Paula Amad  (University of Iowa)
Return of the gaze: Refusing the gift of post-colonial theory to early cinema

Although it is well known that postcolonial studies has been dominated by a literary and linguistic bias, the field has also had a profound and contested impact upon the broader field of visual culture. Central to the legacy of postcolonial studies in the diverse disciplines focused on visual culture has been a reinvestigation (often routed through Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish) of the role of a number of visual forms (photography, postcards, cinema) and sites (World Fairs and Colonial Expositions) that contributed to the vexed visual condition of the colonial field. In the past decade, developing out of the renaissance in the history of silent cinema, significant studies of the interconnections between colonialism and film have deservedly taken center stage. These works each emphasize different dimensions to the colonialism-cinema nexus, ranging from the belief that all colonial cinema presents a straightforward propagandistic function (David Slavin) or contains traces of a disruptive "third eye" (Fatimah Tobing Rony), to an approach resting on a reflection of the complex negotiations between science and spectacle, the colonizer and the colonized (Rachel Griffiths). Beyond their differences, what interests me in this papers is how these (and other) studies display a repeated trope that rests on the authors' ethical intent to 'return the gaze' trapped within modernity's visual archive.

This paper seeks to question from both a historical and theoretical perspective the seemingly automatic attraction of this strategy of 'visual riposte' within studies of early cinema inflected by the legacy of postcolonial studies. I begin the paper by tracing the multifaceted intellectual history of this belief in the radical capacities of returning the gaze within the work of Homi Bhabha (figured in his interest in the "process by which the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined"), Malek Alloula (figured in his intention to 'return' the postcard to its 'sender') and others. I then turn to an overview of the different modes in which a 'return of the gaze' strategy appears in a range of studies dealing with early cinema's undeniable saturation with the evidence of colonial ideology. Finally, with the intention of moving beyond or at least articulating the limits of the 'return of the gaze' move (without returning to an understanding of cinema as an airtight apparatus of oppression), I will investigate a body of pioneering 'ethnographic' style films made in Dahomey (Benin) in the early 1930s by the Catholic Missionary Père Aupiais. Given that the films and Aupiais' unorthodox take on Dahomeyan vodoun rituals resulted in near excommunication, this footage presents a challenging example for testing the limits of the 'return of the gaze' thesis.