When the Moon Waxes Red

In this new collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, award-winning filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha offers new challenges to Western regimes of knowledge. Bringing to her subjects an acute sense of the many meanings of the marginal, Trinh examines Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology. When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. Feminist struggle is heterogeneous. The multiply hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh Minh-ha argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to beat the master at his own game.’

Author Biography

Trinh Minh-ha is Chancellors’ Distinguished Professor in Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Associate Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Among her films is SurnameViet Given Name Nam. She is the author of Women, Native,Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism and, most recently, has coedited Out There: Marginalization inContemporary Culture.