Trinh T. Minh-ha

Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women Issue’

It is thrilling to think – to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep. (Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me)

Documentary Is/Not a Name

There is no such thing as documentary-whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques. This assertion-as old and as fundamental as the antagonism between names and reality-needs incessantly to be restated, despite the very visible existence of a documentary tradition. In film, such a tradition, far from undergoing crisis today, is likely to fortify itself through its very recurrence of declines and rebirths. The narratives that attempt to unify/purify its practices by positing evolution and continuity from one period to the next are numerous indeed, relying heavily on traditional historicist concepts of periodization.

African Spaces: Designs for Living in Upper Volta

The diversity and complexity of African vernacular architecture remain widely unknown both to the general public and to architects. Yet Upper Volta (Burkino Faso) encompasses an astonishing variety of design principles and building techniques that belie the widespread image of the primitive hut so readily associated with rural Africa. This provides a convincing interpretation of the relationship between spatial organisation and daily activity in Gurunsi life.

An Acoustic Journey

In the current political and cultural landscape a crucial shift has been emerging, and maturing: a shift in the (dis/re)articulation of identity and difference. Such articulations remain informed by an awareness of both the enabling and disenabling potentials of the divisions within and between cultures. Constantly guarded, reinforced, destroyed, set up, and reclaimed, boundaries not only express the desire to free/to subject one practice, one culture, one national community from/to another, but also expose the extent to which cultures are products of the continuing struggle between official and unofficial narratives: those largely circulated in favour of the State and its policies of inclusion, incorporation and validation, as well as of exclusion, appropriation and dispossession. Yet never has one been made to realize as poignantly as in these times how thoroughly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, or how radically they evolve within apparently conflictual and incompatible domains, cutting across territorial and disciplinary borders, defying policy-oriented rationales and resisting the simplifying action of nationalist closures. The named ‘other’ is never to be found merely over there and outside oneself, for it is always over here, between Us, within Our discourse, that the ‘other’ becomes a nameable reality. Thus, despite all the conscious attempts to purify and exclude, cultures are far from being unitary, as they have always owed their existence more to differences, hybridities and alien elements than they really care to acknowledge.

Drawn from African Dwellings

This life-in-architecture study displays the world view and the socio-economic and cosmological organization of several African peoples, including the Fulbe, Tokolor, Sereer, Joola, Soninke, Mandingo, Jaxanke, and Bassari. Bourdier and Trinh connect setting, design, decoration, and orientation to kinship, gender, history, oral traditions, poetry, and religions. Through photographs, drawings, and theoretical reflections, the authors challenge the common perception of traditional dwellings as static artifacts. Jean-Paul Bourdiers beautifully detailed drawings bring the material alive with cut-away birds-eye views that reveal the complex patterning of structures and their relationship to inhabitants activities.

The Image and the Void

This article addresses an expansive approach to the ‘visual’, including discussions of the forms of invisibility generated within the visible, the power of the unseen, or of blanks, holes and chairs kept empty.

The Architecture of a Lela Compound

T he Lela, an ethnic group within the Gurunsi cluster of Voltaic languages, are located roughly northwest of Koudougou and east of the Black Volta River in central Upper Volta. The Lela village of Poa is one of the few that still retain traditional building techniques and offer little evidence of urban influence. Its two quarters, four kilometers apart, are Poa and Zyilliwele, but Poa is the oldest of the two and gives its name to the entire village. The compound we have chosen for our research is in Zyilliwele, established around 1920 by a man named Bahala Dano, who belonged to the first settlement in Poa. Zyilliwele consists of about ten homesteads or compounds, 150 to 300 meters apart and dispersed over one kilometer along a shallow depression. Each is surrounded by cultivated land and is from 30 to 200 meters from the main

The Plural Void: Barthes and Asia

Writing, says Barthes, is in its own way a satori. It corresponds to that Zen event which, in LEmpire des signes (Geneva: Skira, 1970) is defined as a loss of meaning, a seismism .. . which perturbs the thinking subject: it produces a speech-void. At the same time, this void makes writing possible; it is what permits Zen, in the suspension of all meaning, to write gardens, gestures, houses, bouquets, faces (p. 10). These statements present the two inseparable faces of a single entity. They open, as would a dice throw, a text in which the (named) Void moves beneath multiple forms, showing us at each pause in its displacement, a new face. This philosophy, this doctrine, which when referring to Barthes I will call the notion of the Void, is not confined to LEmpire des signes. It belongs to a network of closely connected signifiers and signifieds where Barthes chooses to be situated.