ABSTRACT

This article proposes an examination of the white woman’s positionings within the French postcolonial structures of race and gender in two of Claire Denis’s films: Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Using an intersectional frame of reference which combines postcolonial theory, Third World feminism and geography/spatiality, this article demonstrates that these two films unearth structures of power and inequality that situate the white female of the colony not as subjugated by the patriarchal order, as has been argued, but as an agent of imperialism in herself. This analysis shows that Denis’s films anchor their aesthetic sensibility and narrative discourse within pictorial and narrative practices specific to, or appropriated by, imperialism, such as mapping, landscape painting and cinema. These films reveal a rhetorical and visual inventory of colonial tropes that ineluctably structure Denis’s cinematic Africa as a space which, through racial privilege, the white woman claims as her own.

摘要

本文提出了对克莱尔·丹尼斯的两部电影《巧克力》（1988）和《白色材料》中白人女性在法国后殖民种族和性别结构中的定位的考察。（2009）。本文使用结合了后殖民理论、第三世界女权主义和地理/空间的交叉参考框架，证明这两部电影揭示了权力和不平等的结构，这些结构使殖民地的白人女性不像以前那样受到父权秩序的征服。被争论过，但她本身就是帝国主义的代理人。这一分析表明，丹尼斯的电影将其审美敏感性和叙事话语锚定在帝国主义特有的或被帝国主义挪用的图像和叙事实践中，例如地图、风景画和电影。这些电影揭示了殖民比喻的修辞和视觉清单，这些比喻不可避免地将丹尼斯电影中的非洲构建为一个白人妇女通过种族特权声称拥有自己的空间。