Cinema builds the imaginative space of the racialized other through light-dark binaries

Evidence

[Cinema] constructs the imaginative space of the other in the Western spectator’s mind. Furthermore, questions raised by “colonial discourse” assume a greater urgency when discussed in relation to filmic representations of the other. The “perverse pleasures” of cinema and its potential for pornographic exploitation have been studied exhaustively by feminist film theory. Issues of colour, “the epidermic schema,” to use Frantz Fanon’s (1986) suggestive phrase become all the more “visible” in a visually oriented medium based on a creative play of light and darkness, the two binary elements which constitute, according to some postcolonial critics, the Manichean allegory of colonial discourse. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 680

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Epidermic schema’ and the ‘Manichean allegory of colonial discourse’ are analytical terms the reader needs as precise categories for the struggle narrative.
• XREF: connects to: Landscape paintings can make racial terror legible through screened absence rather than depiction — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 770; Mulvey theorized three layered voyeuristic gazes subjugating women in cinema — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 317