Saturday, January 19, 2013

Mudede on Scott on first contact

Charles Mudede on local filmmaker Shaun Scott's Seat of Empire

"Scott claims that it was more of an interaction, a mutual exchange of ideas, values, codes, goods, and bodily fluids."

I wonder if it's John Wayne-Sherman Alexie style fluid swapping or Disney Pocahontas/Dance with Wolves type fluid swapping (is there a difference?)

"When one group meets another, both are transformed by the experience. The pioneers did not just impress their culture on the locals and the landscape, but were changed by both into something new, something other than what they were to begin with. There is no purity, just mixture—Scott is committed to this position."
Check out this clip on the World's Largest Brothel:
Also cf. a Lacanian analysis of the Alexie story, "The entire story of John Wayne and Etta revolves around the logic of symbolic identification and of enjoyment that Zizek describes in 'The Loop of Enjoyment' in Tarrying With the Negative. Both Native American and European in this story are cautious about one another’s culture. The Other – for the European, the Native American, and for the Native American, the European – occupies a space of desire outside one’s own community, a space that is fantasmatic and characterized by either excessive fear and alienation or excessive pleasure. Zizek indirectly describes perfectly John Wayne’s fascination with Etta as the Native, and perhaps even her own fascination with John Wayne. They are fascinated with each other as an Other, and at the same time, they feel threatened by their very fascination for each other, as though they were violating their own tribal-national-ethnic identity (Zizek 203)."

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