Orienting the Eyes: Chinese Cuba in Cinema, Television and Video

• In Event: Social Evaluations and Transitions in Latin American Film

Abstract

This project centers on the mediatic presence/absence of Chinese and Chinese Cubans in Cuban cinema, television, and video. Examples range from earliest ethnographic lenses documenting Chinese contract labourers on Cuban sugar plantations (U.S. Army) to the orientalist/anti-racist ambivalence of Cuban revolutionary television (Cubavision) to the staging of Chinese Cuban self-orientalization as parody in recent music video (Orishas). My study suggests that the audio-visual representation of Chinese and Chinese Cubans on the island is profoundly marked by the tension between two strongly opposed ideological formations. On the one hand, as engendered in 1847 with the arrival of the first contract laborers or “culies” from China, there is a long entrenched orientalist discourse (el chino/ la china). On the other hand, since the revolutionary changes that took place in the early 1960s, Cuba has produced a radically anti-essentialist discourse (Nuestra America). Not only do these apparently irreconcilable discourses fuse in the Cuban context, they are also eclipsed by the post-revolutionary allure of contemporary filmmaking and music video production.

Author

• Frank F Scherer, York University