Malian writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar, and art historian, Diawara is the Director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs at New York University. As a professor, much of his research has been in the field of Black cultural studies, though his work has differed from the traditional approach formulated in Britain in the early 1980s.
Manthia Diawara
(1953 - )
Along with other notable recent scholars, Diawara has sought to incorporate consideration of the material conditions of African Americans to provide a broader, reflexive context for the study of African diasopric culture. An aspect of this formulation has been the privileging of "blackness" in all its possible forms rather than as relevant to a single, perhaps monolithic definition of black culture.
Diawara has contributed significantly to the study of black film. Film narrative is key for spectatorship for Diawara. In his view, the spectator is created through the ideological and formal mechanics of the film narrative (and its process of creation). Viewers (spectators) who will watch the film have, in a sense, already been created by it, thereby imposing an identity already invented for the viewer.
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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Race and Postcolonialism stand as the foundations for misrepresentation of African Americans in cinema, the resistant spectator, and deteritorialization.
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Blacks in Classic Hollywood are viewed as a nuisance, and they (blacks) only exist for white comfort.
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Black independent film has been largely ignored by Hollywood because of its limited appeal to white audiences, and its decision to put black lives onscreen and highlight concerns that arise from living in black communities.
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Hollywood portrayal of black experiences tends to either fail to recognize, side-step, or hide real issues, and maintains a narrative that supports whites in power.
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Discriminatory features of black film in Classic Hollywood are primarily tied to time and space, causing problems with identification and spectatorship.
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Blaxploitation characters tend to be stagnant in characterization and narrative.
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Realism in black film requires characters to progress within the narrative frame and with the story.
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Explores how and why spectators respond to the film viewing experience, and the impact of film construction on people, using micro and macro features and the degree to which all spectators respond in the same way.
RELATED STUDY TERMS
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Spectatorship -- looks not at how viewers respond to a film statistically and scientifically, but instead at how the viewer is involved, implicated and engaged in the viewing experience.
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Resistant spectatorship -- The spectator comprehends the intended message but derives their own meaning from the film by defying dominant cultural values as they are presented onscreen.
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Deterritorialization -- The severance of social, political, or cultural practices from their native places and populations.
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Distanciation – refers to the stepping back or distancing of the observer from an object of scrutiny. Distanciation or estrangement allows for or facilitates a critical attitude.
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Self-reflexivity – refers to circular relationships between cause and effect as an act of self-reference.
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Focalizer – the character from whose point of view the story is told.
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Focalisation – term coined by French narrative theorist Gerard Genette. Refers to perspective through which a narrative is presented.
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External focalization – the narrator says less than the character knows, this provides for an “objective” or “behaviorist” narrative.
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Internal focalization – takes place when narrative events or thoughts are mediated through the point of view of the focalizer.
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Subjectivation -- refers to the construction of the individual subject; often used in critical theory, sometimes with Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation.