Decolonizing Visual Anthropology: Locating Transnational Diasporic Queers-of-Color Voices in Ethnographic Cinema

Reprinted with permission from American Anthropologist Vol. 123, No. 1 (March 2021)

Abstract

The American ethnographic film canon remains dominated by straight white men. As anthropology takes on the task of confronting the riddle of white supremacy, this is a good time to consider who remains missing from popular taxonomies of anthropological cinema and to bring them into the canon. Unsurprisingly, the voices of immigrant diasporic queers of color are absent. By revisiting the ethnographic cinema of four such filmmakers – Marlon Riggs, Pratibha Parmar, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Richard Fung – I call for an expansion of existing histories and a renewed focus on queers-of-color erasure. Their rigorous, sensory filmmaking challenges orthodox definitions of visual anthropology. Working around the same time that some of the most canonical ethnographic films were released, these filmmakers anticipated current discussions of affect and autoethnography. Their work offers unique and productive insights into our understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and power relations. Questioning the limits of what counts as “documentary,” these filmmakers rethink colonial frameworks of ethnography itself. Confronting the patriarchal white supremacy of anthropology demands attention to these important works. [ethnographic film, visual anthropology, transnational, diaspora, queers of color]

The American ethnographic film canon remains dominated by straight white men. No doubt, these early pioneers of visual anthropology – Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, John Marshall, and Timothy Ash – made significant contributions to the discipline and the usefulness of film in “picturing” culture. ¹ Deservedly, their films enjoy routine veneration at ethnographic film festivals, in academic conferences, and within visual anthropology curriculums. However, following anthropology’s recent attempts at ontological introspection with a genuine interest in confronting systemic racial inequities, this might be a good time to take stock of visual anthropology’s short history to consider who remains excluded from popular taxonomies of ethnographic cinema. How do we begin to address the “riddle” of patriarchal white supremacy in visual anthropology? ²

Unsurprisingly, the voices and perspectives left out often belong to immigrant and diasporic queers-of-color, like those I discuss here. Many of these filmmakers also made their ethnographic films during the same time when some of the most canonical films were released. By revisiting films from Marlon Riggs, Pratibha Parmar, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Richard Fung, I call for a much-needed expansion of existing boundaries of ethnographic film and visual anthropology. Building on recent critiques of the heteronormative patriarchal whiteness of anthropology, I ask: What does inclusion look like for ethnographers of color, for immigrants, for queers-of-color, for people like me? ³

The “reflexive turn” in anthropological writing, encouraged by the “writing culture” debates, ⁴ along with the “writing against culture” ⁵ and “women writing culture” critiques, ⁶ led to a sea change in how ethnographies are written and who is represented. ⁷ However, parallel postmodern and postcolonial critiques in cinematic ethnographies seem to have largely been overlooked. Documentary and visual anthropology textbooks rarely begin with films by pioneering feminist filmmakers like Chick Strand, Barbara Myerhoff, Melissa Llewelyn-Davies, and Sarah Elder. Women documentarians like Frances H. Flaherty, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead and Osa Johnson have largely been excluded from disciplinary histories, their significant contributions overlooked or minimized while their male counterparts are celebrated as “visionaries” and “auteurs.” ⁸ Meanwhile queers, and ethnographers of color are often relegated to provincial sections on “gender issues” and/or “identity issues.” Critiques authored by transnational feminist and Indigenous filmmakers like Trinh T. Minh-ha, Victor Masayesva Jr., and Coco Fusco remain largely absent from disciplinary catalogues and film curricula. ⁹ These critiques were authored from the margins and were a source of much consternation when they first appeared. Perhaps because of this, their authors are often dismissed for “lacking sufficient training or knowledge” in the field of anthropology or sidelined because they did not have the adequate academic pedigree. ¹⁰

This erasure is further enabled by the lack of racial diversity in the makeup of film festival juries, leadership boards, selection committees of funding organizations, and among the faculty that make up prominent programs in the field. Maintaining the veneer of racial liberalism by paying lip service to “diversity” and “inclusion,” elite institutions rarely question the systemic inequalities that keep Black and Brown scholars, immigrants, and queers-of-color from accessing opportunities available to our white colleagues. Ethnographic film cannot flourish under these conditions. What might a more inclusive history and pedagogy of ethnographic and documentary film look like if it was not subjected to such boundary-policing and exclusionary practices?

I first noticed this glaring absence of transnational diasporic and queers-of-color perspectives from popular taxonomies of anthropological cinema two decades ago while in college studying visual anthropology at San Francisco State University. Twenty years later, as an instructor of ethnographic film, I often find myself scrambling to fill this void in representation of Black, Brown, queer, and diasporic voices and perspectives. When developing curriculums, curating film festivals, and offering peer review feedback, I make a sincere effort to address this absence. Unfortunately, like many other queers-of-color scholars, I feel pretty powerless when confronted with disciplinary hegemonies and regimes of power that work to sustain existing racial and gender hierarchies. ¹¹ As Junaid Rana recently pointed out, the history of anthropology is steeped in global white supremacy, Enlightenment values, and Christian theology. Visual anthropology is not immune to this affliction. ¹²

Elsewhere, my colleagues and I have advocated for an ontological shift towards “multimodality,” implicit within which is the need for doing away with some of these boundaries altogether and thereby inviting interdisciplinary engagements and intersectional mediations on the themes we explore through a variety of media, not just film. ¹³ This seems like a fitting moment to build on that momentum, rethinking the history and teaching of ethnographic cinema. This rethinking is also aligned with efforts by Black feminist anthropologists, in particular, to decolonize the discipline at large ¹⁴ and calls for imagining an actively antiracist anthropology. ¹⁵ I also build on a recent call to action by the Cite Black Women collective that challenges white gatekeeping in scholarly journals, disciplinary societies, and elite institutions. ¹⁶ Questioning the hegemony of whiteness and heteropatriarchy within ethnographic film and visual anthropology echoes the recent calls to “recognize and interrogate how the discipline of anthropology participates in practices and ideologies of white supremacy,” as well as broader societal conversations we are currently engaged in on the subject of racial justice along with LGBTQI+ and Indigenous rights. ¹⁷ Being included in the canon means making a commitment to continuing investment in and the accessibility of films made by nonwhite, non-straight male filmmakers as well as highlighting the points of view they embody.

Simultaneously, we must also re-evaluate how inclusion in the canon is imagined and enacted. How long does a film have to remain in circulation for it to be considered canonical? What are the appropriate venues in which it must screen? What are the kinds of recognitions and awards it must acquire? Answers to these questions vary depending on the biography and the academic pedigree of the filmmaker. Unlike many of the ethnographic filmmakers we currently idolize, Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung do not come from privilege. They are not independently wealthy. They do not have affiliations with Ivy League universities. When they were starting out, they lacked the necessary resources or institutional support to finance their research and filmmaking endeavors. Instead, they belong to historically disenfranchised communities whose life experiences directly inform their approach to storytelling. Despite lacking the cultural capital needed to become as notorious as their straight white male counterparts, their films have received critical acclaim within gender studies, ethnic studies, and performance studies.

Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung are exceptional because they insist upon engaging in rigorous interrogations of the power dynamics that are at play when attending to differences along gender, race, class, and sexuality and how these hierarchies inform constructions of the “Other” in ethnographic representation. ¹⁸ Whether or not they have formal training in anthropology, I insist that these filmmakers’ work constitutes scholarship. Their stance goes beyond the racial liberalism of anthropology and the humanities more broadly that denounces racism while failing to call out white supremacy. ¹⁹ Instead, following in the footsteps of pioneering renegade anthropologists like Zora Neale Hurston, these filmmakers are race (and gender) rebels, forcing us to confront more unsettling truths about patriarchal white supremacy and our complicity in its maintenance. Nearly three decades after they were initially registered, these postcolonial, postmodern, and transnational critiques of popular cultural representations of the “Other” remain salient and productive. They serve as touchstones, helping the next generation of ethnographic filmmakers, myself included, to navigate the murky terrains of cultural representation in ways that must remain necessary if ethnographic film is to maintain its relevance, much less decolonize itself.

Subverting the Colonial/Racialized Gaze

One of the most jarring memories of my time in college includes the first instance I encountered Forest of Bliss (1986),Gardner’s sensorial film about life on the banks of the Ganges River (in the holy city of Varanasi, India), where Hindus go to cremate their dead. The film opens with a grotesque scene as we watch a pack of dogs brutally tear into another defenseless dog, followed by a quote from the Hindu Vedas (translation attributed to W.B. Yeats): “Everything in the world is eater or eaten, the seed is food and the fire is eater.” What follows is a ninety-minute cinema vérité-style exposition of deeply intimate moments in the daily lives of these “exotic” Indians as they practice their “strange” customs. We see women dressed in brightly colored saris and saffron-clad holy men loudly chanting in an alien language and performing peculiar religious rituals. We see cows wandering down narrow, filthy lanes of this ancient city, dodging clusters of men carrying dead bodies as part of funeral processions making their way toward the holy river. Shots of firewood being unloaded onto the riverbanks are intercut with funeral pyres burning in the distance and an occasional shot of a human corpse floating in the water nearby. Aside from the initial quote, the film is devoid of any context, history, or translation. Authored for Western audiences, Gardner’s film aligns with the exhibitionist style “exotic reportage” or “travelogue” documentaries first popularized by Robert Flaherty, the explorer-cum-filmmaker from the 1920s often credited with having invented the genre of documentary film. ²⁰ Gardner’s refusal to offer context for these important rituals and religious practices personifies the “theological problem of white supremacy” within anthropology, which renders non-Christian religious practices, and by extension its practitioners, as “racial objects” to be salvaged and gawked at but not be contextualized and understood. ²¹

While my fellow students sat transfixed by the visual splendor of the film, seduced by exotic images and sounds of this faraway place, I cringed the entire ninety minutes, knowing that as the only Indian in this largely white classroom, I would have to offer some explanation for what they were watching on-screen. As the film ended, I started dreading the inevitable question: “Is this what India is like?” I resented Gardner for fetishizing my culture and my people and for placing me, a nineteen-year-old college student and a recent immigrant from India, in the awkward position of having to contextualize his Orientalist depictions for a room full of American students who could barely locate Varanasi on the map.

Over the last twenty years, I have come to appreciate the “ethnographic value” of Forest of Bliss,which went on to define the “sensory” or “observational” genre of ethnographic filmmaking. ²² This knowledge does not negate the kinds of traumas that are “produced and triggered by seeing these images,” even when, as Yarimar Bonilla and Deborah Thomas note, they might be put out with “a clear political intent.” ²³ I have even started showing it in my visual anthropology courses, albeit with a caveat about how Gardner might have violated the privacy and trust of his subjects, for which he was never fully held accountable. As a straight, white, and upper-class male filmmaker associated with an influential academic institution, it is likely that such accountability was never requested or required of him. ²⁴ I agree with Jay Ruby that Gardner might have acted unethically by refusing to provide any context for some of the sensational sequences, not subtitling the limited dialogues captured by his camera, and, more importantly, not including the voices of his interlocutors and thereby denying them any agency whatsoever. ²⁵ I remain skeptical of sensory ethnographic filmmaking as an enterprise that encourages ethically ambiguous practices, allowing (mostly white) ethnographers to skirt important issues related to translation, representation, authorship, accountability and reflexivity. More recently, Paul Henley ²⁶ has echoed similar concerns in his critique of Gardner’s films, and of similar sensory ethnographies whose lineage can be mapped back to Forrest of Bliss, for offering a “cinematic experience that [is] not anchored in the ideas and relations of the subjects but rather give[s] expression to the artistic and philosophical concerns of the film-maker.” ²⁷ Forest of Bliss has birthed an entire cottage industry of sensory and observational films, often featuring non-Christian rituals and religious practices that render their subjects as objects of a racialized gaze. ²⁸ Lacking depth and substance, Henley notes that in several of these films the “non-dialogical and arguably objectifying scrutiny of their human subjects [remain] at odds with contemporary ethnographic practice.” ²⁹ Even sensory and observational films made by filmmakers of color obscure gender, class, and caste hierarchies in troubling ways. ³⁰ Visually seductive sensory films like Forest of Bliss capture the zeitgeist of ethnographic cinema, no doubt in part due to the film’s continued canonization within disciplinary histories.

Released around the same time as Forest of Bliss,the four films I discuss in this article are largely absent from conversations about ethnographic cinema. These films, made by transnational diasporic queers-of-color filmmakers, differ in substance and style in important ways. Unlike Gardner and his contemporaries, who engage with their interlocutors largely through the camera lens – as outsiders peeping voyeuristically into their subjects’ lives – Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung are positioned at the very center of their stories and communities. Whereas “conventional” ethnographic films made by white ethnographers continue to deploy some variation on voice-of-God-style narration to render unfamiliar cultural practices and knowledge intelligible for their audiences, Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung use reflexive/autoethnographic strategies to actively subvert this bifurcation of the observer and the observed that has defined anthropology for a century. Autoethnography allows for self-empowerment by, as José Muñoz notes, “seek(ing) to disrupt the hierarchical economy of colonial images and representations by making visible the presence of the subaltern energies and urgencies.” ³¹ In doing so, these filmmakers also made invaluable contributions to the genre of autobiographical documentary in the 1980s, a moment when the “political” and the “personal” became deeply intertwined. ³²

I revisit four noteworthy films – Tongues Untied (1989), Khush (1991), Brincando El Charco (1994), and Orientations (1986), directed by Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung, respectively – and argue that they demand our renewed attention and deserve canonical status. Released nearly thirty years ago, most of these films have been left out of disciplinary histories. Unlike Forest of Bliss, which left me feeling embarrassed of my own past, Riggs’s, Parmar’s, Negrón-Muntaner’s, and Fung’s films empowered me. I did not see them in my visual anthropology classroom, encountering them instead in my ethnic studies and queer studies courses. They reflected my experience as a young queer South Asian immigrant. They made me feel seen and understood. The implications of this work are deeply important for ethnographic filmmaking and visual anthropology as a discipline. Through nuanced depictions that contain multitudes, and by forcing us to confront stereotypes of the “Other,” these filmmakers compel their audiences to engage in ethical, responsible, and compassionate storytelling practices that, above all else, give voice and agency to those who are routinely silenced by patriarchal white supremacy.

Tongues Untied

Marlon Riggs’s groundbreaking film Tongues Untied,about being a gay Black man in the United States in the 1980s, is different from other documentaries that explore the intersections of race, sexuality, and belonging. The film offers us a very intimate and autobiographical account of Riggs’s own personal journey, while also chronicling the experiences of his peers within this doubly marginalized community. Riggs’s aesthetic approach can be characterized by his utter refusal to provide his audiences with a conclusive sense of what it is like to be him, a gay Black man living under the specter of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Rather, by thoughtfully curating a series of poetic monologues and performances intercut with historical and contemporary images from Black and gay cultures, Riggs provides us with an affective and emotive experience of lives lived on the margins. The pulsating rhythm of a beating heart that haunts us throughout the film, along with the dark, unlit cavernous backdrop against which Riggs and his interlocutors address the camera, gives Tongues Untied an ethereal quality. Their stories feel untethered from the progressivist narratives of freedom, equality, and multiculturalism that dominated women’s and gay liberation movements in the 1970s and 1980s. ³³

For Riggs, and other gay men of color (myself included), coming out fell short of delivering on its promise of liberation from discrimination and oppression. We left behind our ethnic or diasporic communities in search of acceptance. Within the predominantly white gay and lesbian communities in urban ghettos, we were confronted with marginalization and objectification because of our ethnicity or skin color. Riggs’s critique of the gay liberation movement goes beyond the lack of diversity and the stereotyping of queers-of-color to call out the gay community for its unbridled white supremacy. Tongues Untied reveals that members of the predominantly white gay and lesbian communities were often complicit in reproducing racialized subjugation. Their fight for liberal sexual politics refused to recognize racism as an issue that concerned their community and struggle for equality. Tongues Untied tried to initiate the kinds of genuine conversations we are having today within anthropology and in society at large regarding systemic racial inequities.

Riggs grew up in Hephzibah, Georgia, and moved to San Francisco to seek refuge from the homophobia and racism he endured in his hometown. In a pivotal moment in Tongues Untied, we witness Riggs’s disenchantment with the white gay world he had entered. Staring directly into the camera, Riggs confesses: “Searching, I discovered something I didn’t expect. Something decades of determined assimilation could not blind me to. In this great gay mecca, I was an invisible man. I had no shadow, no substance, no place, no history, no reflection. I was an alien unseen, and seen unwanted. Here as in Hephzibah, I was a nigger, still.”

This powerful and intimate confession is just as salient today as when I heard it the first time I saw Tongues Untied. Riggs unflinchingly shows us that queers-of-color – and I would add queer immigrants – are not fully accepted in our “home” communities from which we came nor fully welcomed in the predominantly white sexual communities where we often end up. Despite decades of advancement in LGBTQIA+ rights, as queers-of-color (who, like everyone else seek unconditional love and acceptance), we find ourselves perennially treated as second-class citizens.

Tongues Untied begins by conceptualizing the gay Black male body as an abject site onto which racial and homophobic violence is perpetrated. In public, Riggs’s Black body and the bodies of his interlocutors mark them as undesirable and threatening as they navigate a gay male world inhabited largely by muscular white bodies. Inwardly, their bodies serve as repositories for the hurt and anger from a lifetime of feeling rejected. Childhood slurs like “punk,” “faggot,” and “Uncle Tom” inflict wounds that never heal; adding to the pain is the ever-present specter of gay-bashing and police brutality. Being made the butt of a cruel joke by a Black comedian on television, being denied entry to the latest gay nightclub in the Castro (in San Francisco), being unacknowledged and rendered invisible by his fellow gay Black men with whom one ought to be able to share the burden of feeling marginalized, and other such moments of so-called micro-aggressions depicted in Tongues Untied stir up the collective pain and hurt stored within our bodies that we had spent our whole lives suppressing. Yet, as we discover later in the film, the same body is equally capable of offering and experiencing desire. It has the power to cultivate longing, intimacy, and even joy.

Like the ill-fitted identity categories we end up occupying after coming out, our memories of the past are just as complicated and unresolved. They do not fit neatly into conventional narratives of progress. For Riggs and his interlocutors, their sexual desires resulted in their exile from their ethnic communities: “I cannot go home as who I am.” Yet home is also remembered fondly as a site where Riggs grew into his queer selfhood – growing up in Georgia, where he fell captive to the “seduction by a white boy from Tennessee.” The past and present routinely intersect throughout the film. Archival footage of white police officers assaulting Black men and women with batons is intercut with scenes of a gay-bashing after dusk in a secluded park, lit only by a dim streetlight. Iconic images of Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglass, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr., along with footage from the protest marches for racial equality from 1965, are juxtaposed against footage of gay Black men marching proudly in gay pride parades down Christopher Street in New York City and Market Street in San Francisco in the 1980s.

“Anthropology,” as repurposed by Riggs, is an “unending search for what is utterly precious.” Despite the pain and anger that characterize Riggs’s experience of being gay and Black, Tongues Untied is ultimately a celebration of his community’s refusal to be defined by their marginalization. The harsh realities of homophobia and racism are interlaced with moments of love, affection, affirmation, and joy that queers-of-color have successfully cultivated, often on the margins of society. The bleaker moments are punctured by lighthearted and lyrical segments, like “Lessons in Snap!thology,” in which Riggs and his interlocutors offer the audience a brief entry into their shared language of resistance (Figure 1).

Tongues Untied also features incredibly tender moments of belonging, where we witness Riggs and his interlocutors enjoying a meal together, cultivating their own rituals of dance and movement, and teaching each other how to vogue at house balls. “I chose this tribe of warriors and outlaws,” one of Riggs’s interlocutor declares. It is here, within their chosen “tribes,” that they realized that they are “worth wanting, loving each other.” This sense of Black queer diaspora offers a site of creative resistance, argues Jafari Allen, “that inhering in these, small, intimate, troubled spaces is a powerful and virtually unexplored ground for political possibilities.” ³⁴ Riggs’s film “works towards not only transgressing but transcending and finally transforming hegemonies of global capital, the state, and of bourgeois, limited, and limiting notions of gender, sexuality, and Blackness.” ³⁵ Tongues Untied ends with a radical and ultimately hopeful anthem for queer Black liberation: “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act!”

Khush

The title of Pratibha Parmar’s film Khush translates to “happy” or “ecstatic.” In Hindi, “khush” is also a euphemism for “queer” or “gay.” Khush opens with a shot of a young South Asian woman gleefully declaring to the camera, “The best thing for me about being a lesbian is total erotic satisfaction, and endless possibilities!” This joyous declaration of sexual agency sets the emotional tone for the rest of the film, which chronicles the experiences of queer South Asians living in diaspora and in India – places where until recently their sexual desires remained criminalized by colonial-era sodomy laws. ³⁶ Parmar goes on to pose this question to others: “What do you enjoy most about being khush?” Themes of sexual agency and individual freedom along with sense of belonging to a community of fellow queers and feminist South Asians emerge again and again. Parmar’s portrayal of queer South Asians in diaspora is one that confers them with a sense of pride, dignity, and shared belonging. While the film explores familiar issues related to homophobia and familial rejection that queer South Asian confront in diaspora, along with racism and lack of viability in gay and lesbian communities, Parmar refuses to cast her interlocutors as helpless victims of such oppression and erasure. They are depicted as authors of their own narratives, having persevered despite their marginalization by heterosexual patriarchy and white colonial supremacy. For a queer immigrant like myself, who grew up in a conservative Sikh family and endured violently homophobic high school culture in suburban California in the late 1990s, Khush was a godsend. I fell in love with this film. It was one of the only two films (that I was aware of) to celebrate queer desire among South Asians, making me feel okay about who I am for the very first time. ³⁷

Parmar weaves together conventional interviews with queer South Asians from all over the world with a performative sequence of two elegantly dressed women navigating a room full of projections to finally discover each other’s presence and embrace. We return to this couple time and time again as we witness them sharing tender and sensual moments. Their intimacy is ruptured by archival footage from mainstream Indian cinema, projected in the background, where women’s bodies adorned in ornate costumes are made to perform for a primarily male objectifying and Orientalizing gaze. As one of Parmar’s interlocutors laments, within mainstream Western cultural imagination, queer South Asians are frequently cast as a “desirable Oriental, an exotic person to bed with, and not recognized as a human being.” This critique is aimed particularly at the largely white gay liberation movement for erasing our histories of colonial and racial subjugation.

Recalling the traumatic memories of confronting pervasive racism while growing up in Canada in the 1970s, one of Parmar’s interlocutors remembers, “The only way to survive was to play it as straight as possible, and play it as white as possible, and just try to fit in as much as possible.” Coming out as queer brought the risk of being isolated from one’s diasporic community members who would have otherwise been allies in the struggle against racism. For most South Asians featured in Khush, the cultivation of queer/khush diasporic communities, which this film highlights andcelebrates, has been an important feature in their journeys to overcoming that sense of isolation that queer South Asians frequently experience upon coming out. Like Tongues Untied, Khush shows how queers-of-color reconcile what previously seemed to be irreconcilable aspects of their ethnic, sexual, and political selves. A similar sense of celebration is captured within a sequence filmed inside of a dance club, interspersed throughout the film, featuring queer South Asians dancing Bhangra, a North Indian folk dance ubiquitous for its ritualized enactments of heterosexual masculinity and patriarchal descent. ³⁸ This queer reclamation of Bhangra and other popular cultural forms, including Bollywood, serves as yet another declaration of resistance against the status quo. It represents our refusal to be excluded from our national narratives and our insistence on being recognized as part of the diasporic cultural milieu. ³⁹

Outsiders tend to narrate experiences of diasporic communities through a linear, progressivist, before-and-after framework of transnational migration. In contrast, Khush shifts seamlessly between India, the United Kingdom, and Canada, disrupting this hegemonic tendency and reflecting the lives of Parmar’s interlocutors, whose experience is one of inhabiting multiple worlds concurrently. Parmar’s conceptual approach to filmmaking and narrating the experiences of her community actively works against existing colonial knowledge and Orientalizing representations of South Asians, embodying the critical and disruptive ethos of postcolonial, transnational, feminist, queers-of-color storytelling. ⁴⁰

Brincando El Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican

In Brincando El Charco, Puerto Rican American filmmaker and anthropologist Frances Negrón-Muntaner employs a very different approach to ethnographic storytelling than Riggs and Parmar. Yet the film exists in conversation with Tongues Untied and Khush, building on and adding to the aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities that characterize the transnational diasporic queers-of-color experience on film. Weaving together snippets from diasporic cultural performances, a series of intimate autobiographical accounts, and poetic monologues on identity and belonging, the film embodies a similar revolutionary zeal as Tongues Untied. Intercut with carefully choreographed performances of queerness is a series of conventional interviews with queer Puerto Ricans living in diaspora in a style evocative of Khush. Archival footage is used to recall memories of home and nostalgia for the homeland. The coldness and starkness of New York and Philadelphia winters are juxtaposed against sunny, idyllic, and heartwarming scenes of life on the island. As the primary narrator of her film, Negrón-Muntaner assumes a fictional persona of Claudia Marin, a light-skinned Puerto Rican lesbian photographer negotiating her diasporic cultural identity with her queer sexuality, searching for a space that can accommodate both. Drawing upon established ethnofiction traditions, ⁴¹ Negrón-Muntaner offers us a composite of queer Puerto Rican experience in the United States in the 1980s through Claudia’s character. This unconventional approach allows Negrón-Muntaner, in her character Claudia’s words, “another way of narrating myself,” to tell her story on her own terms.

Unraveling the often-complicated linkages between the island and the diaspora, one segment in Brincando El Charco features images of the Puerto Rican flag fading into images of the US flag. Through a series of montages, Negrón-Muntaner repeatedly reminds us of the legacy of US colonialism and imperialism on the island and globally. One such powerful moment includes names and dates of all of the countries that the US military has invaded and bombed since World War II. These scenes of US imperialism are interspersed with images of immigrant and refugee communities that have found themselves living in urban neighborhoods of US cities along the East Coast, trying to rebuild their lives. Nearly a quarter-century after its release, Brincando El Charco remains relevant for calling out the US government’s racialized attitudes and indifference towards Puerto Rico’s inhabitants, as most recently reflected in the woefully inadequate disaster response to Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island in 2017.

Brincando El Charco also offers historical context for how US policies plundered the Puerto Rican economy, leading to waves of subsequent migrations to the mainland. These policies included rapid industrialization of the island’s economy in the 1950s, which caused mass unemployment and an exodus of Puerto Ricans immigrants to major US cities seeking economic opportunities. We learn about the experiences of the newly arriving Puerto Rican immigrants in the aftermath of Operation Bootstrap, uncertain about their place within the established racial and social hierarchies in places like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. The film also explores how newly arriving Puerto Rican immigrants positioned themselves vis-à-vis the Black, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx communities in a racially diverse neighborhood like Harlem, a process fraught with tension. These moments offer unique insights into the politics of racial belonging within Brown and Black communities that are rarely seen as heterogenous by white Americans. The pursuit of the elusive American Dream, along with the struggles for economic justice and histories of slavery, at times unites different communities of color, while tensions and contradictions related to racial identity and white superiority remain unresolved.

The politics of race and the ways one is racially interpellated, often based on skin color, are reoccurring themes within Negrón-Muntaner’s film. We hear one gay Puerto Rican activist confess: “There’s no melting pot for us! It’s only for whites. Even if Puerto Ricans say they are Americans, they’re not going to be considered that way. Blacks are Blacks. And if they come claiming they’re American, they’re still considered Black.”

Claudia’s own (light) skin color seems to position her as privileged in relationship to her interlocutors, calling into question her claim to Puerto Rican heritage and belonging within the diasporic community. “White is a relative, [and] I am a long-lost distant cousin,” recites Claudia, reflecting on how the racial ambiguity of her skin calls out the precariousness of our investment in supposedly fixed racial categories. “I am a surface where mestizo diaspora displays one of their many faces,” she declares. Yet Negrón-Muntaner’s interlocutors are not devoid of agency. In another moment of resistance, when the topic of racial identity dominates the discussion among a group of young queers-of-color over dinner, the same gay Puerto Rican activist declares, “I write ‘Other.’ Let them imagine what I am!”

Homophobic patriarchal violence, in Puerto Rico and in the diaspora, is a central force that shapes the experiences of queer Puerto Ricans like Negrón-Muntaner. The film opens with narration by a young gay Puerto Rican model who laments, “Puerto Rican people are raised to be homophobic,” as Claudia fixes the lens of her camera onto his petite body, rapidly clicking away while he shifts gracefully between poses, proudly performing his queer masculinity. The ease with which the two (the photographer and the model) interact suggests a level of trust and intimacy that enables the sharing of personal and often vulnerable revelations around sexuality and family. As we soon learn, Claudia’s experiences echo the model’s fears and disappointments of familial rejection rooted in Catholicism. Through a flashback, we learn about the abuse Claudia experienced at the hands of her conservative father upon coming out as queer, which precipitated her voluntary exile from her homeland. When Claudia hears the news of her father’s death, we witness her struggle with the decision to return to San Juan for his funeral.

A brief moment early in the film illustrates how the gay liberation movement failed to understand the struggle of queers-of-color against white supremacy. During an exchange between Claudia and her (middle-aged, white, gay male) magazine editor, he insists that her “concerns about colonialism,” are antithetical to the magazine’s initiative to increase the “visibility of gays and lesbians of color.” The editor suggests to Claudia that perhaps she should limit her exploration of these power dynamics to bondage and sexual role-play. He dismisses colonialism as being relevant to the visibility of gays and lesbians of color – while speaking directly to a queer-of-color woman whose presence in the United States is made possible by colonialism. By suggesting BDSM and role-play as a substitute for addressing colonial violence, he reinscribes the white supremacy she is seeking to confront. This incident shows how queers-of-color are routinely rendered as erotic objects within the predominantly white gay and lesbian cultural and sexual imagination, highlighting this dynamic as itself a type of colonialist oppression. We witness Claudia forge her own community of friends and fellow queer activists, many of whom are African American, Latinx, and Asian, and share similar struggles against racial and sexual subjugation. “Among us,” Claudia notes, “being uprooted is not the exception but the rule.” Just as for queers-of-color featured in Tongues Untied and Khush, the ballrooms and the gay discotheque are places closest to “feeling at home.”

The title Brincando El Charco also has a specific colloquial resonance. Among Puerto Ricans, it refers to “jumping the puddle,” referencing the movement of people and cultural practices between the island and the mainland. The expression characterizes the routine ongoing migrations and movements that define the experiences of Puerto Ricans in the United States. ⁴² While leaving home is never an easy decision, Puerto Rico’s status as a US colony has created pathways for islanders to access transnational migration, returning regularly to the island and the communities they left behind. Yet, as is the case with Riggs’s and Parmar’s interlocutors, for many queer Puerto Ricans like Claudia, the decision to leave home is not about looking for better economic opportunities, but rather is a matter of survival. They are often escaping a homeland contaminated by toxic homophobia, residue of colonialism across the Global South. Returning home, as we witness in the film’s final moments where a hesitant Claudia has to be persuaded by her girlfriend to board her flight to San Juan, is fraught with anxiety and dread.

Orientations and Re:Oreintations

The release of Richard Fung’s inspiring film Orientations, an intimate portrait of the lives of fourteen gay and lesbian Asian Canadians, pre-dates the release of Tongues Untied, Khush,and Brincando El Charco. Yet, I reserved its discussion until the end because it is even more meaningful when engaged alongside Fung’s follow-up documentary, Re:Orientations, in which he revisits his Orientations interlocutors three decades after its release. The two films serve as useful bookends of sorts when chronicling the experiences of transnational diasporic queer communities. Given the general absence of queer narratives from historical and documentary archives, particularly of queers-of-color, Fung’s films are among the few longitudinal accounts documenting the life histories of queers-of-color who have suffered and survived unimaginable losses and celebrated tremendous achievements.

Orientations opens with a shot of three men (one of them Fung himself) filming a performance artist named Lim Pei-Hsien, who moves gracefully across the hardwood floors of his studio wearing a white mask and ropes wrapped around his torso. As Lim studies his image in the mirrored wall, his voiceover explains the significance of the two objects. The rope signals racial oppression and colonial bondage. The white mask represents a colorless existence, resulting from being trapped inside the closet. Lim explains that his performance acquires an even deeper meaning when performed for queer audiences, where the mask represents the limitations of being Asian within predominantly white gay spaces. The removal of the mask signifies a reclamation of both identities, his Asianness alongside his queerness.

Even though coming out is central to the experiences of Fung’s interlocutors, the film explores different issues that informed queer Asian life in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. Echoing themes of racism explored in Tongues Untied,one young Asian man recalls his experience of entering a gay bar in San Francisco immediately after having witnessed a gay Black man being denied entry into the same bar. He wonders: What differentiates gay Asians from gay African Americans? With this unanswered question and the uncomfortable pause that follows, Fung goes on to explore how gay Asian men, particularly within the mainstream gay erotic imagination, are rendered as passive receptors for Orientalist desires and domination by white men. ⁴³ Gay Asian bodies are marked as the opposite of threatening when juxtaposed against bodies of gay Black men. Fung’s film chronicles the experiences of Asian men who actively resist such stereotypes and notions of desirability vis-à-vis these white-dominated paradigms of gay erotic fantasies. In a similar vein as Riggs, Parmar, and Negrón-Muntaner, Fung’s camera also explores the themes of multiplicity concerning identity, as we watch his interlocutors negotiate the different facets of their cultural and sexual identities. For queer Asians, as for other queers-of-color, a fully settled sense of belonging remains elusive. They exist within the hybrid cultures of diasporic queer communities fashioned out of different aspects of their current lives and their past experiences.

As a Chinese Trinidadian gay man living in Canada, Fung embodies the postcolonial cultural hybridity that thematically underscores his visual and written scholarship. In Fung’s films, notes José Muñoz, “hybridity helps one understand how queer lives are fragmented into various identity bits: some of them adjacent, some of them complementary, some of them antagonistic.” ⁴⁴ While coming out as gay signals an end to one kind of oppression – of their intimate desires – other forms of repressions remain unresolved. Police brutality, labor exploitation, patriarchal traditions, and the traumas of structural racism in Canadian history (settler colonialism, Japanese internment camps, the Komagata Maru incident) ⁴⁵ continue to shape their lives and define their identities. Nevertheless, queerness and hybridity in Fung’s films open up generative spaces where “identity’s fragmented nature is accepted and negotiated.” ⁴⁶ As the title powerfully implies, Orientations subverts the historical working of Orientalism by refusing to cast Asian bodies through the white gaze as racialized objects. ⁴⁷

Fung’s interlocutors convey a sense of exuberance that accompanies being able to vocalize their feelings and narrate their experiences on camera. Their narratives convey a sense of hope for a less-repressive future ushered in by the feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Orientations ends with another performance of “Reconnaissance” by Lim, the same piece that opens the film, yet this time Lim is seen performing on a stage in front of a large audience, under a spotlight. We see him slowly tear off the white mask. Untying the ropes constraining his torso, Lim glides gracefully across the stage, enthusiastically waving the gay liberation flag embossed with the inverted pink triangle.

Orientations was filmed in 1984 and released in 1986, just before the HIV/AIDS pandemic ravaged gay communities across North America. Lim Pei-Hsien’s graceful body is noticeably missing from Fung’s 2016 follow-up film, Re:Orientations. His absence lingers in the air as an unanswered question. Fifty minutes into Re:Orientations, our worst fears are confirmed. We watch Fung make his way through an AIDS memorial in search of Lim’s name. We learn that Lim had succumbed to the illness and died in 1992. Out of the fourteen queer Asians featured in the original film, Fung is only able to reconnect with seven. Three, including Lim, had passed away, while others were unavailable to participate in this follow-up effort. Unlike the original film, where Fung only briefly appears on-screen, in Re:Orientations Fung’s presence constitutes the central thread that connects the different narratives.

The trauma of the HIV/AIDS pandemic engulfs Re:Orientations in somber hues. Gone is the exuberance of youth and the excitement of what is yet to be discovered that makes Orientations such an exceptional ethnographic document of gay life before the HIV/AIDS pandemic. While the film could have focused on mourning who and what were lost over the last three decades, Re:Orientations centers the survival and perseverance of queers-of-color. The film narrates how the queer Asians across Canada mobilized community support structures to assist HIV/AIDS patients and deter further transmission, even in the absence of support from the state. As LGBTQIA+ communities steadily gained mainstream acceptance and equality, issues related to racism and xenophobia persist. Unlike in the original film, where Fung’s interlocutors were excited about joining the gay liberation movement, thirty years later most express feeling disenfranchised from mainstream gay culture. Instead, they now cherish their “outsider” status. In their narratives, they convey a deeper awareness and need for intersectional dialogues beyond gay liberation. Upon retrospection, Tony Souza, a South Asian man featured in both films, wisely insists on the importance of “understanding the structures that don’t allow [us] to have control over [our] lives.” Concerns around economic insecurity and the need for racial justice are now at the forefront, particularly as many enter retirement. Queers-of-color nowadays seem frustrated with the gay liberation movement morphing into a struggle for (hetero)sexual citizenship and homonormative belonging, or what Jasbir Puar refers to as “homonationalism.” ⁴⁸ For queers-of-color, and particularly queer immigrants, this investment in homonationalism is bound up with the mainstream gay community’s refusal to divest from patriarchal white supremacy. Many of us queers-of-color are still fighting liberation struggles against racism, neocolonialism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia, alongside homophobia.

Re:Orientations ends with yet another performance of “Reconnaissance” (originally performed by Lim), reprised here by Sze-Yang Ade-Lam, a young Toronto-based queer nonbinary Asian dancer, who renamed the piece “Shatter Whiteness.” As Sze-Yang’s body frees itself from the ropes constraining their naked torso and the ghostly white mask concealing their face, what emerges is a renewed sense of perseverance, continuity, celebration, and hope for the next generation of queers-of-color.

Expanding the Boundaries of Ethnographic Film Canon

Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung have profoundly shaped my approach to ethnographic storytelling. Where Forest of Bliss left me feeling like a racial object devoid of agency, Tongues Untied, Khush, Brincando El Charco,and Orientations allowed me to feel empowered, in part because of their refusal to endorse white liberal narratives of sexual and racial progress. Since encountering these visual texts, I have gone on to make my own ethnographic films, including Milind Soman Made Me Gay (2007), in which I directly draw on the autobiographic aesthetics and conceptual sensibilities of all four filmmakers to illustrate how transnational queer immigrants experience the violence of displacement on multiple fronts. ⁴⁹ Scarred by the trauma of exile (voluntary or imposed), queer immigrants have complicated relationships with our past and our memories of home. Echoing Stuart Hall, our identities are characterized, above all else, by discontinuities; “they are the names we give to the different ways in which we are positioned by and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.” ⁵⁰ As we traverse cultural and national boundaries in search of belonging, we are expected to downplay or “cover” the inconvenient aspects of our identities and our past ⁵¹ as a precondition for acceptance within heteronormative white worlds where the struggle for freedom, time and time again, leaves in place racial and colonial hierarchies. ⁵² It is precisely this schizophrenic nature of the terms by which we engage with our past that we are attempting to exorcise by authoring our own narratives and telling our stories. Filmmaking itself becomes a transformative practice that allows us to come to terms with who we are, where we come from, and where we belong.

While the promise of assimilation is never fully realized, nostalgia and longing for home continue to inform our present. Rather than narrating a linear biography of a life, our films feature narratives fractured by disparate memories from our past. Diaspora offers little refuge from the punishingly patriarchal heterosexuality of the nation-state. The act of authoring our own stories and creating cinematic representations of our communities, rarely seen before, are also attempts to cultivate alternative “queer diasporas” and forms of shared queer diasporic cultures, allowing us to reclaim our histories and remake “home” in our own terms. ⁵³

Films like Tongues Untied, Khush, Brincando El Charco,and Orientations resonate deeply within my anthropological consciousness precisely because they are unconcerned with Eurocentric, white sensibilities that have historically characterized mainstream ethnographic and documentary viewership. Rather than talking at normatively constructed audiences, Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung invite their audiences to “listen in” on queers-of-color “talking to each other.” ⁵⁴ These particular depictions are neither comfortable nor convenient as narratives about “a culture.” Rather, they accurately reflect the complicated nature of racial, cultural, and sexual experiences, destabilizing anthropology’s historic investment in fixed cultural identities and related practices that need salvaging. These films are no less emotive than sensory ethnographies. Instead of focusing on capturing the texture of a particular “other” place or an exotic local, these transnational diasporic queers-of-color filmmakers offer audiences a deeply affective experience of their interlocutors’ lives. While this focus on “affect” has experienced a resurgence in sensory anthropology, films like Tongues Untied, Khush, Brincando El Charco,and Orientations, released three decades ago, remain some of the first documentaries to offer us intimate insights into how visual texts communicate certain affective knowledge by producing a particular zone where “emotion intersects with processes taking place at a more corporal level.” ⁵⁵ By foregrounding embodiment and sensuousness of life not entirely untethered from but rather in relationship to their place (or places) of belonging, we are offered a far richer and more nuanced understanding of the worlds of transnational diasporic queers-of-color.

Like the lenses and the microphones we pick out to assemble our camera kits, feminist and queer theories and approaches are akin to “tools selected to reveal the truths at hand,” explains Molly Merryman, “and in the same way that an improper lens (or setting) will only capture darkness, field researchers who lack feminist lenses and queer lenses will not see and thus not aim their cameras to capture the truths in front of them.” ⁵⁶ Equipped with feminist and queer theories and sensibilities, Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung consciously structure their films against the grain of documentary conventions. ⁵⁷ Juxtaposing choreographed performances against semi-structured interviews, intimate autobiographical confessions against the backdrop of archival footage from significant historical moments assembled together in a consciously non-chronological structure, all five films engage in producing a deliberate sense of “nonlinearity” and “nervousness” that challenge the conventional “ethnographic temporalities” in anthropological cinema. ⁵⁸ The same conventions and temporalities that serve to reproduce the colonial gaze, keeping white supremacy intact in films like Forest of Bliss. “Pressing against disciplining and normalizing of knowledge,” transnational diasporic queers-of-color perspectives such as these have the power to “expose and destabilize colonial conditions of anthropological epistemology and methodology.” ⁵⁹ Films like the ones made by Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung are “not burdened but empowered by the knowledge of the history of representations outsiders have constructed” of their communities and their experiences. ⁶⁰ These films deserve our attention for “questioning the limits of what counts as ‘the document,'” notes Ruth Behar, thereby redrawing the boundaries of ethnographic cinema and documentary film. ⁶¹

Conclusion

In a primer on ethnographic film, Durington and Ruby note, “creating a canon of ethnographic film that would be universally accepted is virtually impossible. Often, what films are used is more a result of what films are accessible.” ⁶² However, canon is not just a “best of” or a hall of fame list of the greatest hits. It a more holistic phenomenon entwined in a host of institutional practices through which scholarly knowledge and disciplinary histories are produced and reproduced. Keeping this in mind, what are the implications of excluding particular voices and subjectivities – in this case, excluding transnational diasporic queers-of-color from taxonomies of ethnographic and documentary film? These queries deserve meaningful interrogation, especially now, given the renewed interest in addressing inherent inequalities in the production of anthropological scholarship. As Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre have powerfully observed, “how we cite and discuss our practices, writing and critiques of each other’s work – is implicated in furthering white supremacy.” ⁶³ The choice of which texts to highlight and which to exclude is also played out with material consequences on the future funding and career development prospects of their authors. It is worth noting that the companies that distribute Riggs’s, Parmar’s, Negrón-Muntaner’s, and Fung’s films were founded because established documentary distributors did not (do not) value films made by queer, immigrant, or women filmmakers as much as ones made by our heterosexual straight male counterparts. ⁶⁴ Riggs was subjected to additional attacks and scrutiny by the conservative American Family Association ⁶⁵ after Tongues Untied was shown on public television. The whole episode resulted in mainstream documentary funders and distributors becoming even more hesitant to support LGBTQIA+ and queer-of-color filmmakers. As a result of these intertwined processes, most immigrant diasporic queers-of-color filmmakers I know are actively struggling to get their films funded, made, distributed, and/or recognized by mainstream documentary channels and institutions. ⁶⁶

Riggs, Parmar, Negrón-Muntaner, and Fung might not fit into the orthodox definitions of ethnographic films as research films, yet they are no less rigorous in their methodological approaches, and they offer unique and productive anthropological insights on race, gender, sexuality, and power relations in North America and globally. In fact, they share a lot in common with feminist and queer methodological interventions in ethnographic research and storytelling. ⁶⁷ These transnational diasporic queers-of-color critiques challenge us to rethink the conventional role of the “filmmaker” and the “subject,” disrupting “the self and the other” binary formations that, as transnational feminist scholar Inderpal Grewal points out, are characteristic of a particular modernist moment within anthropological knowledge production. ⁶⁸

Perhaps because they are authored from the margins, these five courageous, unapologetic, unfiltered, and incredibly intimate films are the ones that have made the greatest impact on my approach to ethnographic storytelling. They continue to inspire me. They are essential viewings in my anthropology courses, alongside more-recent films by feminist, queer, and radical filmmakers. As a junior scholar invested in shaping the future of visual and multimodal anthropologies, I remain committed to highlighting transnational, queer, feminist, and diasporic voices and perspectives. While developing curriculum, organizing public presentations, programming film festivals, and serving on various committees and editorial boards, I continue to push for their inclusion. I do not want the next generation of immigrant diasporic queers-of-color anthropologists and filmmakers to feel like racialized objects of white gaze. I do not want them to feel voiceless. We must do better!

I end by reiterating my call for broadening the ethnographic film canon to include more films by transnational diasporic queer filmmakers-of-color not just because their exclusion underscores the anthropology’s white supremacy problem, but also because anthropology needs them. We need their perspectives and ways of seeing if we are truly committed to figuring out how to not just allow “Others” to speak for themselves but hold ourselves accountable to hearing what they have to say.

Harjant S. Gill Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Criminal Justice, Towson University, Towson, MD 21252, USA; hgill@towson.edu; he/him/his

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the three peer-reviewers and the journal editors Deborah Thomas and Elizabeth Chin for their invaluable feedback. I also thank Attiya Ahmad, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Jennifer Nash, Sima Shakhsari, Jennifer Terry, Neha Vora, and other participants from the 2014 Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices Conference at the Barnard Center for Research on Women where I presented an early draft of this paper. I thank Ahmet Atay, Christa Craven, Dána-Ain Davis, Lisa Kahaleole Hall, Catie Newton, Savannah Shange and other participants at the 2018 Feminist & Queer Pedagogies Workshop at College of Wooster where I further workshopped this article. My deep gratitude to Samuel Collins, Sanjiva Cooke, Jenny Cool, Matthew Durington, Fiona McDonald and J.P. Singh for their feedback. I want to give a shout-out to Amy Sueyoshi in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and her “Coloring Queer” course where I was introduced to Parmar and Fung’s films. I dedicate this essay to the memory of Marlon Riggs who died in 1994 from complication related to HIV/AIDS. His films serve as an endless source of inspiration.

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1. Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).[↑]
2. I use “riddle” here to echo Junaid Rana, “Anthropology and the Riddle of White Supremacy,” American Anthropologist 122 (1) (2020): 99–111.[↑]
3. Paul Basu, “Reframing Ethnographic Film,” in Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives and Practices,eds. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong, 99–106 (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008); Ruth Behar, “Expanding the Boundaries of Anthropology: The Cultural Criticism of Gloria Anzaldúa and Marlon Riggs,” Visual Anthropology Review 9 (2)(1993): 83–91; Asiha Beliso‐De Jesús and Jemima Pierre, “Toward an Anthropology of White Supremacy,” American Anthropologist 122 (1)(2020): 65–75; Molly Merryman, “Queer and Feminist Approaches in Ethnographic Video,” in Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video,ed. Phillip Vannini, 126–34 (New York: Routledge, 2020); Junaid Rana, “Anthropology and the Riddle of White Supremacy,” American Anthropologist 122 (1)(2020): 99–111.[↑]
4. James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).[↑]
5. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present,ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), 137–62.[↑]
6. Ruth Behar, and Deborah A. Gordon, eds., Women Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).[↑]
7. Also see Trinh T. Minh-ha, Women, Native, Other: Writing Post-coloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).[↑]
8. Shilyh Warren, Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary Film (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019).[↑]
9. See Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989), Imagining Indians (1992), and The Couple in the Cage: Guatinaui Odyssey (1993).[↑]
10. Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture. Qualifications of white male ethnographic filmmakers listed at the beginning of this essay have rarely been questioned. Similarly, critiques of ethnographic representations authored by white male filmmakers like Dennis O’Rourke (Cannibal Tours,1988) receive greater attention than ones by women, Indigenous, and queers-of-color filmmakers.[↑]
11. Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre, “Toward an Anthropology of White Supremacy,” 65–75.[↑]
12. Junaid Rana, “Anthropology and the Riddle of White Supremacy,” 99–111.[↑]
13. Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill, “Multimodality: An Invitation.” American Anthropologist 119 (1) (2017): 142–53.[↑]
14. Faye Harrison, ed., Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further towards an Anthropology of Liberation (Arlington, VA: American Anthropology Association, 1991); Faye Harrison, “Racism in the Academy: Towards a Multi-Methodological Agenda for Anthropological Engagement,” in Racism in the Academy: The New Millennium, eds. Audrey Smedley and Janis F. Hutchinson (Arlington, VA: American Anthropology Association, 2012): 13–32.[↑]
15. Leith Mullings, “Interrogating Racism: Towards an Antiracist Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005):667–93; Leith Mullings, “Presidential Address: Anthropology Matters,” American Anthropologist 117 (1) (2015): 4–16.[↑]
16. Zakiya C. Johnson, Jenn M. Jackson, Erica L. Williams, Ashanté Reese, Christen A. Smith, Daina R. Berry, Bianca C. Williams, et al. 2017, “The Collective,” Cite Black Women website, https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/our-collective.html.[↑]
17. Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre, “Toward an Anthropology of White Supremacy,” 65–75; Yarimar Bonilla, and Deborah Thomas, “An Interview with the Editor of American Anthropologist about the March 2020 Cover Controversy,” American Anthropologist website, June 29, 2020,

    Efforts to decolonize visual anthropology must entail sincere willingness to interrogate and possibly dismantle traditional structures of knowledge production and circulation – which includes how our films are funded, distributed, and recognized. Ethnographic film poses specific problems because of the ways that film, as a material thing, circulates. University libraries update their ethnographic film catalogues ever more frequently as the ways we consume media evolve – from VHS to DVD to instant streaming. Because the interlocked systems that govern ethnographic film privilege whiteness, the cinematic representations authored by historically disenfranchised communities are far more likely to fall out of circulation, vanishing to the realm of ephemerality. ((Harjant Gill, “De-Gentrifying Documentary and Ethnographic Cinemas: Displacement of Community-Based Storytelling in San Francisco’s Mission District,” Pluralities 1 (1) (2019): 1–27; Harjant Gill, “How to Distribute Your Ethnographic Film,” in Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video,ed. Phillip Vannini, (New York: Routledge, 2020), 281–92.[↑]

18. Dána-Ain Davis, and Christa Craven, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Inderpal Grewal, “Autobiographic Subjects and Diasporic Locations: Meatless Days and Borderlands,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices,eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 231–54; Trinh T. Minh-ha, Women, Native, Other: Writing Post-coloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).[↑]
19. Rana, “Anthropology and the Riddle of White Supremacy,” 99–111.[↑]
20. Paul Henley, Beyond Observation: A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film. Manchester University Press, 2020), 81-87.[↑]
21. Rana, “Anthropology and the Riddle of White Supremacy,” 101.[↑]
22. Karen Nakamura, “Making Sense of Sensory Ethnography: The Sensual and the Multisensory,” American Anthropologist 115 (1) (2013): 132–35.[↑]
23. Bonilla and Thomas, “An Interview with the Editor of American Anthropologist about the March 2020 Cover Controversy.”[↑]
24. I often pair Forest of Bliss with Karen Nakamura’s A Japanese Funeral (2010), a sensory/observational film about end-of-life rituals in Japan that does not fetishize its subjects. Nakamura, who belongs to the communities she documents, shows us a more ethical and respectful way of doing sensory ethnography.[↑]
25. Jay Ruby, “An Anthropological Critique of the Films of Robert Gardner,” Journal of Film and Video 43 (4) (1991): 3–17.[↑]
26. Henley, Beyond Observation, 282–283.[↑]
27. Henley, Beyond Observation, 436.[↑]
28. Lee, Toby, “Beyond the Ethico-Aesthetics: Towards a Re-Evaluation of the Sensory Ethnography Lab,” Visual Anthropology Review 35 (2) (2019): 138–47.[↑]
29. Henley, Beyond Observation, 441–450.[↑]
30. See Savannah Shange’s review of RaMell Ross’s 2018 documentary Hale County, This Morning This Evening in American Anthropologist. Savannah Shange, “Film Review of Hale County, This Morning This Evening,“ American Anthropologist 122 (1) (2020): 178–79.[↑]
31. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 82.[↑]
32. Jim Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Bill Nichols, “The Ethnographer’s Tale,” Visual Anthropology Review 7 (2) (1991): 31–47.[↑]
33. My use of the term “gay liberation” instead of the more inclusive “LGBTQIA+” is meant to underscore how the movement privileged cis-men’s needs and rights over everyone else.[↑]
34. Jafari Allen, ¡Venceremos: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 187.[↑]
35. Allen, ¡Venceremos, 187.[↑]
36. Suparna Bhaskaran, “The Politics of Penetration: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code,” in Queering India: Same Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society,ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2002), 15–29; Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan, eds., Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006).[↑]
37. Other films include My Beautiful Launderette (1985), written by the British Pakistani author Hanif Kureishi.[↑]
38. Gayatri Gopinath, “‘Bombay, U.K., Yuba City’: Bhangra, Music and the Engendering of Diaspora,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 4 (3) (1995): 303–21.[↑]
39. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).[↑]
40. Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, “Challenging Imperial Feminism,” Feminist Review 17 (1) (1984): 3–19; Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).[↑]
41. First popularized by Jean Rouch in films like Jaguar (1967).[↑]
42. Gina Pérez, The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement and Puerto Rican Families (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).[↑]
43. Richard Fung, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,” in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video,ed. Bad Object-Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 145–68.[↑]
44. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 79.[↑]
45. In 1914, a Japanese steamship, Komogata Maru, carrying 376 passengers, most South Asian immigrants, was denied entry into Canada, which led to a two-month-long standoff and eventual return to India, where the British authorities confronted the ship, killing twenty-two and imprisoning 200 of its passengers. The incident elucidates systemic racism in Canadian history and immigration policies.[↑]
46. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 79.[↑]
47. Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (New York: NYU Press, 2013).[↑]
48. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).[↑]
49. Harjant Gill, “How Milind Soman Made Me Gay: Exploring Issues of Belonging and Citizenship amongst Gay South Asian Men in Diaspora,” Anthropology Today: Contemporary Trends in Social and Cultural Anthropology 7 (2010):87–96.[↑]
50. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 225.[↑]
51. Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New York: Random House, 2006).[↑]
52. Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).[↑]
53. Behar, “Expanding the Boundaries of Anthropology, 90; Gayatri, Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).[↑]
54. Behar, “Expanding the Boundaries of Anthropology, 85.[↑]
55. William Mazzarella, “Affect: What Is It Good For?” in Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization,ed. Saurabh Dube (New York: Routledge, 2009), 291–309.[↑]
56. Molly Merryman, “Queer and Feminist Approaches in Ethnographic Video,” in Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video, ed. Phillip Vannini (New York: Routledge, 2020), 132–33.[↑]
57. Behar, “Expanding the Boundaries of Anthropology, 84; Muñoz, Disidentifications.[↑]
58. John Jackson, Jr, “Ethnography Is, Ethnography Ain’t,” Cultural Anthropology 27 (3)(2012): 486.[↑]
59. Scott Morgensen, “Encountering Indeterminacy: Colonial Contexts and Queer Imaging,” Cultural Anthropology 31 (4): 607.[↑]
60. Behar, “Expanding the Boundaries of Anthropology, 87.[↑]
61. Behar, “Expanding the Boundaries of Anthropology, 86.[↑]
62. Matthew Durington, and Jay Ruby, “Ethnographic Film,” in Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology,eds. Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 195.[↑]
63. Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre, “Toward an Anthropology of White Supremacy,” 70.[↑]
64. Women Made Movies, Frameline Distribution, Vtape, and Video Data Bank.[↑]
65. A Christian fundamentalist NGO based in the United States that opposes LGBTQIA+ rights and expression.[↑]
66. Accomplished queer Asian scholar/filmmakers, including Sonali Gulati and Karen Nakamura, have struggled to screen and distribute their documentaries I Am (2011) and Bethel (2007) despite receiving global acclaim for their films.[↑]
67. Dána-Ain Davis and Christa Craven, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).[↑]
68. Grewal, “Autobiographic Subjects and Diasporic Locations: Meatless Days and Borderlands,” 232.[↑]