T H E O R Y
"You know what it's like, right?": women-of-color feminist criticism, inside and outside the
frame
Group work
As a group, discuss how bell hooks’s notion of eating the Other – the principal
dimensions/mechanisms/characteristics of which are outlined below – is fleshed out in Nanny.
The following questions are designed to help you unpack the scenes we will be analyzing:
- What does hooks’s theory of eating the Other (as excerpted below) reveal about the
relationship between the Self and the Other [in Nanny]?
- How are the concepts of eating the Other – as well as its constitutive theoretical
underpinnings (i.e. the instrumentality of the Other; the commodification of the Other;
imperialist nostalgia; eating the Other as a conversion experience; the
West’s/whiteness’s crisis in identity; Black nationalism) represented (visually and
narratively) in Nanny?
Your group must be prepared to apply/embed the following key quotes from hooks’s reading
(in)to your reading of Nanny:
Key quote 1
There is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgement and enjoyment of racial difference. The
commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight,
more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. With commodity culture,
ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dishes that is mainstream white
culture. … The “real fun” is to be had by bringing to the surface all those “nasty” unconscious
fantasies and longings about contact with the Other embedded in the secret (not so secret) deep
structure of white supremacy. … Such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and
maintains the status quo.
Key quote 2
[T]he body emerges as a site of contestation where sexuality is the metaphoric Other that
threatens to take over, consume, transform via the experience of pleasure. … Sexual pleasure
alters the consenting subject, deconstructing notions of will, control, coercive domination. …
Sexual agency is expressed within the context of racialized sexual encounter is a conversion
experience that alters one’s place and participation in contemporary cultural politics.
The seductive promise of this encounter is that it will counter the terrorizing force of the status
quo that makes identity fixed, static, a condition of containment and death.
Key quote 3
[T]his recognition [of the Other] was “contingent upon instrumentality”: “In this way, through
affinity and use, the primitive is sent up into the service of the Western tradition (which is then
seen to have produced it).” [White men] claim the body of the colored Other instrumentally, as
unexplored terrain, a symbolic frontier that will be fertile ground for their reconstruction of the
masculine norm, for asserting themselves as transgressive desiring subjects. They call upon the
Other to be both witness and participant in this transformation.
Key quote 4
The current wave of “imperialist nostalgia” (defined by Renato Rosaldo … as “nostalgia, often
found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have
transformed” or as “a process of yearning for what one has destroyed…”) often obscures
contemporary cultural strategies deployed not to mourn but to celebrate the sense of a continuum
of “primitivism.” … [I]t establishes a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by the
structures of domination on those designated Other is deflected by an emphasis on seduction and
longing where the desire is not to make the Other over in one’s image but to become the Other. …
The contemporary crises of identity in the west … are eased when the primitive is recouped via
a focus on diversity and pluralism which suggests the Other can provide life-sustaining
alternatives.
Key quote 5
Black nationalism, with its emphasis on black separatism, is resurging as a response to the
assumption that white cultural imperialism and white yearning to possess the Other are invading
black life, appropriating and violating black culture. As a survival strategy, black nationalism
surfaces most strongly when white cultural appropriation of black culture threatens to
decontextualize and thereby erase knowledge of the specific historical and social context of black
experience … [Black nationalism is opposed to] the commodification of difference [that]
promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated,
via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the
significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization.
