Imagining Otherness: Filmic Visions of Living Together

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Imag(in)ing Otherness Filmic Visions of Living
Together

• Aesthetics, Ethics, and Chocolat

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S. Brent Plate

• Introduction Images and Imaginings
• In Imag(in)ing Otherness Filmic Visions of
  Living Together. Edited by S. Brent Plate and
  David Jasper
• American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticism
  Series. Bjorn Krondorfer, Editor
• Scholars Press Atlanta, Georgia, 1999.

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Imag(in)ing

• Imaging Otherness
• Aesthetics
• Visual medium of film
• Imagining Otherness
• Ethics
• The ethically imaginative goal is to offer new
  forms of living together, new forms of community
  (3).

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Otherness margin and center

• The term otherness is initially used here to
  denote that which resides outside the margins of
  the dominant cultural representations, outside
  the social-symbolic order. In what are by now
  oft-quoted identity categories in the West this
  has typically meant persons of color, gays and
  lesbians, the poor, and women, while the dominant
  order has been constructed and reigned over by
  caucasian, heterosexual wealthy men. Otherness
  also functions globally in that many northern
  countries (those of the G-7 and/or NATO)
  construct the world order by which the others
  (those of the two-thirds world) must abide. If we
  are interested in the ethical and critical
  practice of imag(in)ing otherness, we must
  undertake a search for that which has been
  forgotten, pushed aside, and otherwise exiled
  from the realm of visual-social representation.

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Otherness margin and center

• Still, there remains a problem with these notions
  of otherness. As I have described it so far, the
  other is seemingly only able to be defined in
  relation to the same, in relation to the
  dominant social-symbolic order. As Simone de
  Beauvoir protested 50 years ago, women finds
  herself living in a world where men compel her to
  assume the status of the Other. Woman, de
  Beauvoir argued, has been assigned the position
  of the second sex, an object only understood in
  a context where man is the primary subject (4).

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The practice of imag(in)ing

• The practice of imag(in)ing otherness envisions
  relationships between others, not between a
  primary subject and a secondary object (5).
• Thus the practice of imag(in)ing otherness
  entails more than mere tolerance it entails
  being changed by the other and having to
  rearrange given structures and established
  communities (5).
• the practice of imag(in)ing otherness is caught
  up in the relationship between aesthetics and
  ethics, and between what has been imaged and what
  can be imagined (9).