Sharon Sliwinski, York University, York (UK) Third Cinema, Diaspora and Traumatic Identity: The New International

and the Fact of Difference The intent of this paper is chiefly to track three major developments; to see if engaged in conversation these three spheres will yield productive insights. The three spheres include: 1. the theory and practice of Third cinema, 2. the re-emergence of Frantz Fanon's work at the forefront of postcolonial studies, and 3. the recent work in the study of trauma. Third Cinema, a field only conceived in the late 1960's, has had recent renegotiations at its borders. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, editors of Questions of Third Cinema begin their book with two main questions: "What relevance does the concept of Third Cinema have for film and video practitioners working today?" How does it relate to "the cinema of diasporic subjects living and working in metropolitan centres"?" (vii). These questions were partly inspired by recent developments in the independent film scene in Britain including the formation of various collectives, funding re-structuring, and evidence of a newly forged relationship between theory and practice among film and video makers. In part, the editors of Questions of Third Cinema are suggesting that the independent filmmakers working in Britain since the mid-1980's have opened up and challenged the race-relations paradigm by experimenting with new forms of (black) representation. Their notion of diaspora, which not only forged international links "but also highlight[ed] the sheer complexity and richness of experience inscribed in diasporic subjects'", was also a way of "framing a range of questions around the various forms of oppositional cultural production" (Pines & Willemen vii). Specifically this paper will examine the work of two contemporary black British filmmakers, John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, tracking a material and theoretical opening in questions of representation. It is my contention that their work offers strategies for thinking through "identity" that stretch wide beyond a black, British, independent scope and into questions of Third Cinema. However, other scholars and filmmakers find this easy transposition of what essentially seem to be questions of identity politics in the "First World" to the intense struggles of "Third World" peoples and their cultural products somewhat problematic. This debate will be entertained in the first section in order to interrogate the value of opening up the borders of Third cinema and to gauge the relevance of this new work in an international political scope. The second major development involved in this conversation is the reemergence of Frantz Fanon's work at the forefront of postcolonial studies. This "return" is no doubt spurred in part by the previous question regarding

the form of oppositional cultural production. A general source of appeal contributing to Fanon's reemergence is the association Fanon makes in Black Skin, White Masks between racism and what has come to be called, the scopic drive. This exercise of power caught in the dialectic of looking, of course, neatly relates to cinematic practices and forms of oppositional cultural production. Fanon's work foresees the supremacy of the image at the close of the twentieth century - his re-emergence is not untimely. Fanon has long been known for his essay on national liberation movements in particular, as Stuart Hall notes, "for promoting an invitation to violent, self-cleansing, self-remaking anti-colonial struggle, which constituted for many, the invitation to an action" (Hall 1996 14-5). It is this Fanon that has largely influenced the Third Cinema emerging from Latin America, Africa and much of Central and South Asia. Teshome Gabriel has recalls a Fanon who calls cinema "a soldier of liberation" and that the "original manifesto of camera as gun still holds"(Gabriel 55). Meanwhile, Homi Bhabha has opted for a broader perspective, endorsing a "specific value of a politics of cultural production which because it makes the surface of cinematic signification the grounds of political intervention, it gives depth to the language of social criticism and extends the domain of politics' in a direction that will not be entirely dominated by the forces of economic or social control" (Bhabha 1989 112). In other words, Bhabha has opted for a discursively centred form of cultural production while Gabriel opts for a more materially centred, militant form. It is my contention that these positions, although they have become radical opposites in academic circles, are not so distant. More urgently, however, and part of what is at stake in the recent developments in the independent (black) British film scene, is which Fanon will be remembered, which in turn sets the value of cultural production and its relevance to political struggle. Along with the re-emergence of Fanon at the forefront of postcolonial studies is an analysis of the American civil rights movements at the forefront of black cultural studies. Henry Louis Gates Jr., spearheading the analysis to some degree, has framed it in questions of the expanding American economic problems: "Thirty years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, how have we reached this point where we have both the largest black middle class and the largest black underclass in our history?" (Gates 1998). Beyond Martin Luther King, Malcolm X has also made a ghostly return in contemporary thinking perhaps because of his close alignment with Fanon's brand of liberation "by any means necessary." Isaac Julien's film about Frantz Fanon and John Akomfrah's work The Seven Songs for Malcolm X, will anchor this extended discussion of the return of these emancipation thinkers.

The other figure that looms large in this work is Jewish-German writer Walter Benjamin. Why Benjamin? Echoing Stuart Hall's "Why Fanon? Why Now?" Benjamin's work on the dialectical image resurfaces in this conversation because Benjamin sketched out his theory - like Fanon and Malcolm X - in a powerfully fascist culture - exemplified by Nazi Germany with its highly aestheticized politics which I suggest is not unlike our contemporary moment of high global capitalism. All of the aforementioned writers perform a resurrection of sorts on Marxism - a "spectral" resurrection keeping in mind Derrida's recent book Spectres of Marx. In fact, at the heart of Derrida's re-reading lies a clue as to Why Fanon? and Why Malcolm X? Derrida calls for responsibility, or more precisely, for discussion on the nature of responsibility - how to learn to live (xvii). I have more questions then: in what way is this learning historical? And from Derrida, what way does it deal with ghosts? What does one learns from "the other and by death" (xviii)? The "other and death" leads to the third development - the unhurried but vital body of work devoted to the study of trauma. Questions of the structure of cultural memory and memorial practice link directly to the narrative structure of the film work that I will examine here. It is my contention that by (re)framing this conversation in the language and form of trauma and traumatic memory - in what responsibility we have to live - we will best be able to comprehend the new film work meaning and its relevance. As the editors of Between Hope and Despair believe, "remembrance as a hopeful practice of critical learning extends to reworking notions of community, identity, embodiment, and relationship"(Simon, Rosenberg, Eppert 6). In particular, trauma makes radical alterations to the structure of the memory of the traumatic experience: "the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it"(Caruth 4). But Cathy Caruth and others have gone on to make the argument that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is not, perhaps, a typical pathological disorder. Because of the literal return of the event against the will of one it inhabits, because the disorder doesn't incur a falsehood or displacement of meaning, we might begin to see PTSD as a "symptom of history itself" The traumatized, we might say, carry and impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history they cannot entirely possess"(Caruth 5). It is a disorder of Truth. Yet what can it mean that history occurs as a symptom? (ibid). In Seven Songs for Malcolm X, historian Jan Carew has said of Malcolm X that in West Africa he would have been called a "Truthteller - one who tells the truth at any cost. He told the black people of America the truth about themselves in an unvarnished, ruthless, eloquent manner" That's why the memory of him lives the way it does." In this way Isaac Julien and John Akomfrah's work (and Malcolm X's

and Fanon's before them) explores the critical possibility of facing the traumatic "truth" of black experience, opening up in the process new ways of forming identity and community. This exploration isn't without significance: as Kobena Mercer has said: "This critical potential might enable us to overcome reality"(Mercer 1988 60).