When the Moon Waxes Red : Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics

In this new collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, award-winning film-maker 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 Minh-ha examines Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology. In one essay, taken from ideas raised earlier by Zora Neale Hurston, she 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 R" with "depth R", while "inner R" 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 multi-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh Minh-Ha describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already". This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics.