so called non-aligned nations who comprise our world's impoverished others.

"Third World" is also unhelpful in that it projects onto poorer regions and nations a static state of abjection, in contrast with the dynamic narratives of agency, progress, and national dignity which the terms. "developing" and "post-colonial" imply. Indeed, Steven Feld's "A Sweet Lullaby for World Music" pushes this critique further by linking the emergence of commercial World Music to the emergence of "third world." Feld points to a commercial stake in stabilizing and de-politicizing the notion of "third world" in the interest of marketing so-called primitive, exotic, tribal, and folk commodities which sonically penetrate and harmonize difference. (2)

Still, though these latter two labels seem more positive, their very optimism is questionable. "Developing" implies that these countries were not developed until conscripted into the new global economy, and it is further belied by the widespread stagnation and neglect evident in "developing" countries. Similarly, despite a measure of progress here and there, the west's dominance of the global economy, culture, language, and all that flows from them, renders the "post" of "post-colonial" dubious at best.

Another phenomenon that further complicates the notion of "Third World" is the fact of global migrations, exiles, expulsions, and deportations, on top of the fact that certain indigenous minorities live as third world aliens within their own countries. Are Australia's aborigines "Third World" and, if so, would we think of Tracy Moffat's cosmopolitan high-art videos as "Third World" because she is aborigine by birth (though forcibly brought up in a white home)? Is the work of artists of Iranian, PalestinianLebanese, or Afro-Caribbean heritage (Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, and Isaac Julien), who have reached the zenith of international acclaim, "Third World"? What bearing does the fame of "first world" star scholars like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, or Edward Said, have on their authority as cultural critics of third world origins? And what about films made by Pakistanis residing in England, or Africans in France, or foreign workers or gypsies in their places of sojourn? At issue, then, are the transnational vo ices of both rooted communities and their diasporas. In this sense, the "Third World" or postcolonial condition no longer means a territorially specific fixed domicile. (3)

RATIO NALE 

To raise these issues in class-to note that "globalism" means more than the flows of global capital, and that "Third World" is more complicated than the abjection which follows from the exploitation of local labor and resource markets-is to start critiquing the current reconfiguration of global relations and each of our places within it. Most importantly, as one mulls over the rationale for such a course (be it on third world film, literature, art, women, and the like) it becomes increasingly obvious that "Third World" is bound up in race, poverty, and gender in ways that transcend national identities. (The economist Armatya Sen stresses gender in particular as key to development.) (4) When taught from a radical perspective, the course "Third World Film" becomes a course on global applications and abuses of social justice. It happens to be about film, and thus benefits from the fact that film is a powerful imaginative medium that readily promotes empathetic engagement. It also benefits from the existence of impressive nonwestern film industries, even if their films are badly distributed. But a key concern here is also the fact that film is a mode of cultural expression that molds local and external attitudes towards the material organization and rights of societies perceived as geopolitical configurations. In this respect, the rationale for studying third world film is that such a course gives a voice to subalterns defined in terms of national, geographic, and ethnic units-that is, units that have been instrumental in both their oppression and their empowerment.

Planned as an introductory overview for students who mostly identify as part of the dominant West, be it in Israel or the US, I expect this course to speak to students' perspectives on categories of humanity they would hardly glimpse otherwise. For us teachers this is not a safe path. The effort to heighten students' awareness of systems of collective dispossession can also alienate some of them. It can sharpen their understanding of the causes of oppression and their empathy for the yearnings, endurance, dignity, and liberation struggles that arise in response to it. But it can also have the opposite effect, especially since many third world films include unfamiliar cultural indicators (costumes, dwellings, music, customs, etc.) and use different film "languages" (e.g. style, pacing, cinematography, production values). They are, in short, unfamiliar and hard to watch for those reared on slick Hollywood fare. Thus, while some students will be able to locate themselves and understand their complicity within g lobal relations, others might re-affirm their place within existing power relations or use the "otherness" of the material to reject empathetic reading. Some may understand the need for change, while others may resist it. As happens in all politically charged humanities courses (e.g. ethnic studies, women's studies, or queer studies), the material does not lead inexorably to certain conclusions, and one cannot assume a uniform response.

TEACHING

As all this suggests, the rationale for this course is not that separable from how one might teach it. Each of us will need to tap the best in her pedagogic resources, be it the use of journals, small group discussions, in class presentations, etc. Attentiveness to students' "incorrect" responses, openness, and dialogue are crucial here, as is a careful navigation of conflict in the classroom. Such inclusive and sensitive teaching is especially needed in humanities courses, where interpretation and expression carry the burden of persuasion more than facts, numbers, and tables. Thus, while this course can invite students to reassess the notion of a center ("us") and a periphery ("them"), it can also invite students to become aware of ways that the cinematic "language" of the films discussed participates in their production of meanings. The very unfamiliarity of third world films' styles, languages, settings, and themes is itself a teaching tool, useful precisely because the medium is normally so masterful at s oliciting from viewers uncritical surrender. Indeed, one of the strengths of this over-saturated medium is its ability to elicit strong identification. In response teachers can help students develop a kind of double-vision, a way of re-seeing and re-thinking the issues at hand. Attention to film as a medium can help teachers delineate a critical space from which to reflect on the material.

Identification, reception, and point of view can be examined in class very fruitfully. Most immediately, this focus-a skeptical, rhetoric-conscious stance-can protect such a course from slipping into a sentimental "global village" mode. Like the tangled question of how we define "third world," they expose the power that rests in the hands of those who define words and control texts. Once we are aware of them, we can see where a film positions its audiences (i.e. its "intention") and to what ends. So, for example, the Cuban film, The Other Francisco, strives to have all its viewers empathize with its slave (i.e. subaltern) protagonists, but it also has its privileged audience members (who are currently white) see themselves through the slaves' eyes in the personae of owners and overseers. In addition, this film allocates segments of the narrative to different narrators who have different stakes in the account, with a clarifying voice-over commentary (as if "from above") integrating it, so as to gradually unfol d a dialogically constructed reading of slavery, abolition, and revolution. The French-Algerian classic, The Battle of Algiers, encourages western audiences to identify with the Algerian fighters but also to feel implicated in the French occupiers' position. Sembene's film Mandabi invites all viewers to identify closely with his Senegalese protagonist only to pull Western viewers back abruptly, at the very end, when the film signals directly and with bitter irony the West's complicity in the situation it depicts. These few examples hardly cover the array of practices that can be discussed in class, but they illustrate ways the discussion can trace issues across heterogeneous materials so as to situate such a course within a comparative understanding of cultural practices as providing an ideological foundation for material globalism.

In a course where much of the material is likely to focus on the consequences of colonization and its ideologies of repression, the double vision I describe above is likely to be our frequent companion. I fully expect to teach The Battle of Algiers in either version of the course, Israeli or US, and plan to address that question of audience position forthrightly. Given Israel's self-perception as previously colonized and its current experience as colonizer, including its participation on both sides of popular uprisings, this topic is likely to strike a much rawer nerve there than it will in the United States. The film's treatment of the bombing of a coffee shop frequented by French teenagers, for example, parallels closely the real-life bombing of a disco in Tel Aviv crowded with Israeli teens. In contrast, The Other Francisco, which I also expect to teach in both countries, may seem less pressing in Israel, more guilt provoking in the US. In fact, none of these films is alien, though students may prefer to t hink so. Cisse's film Genesis (Mali) illustrates this point powerfully in its adaptation of Old Testament stories to a mythical African context that looks, for all its abstraction from current actuality alarmingly contemporary. Sembene's film Cheddo (Senegal) also recreates a vanished past (and language) as a parable of the present.

ORGANIZATION

When students understand this interweaving of the specifics within a given film as it interacts with its broader context at the time and place of its production and reception, they take possession of the course. This is the point when the course transcends its status as a collection of representations of exotic others, a kind of National Geographic or Family of Man sampler, and becomes a window on specific local events that reverberate in response to global ones. In this respect, the teacher's task is mainly to construct a syllabus that will sequence useful materials which will gradually help students piece together a global narrative. A mere geographic selection of films-something like, "Here is a film from...," and "Here is one from... "-will not do. Even in a course that purports to be an introductory overview of unfamiliar materials, there are too many films to cover, and a sampler is likely to hobble the development of an encompassing critical understanding. Instead, it is important to make students awar e of what has been left out and why, and of how that which has been retained raises a coherent set of interwoven concerns. While this is a challenge in any course that covers heterogeneous materials, the focus on third world films invites attention to power relations, economics, colonialism, racism, and other issues of equity as a geo-political core that needs to be brought to the attention of both Israeli and US students.

My own version of this course combines a thematic organization with what I perceive as the course's implicit commitment to inclusiveness. (Sample themes might include colonialism and liberation, history and modernity, third world women, pastoral ideals and urban realities, etc.) The advantage of thematic organization is that it yields clear unifying concepts. My syllabus also reflects urgency about geographic inclusion, as this is likely to be the only course students will take in this subject, but it ultimately puts coherence ahead of inclusion. To this end, my syllabus rests on a cluster of thematic considerations from which the course derives its framework In its Israeli version the central themes will be national formation, history, and modernity, with a focus on feminism, class, and armed struggles. The U.S. version will stress colonization and empire, internal inequalities, and the production and critique of dominant ideologies. Both versions will also include attention to gender and class as actors int egral to local and global power relations. Time allowing, the Israeli course will include more films from the Middle East (Egypt, Lebanon, etc.), while the American version may include more films from the Americas and domestic "third world" film makers (Native American, Chicano, black, Asian-American, etc.). Further, the syllabus also reflects my sense that films are crafted artifacts, where the relation between message and medium, context and the autonomy of artistic vision are always a concern. Accordingly, the films I select tend to have passed the test of time in terms of their crafting as well as subject matter. To the extent that "third world" allows for it, they are List becoming canonical. They have been frequently taught, screened, and written about.

EXPERTISE

The challenge of reaching such a widely ranging course is indeed great. After all, none of us can master the diverse knowledge it requires, including third world history, politics, and film cultures. Indeed, the scholarship available is itself in its infancy both in terms of available factual information and in terms of critical and theoretical writing. Obviously one has to teach oneself the material, as few of us were taught it, and one must teach from one's own strengths, as we often do. Further, one cannot do justice to the wealth of available films in a course that lasts a mere semester. Deep cuts are necessary, and one of mine has been to exclude the documentary genre, as this would require an even more thorough knowledge of local histories, politics, economics, and culture. A film specialist such as myself might design a course that stresses cinematic discourse (film "language," cinematography) as its organizing focus. Someone else may design a wonderful course focused exclusively on the documentary gen re. Another would focus only on a region--Latin America, for instance--as a way of marshaling knowledge. Some of you may just use an occasional film in the context of altogether different courses. These are all ways of teaching from our strengths, without claiming an authority we may not have. Indeed, my experience shows that students appreciate it greatly when our discussion includes a critique of the limitations on knowledge which a given course has to face.

The course outline sketched below (see appendix) is not about total coverage and does not yet offer a fixed syllabus. It mainly delineates areas of studies and films that might fit under those categories. Though my proposed course aims at an overview of films coming out of diverse geographic and political contexts, it mainly seeks to engage students in those aspects of third world cinemas that have the most direct bearing on their own role in global affairs as citizens of their particular country. To that end, the syllabus pairs films and uses film clusters for comparison and contrast. When possible, it also sequences them chronologically to foster awareness of individual films' accountability to their national and other group circumstances. Finally, it uses diverse kinds of reading and writing assignments to structure contexts for analysis and synthesis. To the extent possible, readings will be matched with specific films, though a substantial number of readings will explore third world subaltern questions m ore broadly. Writing assignments for my course will include weekly journal entries (in the form of two-column "dialogues" between viewing notes and commentary/response) of notes on selected assigned readings, short critical papers, one research based paper or three shorter equivalents, and an essay exam where students will synthesize their cumulative knowledge in terms of thematic relations.

I have developed this course outline after long experience with another film course, "Women Film Directors," which similarly uses widely ranging materials, including several from third world countries. "Women Film Directors" also interweaves global and local concerns, spans different themes and "vocabularies" (styles, technologies, etc.), and uses a similar set of writing assignments. Though unified by questions of gender, "Women Film Directors" is more heterogeneous, in that it covers twice as many decades and includes documentary film. Still, both courses take as their point of departure the problem of defining a subject matter within an overly inclusive course title, and both return frequently to critiquing the misconceptions that title encourages and illuminating the assumptions on which it rests. Thus, while a course on third world film cannot select a single Argentine film like The Official Story to speak for all Argentine cinema, it can still locate that film in its historic specificity and analyze its discourse (notably as it renders memory and insight) as an important way of addressing Argentina's heritage.

For the present course's goal of helping students become more respectful of cultural and material differences and more reflective about their own relative position (individually and nationally) within global relations, it is important that students be aware that they are not sampling "typical" films or acquiring in-depth knowledge of third world cinemas. Even the question of whether Argentina is "third world" is up for discussion. After all, awareness of the problems tangled in this terminology and of the incomplete nature of what we strive to understand about third world cinemas is at once the most humbling and enabling aspect of what the course aims to accomplish.

APPENDIX

Third World Film--Draft Outline

Note: The outline below sketches out the Israeli version of this course. It is still a wish list, too long for a semesters offering. As noted above, the U.S. version will resemble it closely but recast it in terms of U.S. concerns. While the present outline is too long for a semester's offering, it reflects my overall goal of including films from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia, and having a substantial concluding section that looks at diasporic third world films by way of further interrogating the notion of "third world" in its global contexts. Time allowing, I would like to include some "high art" work by diasporic film makers of third world origins in order to further problematize this terminology.

Week 1: Introduction. Satyajit Ray's The Rime and the World (India; based on a novel by Rabindranath Tagore) and selections from Josephine Baker's Princess Tam Tam (France).

These films will help us delineate issues key to this course: historic contexts of emergent nationhood; encounters between first and third worlds; the effects of class and gender within such narratives; questions of perspective (insider/outsider, self/other); racism and colonialism; the function of gender in third world representations; and the emergence of modernity.

Weeks 2-9: Comparative studies. Selected films from all the areas listed below, except for the Middle East and third world diasporas. These selections will "speak' to films which precede and follow them.

a) Fire (India) pairs well with The Home and the World because of its contemporary feminist focus. Similarly, Euzan Palcy's Sugar Cane Alley (Martinique), relates to them as another narrative of personal/political coming of age and national emergence.

b) Cisse's Genesis (Mali) concerns nation-forming myths, Sembene's Mandabi (Senegal) concerns modern bureaucracy and economics in a barely "post" colonial situation, while Maldoror's Sam bizanga (Guadelupe/Congo/Angola) presents a woman's perspective on liberation struggles.

c) Kiss of the Spider Woman pairs well with The Official Story because of their overlapping and yet different treatment of a period of extreme internal repression in Argentine history.

Weeks 10-12: Special interest films. Selections from Middle East and North African cinemas for an Israeli offering, with a more local emphasis for a US offering.

a) Youssef Chaheeds Alexandria Why? (Egypt) and Mouffida Tiatli's Silences of the Palace juxtapose panoramic and domestic representations. Bertochelli's Ramparts of Clay (Algeria/France) supplements them with its focus on a Berber woman and village uprising. All stress historic contexts and a move towards modern statehood. (Ditto The Scent of Green Papaya, which explores class and gender in the domestic sphere at the twilight of French colonialism in Viemam.)

b) Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The Peddler and Jafar Panahi's The Circle reveal contrasting renditions of Iranian realities. While they address internal matters, not colonizing influences, their inward perspective speaks obliquely to Iran's self-definition in relation to local and external historic forces. Like The Circle, Yilmaz Gunei's Yol (Turkey) also critiques internal repression as part of modern nation formation in his country.

c) Two Lebanese films to consider are Ziad Doueiri's West Beirut and Jocelyne Saab's Once Upon a Time in Beirut.

Weeks 13-14: Diasporic Cinemas. This challenge to a stable notion of "third world" reviews the founding definition of "third world" film within local and global contexts. It can also be blended into the preceding "special interest" section or otherwise reorganized to allow for a fuller exploration of the third world presence within the first world, and the role exilic cinemas play in the construction of contemporary globalism. This emphasis may be of special significance to first world students.

Note: Several films listed above (eg. Sambizanga, Ramparts of Clay, and The Battle of Algiers) already brought up questions about transnational co-productions and the notion of a "pure" third world film. The very concept of a "third world" is challenged by diasporic films such as Med Hondo's Soleil O (France), work by the Sankofa Collective (Afro-Caribbean/UK), Negosia Onwurah's The Body Beautiful (UK/Nigeria), and Frances NegronMuntana's Brincando El Caro (US/Puerto Rico). These films extend the notion of economic and often race-based dispossession from the third into the first world. Haile Gerima's Harvest, 3000 Years (Ethiopia/USA) and Raul Peck's Lumumba (Haiti/Congo/Belgium) are two examples of films which benefit from first world support, made by diasporic directors, about third world subject matter. Formally experimental within the latest post-modern definitions of "high art," Mona Hatoum's Measures of Distance (Lebanon/UK), Tracy Moffat's Night Cries (Australia), Shirin Neshat's videos (Iran/ Morocco /US), and Issac Julien's Looking for Langston illustrate ways exilic film and video can cross over from its third world pigeonhole into the establishment.

NOTES:

(1.) Arjun Appadurai distinguishes usefully between globalization from below, which relies on "strategies, visions, and horizons for globalization on behalf of the poor," and the globalization from above which has drawn protest and debate. "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination." Public Culture 30 (Winter 2000); Globalization pp. 1-19. The Family of Man was published in 1955.

(2.) Public Culture, Globalization [above], pp. 145-171.

(3.) More neutral terms like "transnational" and "cosmopolitan" similarly indicate this flow of populations. Both grant such populations a measure of equality and a political claim to social justice, but also thereby blur the contours of their specific oppressions and the struggles these oppressions predict. "Global" assumes a removed point of view, as if from above; "transnational" takes the nation-state as its point of departure; "cosmopolitan" focuses on immediate situations on the ground.

(4.) Armatya Sen. Development as Freedom. New York Knopf, 1999.

Linda Dittmar teaches English and Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts--Boston. She is co-editor of From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film (Rutgers 1990) and Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism (Minnesota 1994). She is a member of the Radical. Teacher editorial group.