The practice of feminist documentary filmmaking, and the scholarship it evokes in response, chart out the major fault lines of feminist theorizing and political activism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Scholarship on early feminist documentary practice in the mid-twentieth century is told in two stories. In one, Third World–ist revolutionary cinema movements of the mid-twentieth century in East Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East created a “cinematic counter-telling” in which women and feminists were visible participants, and feminist concerns were framed in terms of an anticolonial message: “The Third World and its diasporas in the First World have rewritten histories as their own, taken control over their own images, spoken in their own voices, reclaiming and re-accentuating colonialism and its ramifications in the present in a vast project of remapping and renaming.”1 The other story told is that of a burgeoning feminist First World cinema movement...
Documentary
Isra Ali is a feminist media scholar engaging postcolonial and feminist theory to consider media's relationship to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the era of the war on terror. She is completing a book manuscript on the trajectories of women journalists and documentary filmmakers from North America and Western Europe who traveled to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2016 to make media about women. Currently she is researching Muslim identity, cultural citizenship, and the production of digital/social media by Muslims, post-9/11. She is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
Isra Ali; Documentary. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2018; 4 (2): 67–71. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.67
Download citation file:
University of California Press