Elsewhere, Within Here

by Trinh T. Minh-ha

Winner of the 2012 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) World-renowned filmmaker and feminist, postcolonial thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in both independent filmmaking and cultural politics. Elsewhere, Within Here is an engaging look at travel across national borders--as a foreigner, a tourist, an immigrant, a refugee―in a pre- and post-9/11 world. Who is welcome where? What does it mean to feel out of place in the country you call home? When does the stranger appear in these times of dark metamorphoses? These are some of the issues addressed by the author as she examines the cultural meaning and complexities of travel, immigration, home and exile. The boundary, seen both as a material and immaterial event, is where endings pass into beginnings. Building upon themes present in her earlier work on hybridity and displacement in the median passage, and illuminating the ways in which "every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries," Trinh T. Minh-ha leads her readers through an investigation of what it means to be an insider and an outsider in this "epoch of global fear." Elsewhere, Within Here is essential reading for those interested in contemporary feminist thought and postcolonial studies.

Genres: Nonfiction, Post Colonial, Philosophy, Feminism

152 pages, Paperback

First published July 30, 2010

About the author

Trinh T. Minh-ha (born 1952) is a filmmaker, writer, academic and composer. She is an independent filmmaker and feminist, post-colonial theorist. She teaches courses that focus on women's work as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and the arts. The seminars she offers focus on Third cinema, film theory and aesthetics, the voice in cinema, the autobiographical voice, critical theory and research, cultural politics and feminist theory.[1] She has been making films for over twenty years and may be best known for her first film Reassemblage, made in 1982. She has received several awards and grants, including the American Film Institute’s National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award, and Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Her films have been the subject of twenty retrospectives.

Reviews

[Kate Savage · Rating 5 out of 5]

Minh-ha gathers all of the stereotypes White Americans have about "others" and plays with them until they burst. Dominant discourse aligns marginalized people with irrationality, nature, passivity, and silence, against the centralized culture's reason, culture, activity and words. By the time Minh-ha is done crafting her poem/theory, all of this is upended. Silence -- particularly the breaths between words -- takes on meaning, and the uninterruptable speech of the self-important betrays its meaninglessness; ways of knowing dance and nest together; winning starts to look a lot like losing, and vice versa. Each word of the West unspeaks itself (for example, when an authority says "security" you'll begin to hear "insecurity").

I loved her writing on mothers and nature and becoming, and how she follows Genet into an "accoustic approach to truth" ("What made Genet draw the line -- a line that matters here and now -- and take up a position by the side of the dispossessed was, not so much the voice of justice in its logic of naming, as the emotions it conveyed -- or better, its musical accuracy: 'I had greeted the revolt as a musical ear recognizes a right note.'").

The last essay was impossible for me -- it focuses on the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and travelled far into the realm of the inexplicable. I'll read Cha's Dictee one day, but without hope that this will help me.

Minh-ha valorizes mistranslation as the only way to keep words alive across cultures -- a clear, faithful translation kills the story, which must transform to live. So maybe this book is a lively, synaesthetic mistranslation of Western culture, returned to readers from a journey so far away it could finally be seen.