Intersectional Spectres

This paper explores two of Fernando Vendrell's films about colonial disaffiliation, O gotejar da luz [Light Drops] (2001) and Pele [Skin] (2006). I argue that both films may be productively read as ‘coming of age dramas’, in which their young protagonists, the white colonial planter's son Rui Pedro in Gotejar and the young mulata woman Olga in Pele, acquire heightened political consciousness, by unravelling the empire's lusotropical mythologies of hybridity and assimilation. It is the body of the African (or Africanized) woman that becomes the object of contention in the narratives of both films, becoming inextricably bound up with the trauma of white anti-imperialism's foundational narratives of familial disaffiliation. While the exotic fantasy image of the black woman is never fully superseded here, it is consciously and conspicuously framed as being a white masculine projection, from which the embodied desires of the African woman herself are violently erased. By the end of the films, both of the African women are ‘dead’, literally so in the case of Rui Pedro's childhood friend, Ana, and symbolically so in the gestures of masking and concealment that characterize Olga's blackface performance. Consequently, I argue that the women's ‘presence’ in the closing frames of both films is retroactively re-symbolized only through the illusory singularity of the ‘fetish’ and the haunting associated with the ‘spectre’. In this process, both films expose the limits of what could and could not be symbolized through cinema in the contentious territory of miscegenation at the beginning of the twenty-first century

Art · Art history · Colonialism · Fantasy · Humanities · Hybridity · Literature · Movie theater · Mythology · Narrative · White (mutation · Cuban History and Society · History · Literature, Culture, and Criticism