Abstract
Rachid Bouchareb's movie Indigènes (aka Days of Glory, 2006) constitutes a powerful critique of the discourse of orientalism in significant ways that requires consideration. The chapter presents a descriptive and critical analysis of ambivalent positions during colonial encounters in the Second World War and analyses the totalizing and monist nature of the logocentric regime of meaning in the construction of a colonial orientalist discourse where knowledge and power enter into an agreement of sorts. The chapter throws light on ways in which Eurocentric history writing undermines the colonial soldiers' struggle for recognition and opens up a vista onto the critical role of post-colonial cinema in giving the invisible subjects' their due in history and popular media.
TopIntroduction
This paper assesses the significance of Rachid Bouchareb’s film Indigènes (2006) in the broader context of orientalism and its function of othering. The paper presents a descriptive and critical analysis of ambivalent positions that take place in colonial encounters along with the construction of the colonial regime of meaning in a dialogue with the knowledge-power equation in the film. Edward Said observes that, “to say simply that modern Orientalism has been an aspect of both imperialism and colonialism is not to say anything very disputable” (2003, p. 123). While providing insight into the colonial discourse of orientalism, the article analyses how this self-serving discourse incorporates colonial myths into popular cinema, particularly films connected to the Second World War. In one respect this paper is a theoretical attempt to articulate the underlying rationale of the injustice implicit in hegemonic/Eurocentric history writing, determining the other as subordinate to the history of technological and scientific advances, which, in effect, is the essence of orientalist practices. Such histories are “universalized”, with the particular histories of other peoples being erased and written over in the “white mythology”, rendering the colonized as ‘otherwise’ in the process. This will be discussed extensively in the following sections of this chapter. To further emphasize this point, one may recall Hegel’s ‘exemplary’ orientalism, which has now become a watchword, where he claims that Africa has no history:
At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit […] What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History. (Hegel, 2001, p. 117)
Key Terms in this Chapter
White Mythology: The exculpatory history of the colonial west. A dominant narrative which puts the west before and above the non-west.
Essentialism: A belief in the unchanging property of a thing or the essence.
Monist: Here, a belief in one language, one interpretation and a single truth.
Contamination: The state of having been influenced by local or native ways of life.
White Washing: Hiding the violence in colonial history writing.
Subaltern: Community or class who are silenced and rendered invisible by the practices of the hegemonic mode of history writing.
Logocentrism: The illusion of a direct or immediate communication with the meaning outside the parameters of spatio-temporality.
Worlding: A pattern in white history writing that de-historicizes non-Europeans in order to assimilate their difference into white universal history.