When the Moon Waxes Red

by Trinh T. Minh-ha

In this collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, award-winning filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha offers new challenges to Western regimes of knowledge.

Bringing to her subjects an acute sense of the many meanings of the marginal, Trinh examines Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology. In one essay, taking off from ideas raised earlier by Zora Neale Hurston, Trinh considers with astonishment the search by Western "experts" for the hidden values of a person or culture, a process of legitimized voyeurism that, she argues, ultimately equates psychological conflicts with depth, while inner experience is reduced to mere personal feeling.

When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. Feminist struggle is heterogeneous. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to "beat the master at his own game."

Genres: Feminism, Film, Nonfiction, Art, Essays, Post Colonial, Gender

264 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1991

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

[My Tam · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The function of any ideology in power is to represent the world positively unified.” What is pop culture - whose ideas are deemed worthy of consumption for the masses? I went to the Whitney museum Biennial for the first time a couple weeks ago and was introduced to Trịnh Thị Minh Hà’s work. Someone whom I wish I knew about sooner and wish more people knew of. Her thinking is deep, global, and intersectional from Audre Lorde and Nigerian filmography to Vietnamese mythology. I’m coming off of a three-day board retreat with an org whose mission is shifting our financial system to be more decentralized and community focused through design thinking and systems change rooted in cultural histories and practices of trust-based finance. These themes, along with our global need to be more unified, move collectively, and in right action after two years of stillness are things I’m sitting with, hope for, and working toward. I hope you, too, will read her and look for voices who are important, significant, relevant, and are often made invisible in the production of mass content. This is my wish for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage month this May, all heritage months, and calendar year. Here’s to expanding our collective understanding and knowledge of one another.

[Nicole Zhang · Rating 5 out of 5]

really thoughtful, like poetry like prose with critical mind

[Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essay collections are generally kind of a mixed bag, and I'll admit to having some problems with the way film is treated here. (Short version: there is only one way of making film. Well, no, there isn't. Although, I'm sure in 1991 film appreciation was a lot less fragmented and flexible than it is now.) There were one or two essays I really, really, really loved - I think they were "Totalizing Quest of Meaning" and "All-Owning Spectatorship," but I read it it bits and pieces over two and a half weeks so it's hard to remember. The zeitgeist has changed since the book was published . . . in fact, it had probably changed a lot between the writing of the pieces and the collection and publishing. So it's a bit difficult not to treat it as an historical document.

[Bops]

delicious

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review published in Criticism 34.3 (1992): 438-441.