Gita Rajan

Dr. Prajna Paramita Parasher, an independent film maker of Indian descent,
currently works in Pittsburgh on issues such as the "nation," "history,"
"modernity," "postcoloniality," "women and labor," and "cultural disloca-
tion" through a complex system of politicized representations. Acknowledging
her strategy, Parasher says she is most effective when she positions her camera
so that the subject does the "looking" instead of the camera, and in this sense,
subverts the classic thesis of the gaze proposed by Laura Mulvey in "Visual
Pleasures." Similarly, she says she allows the national or postcolonial subjects
to speak in her videos, instead of being their spokesperson, again in effect,
rewriting the Marxist dictum of the colonized people only being audible/visible
when represented. She admits that a part of her video and film-making agenda
has been influenced by the powerful theorizing of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
and that she has learned a great deal regarding the art of interviewing
(specifically adapted to the camera), from Deleuze and Gauttari. Smilingly, she
quotes Spivak as the theorist who says in words what she displays on the screen:
"The person who knows has all the problems of selfhood. The person who is
known somehow seems not to have a problematic self. These days it is the same
kind of agenda that is at work. Only the dominant self can be problematic; the
self of the Other is authentic without a problem, naturally available to all kinds
of complications. This is very frightening" ( The Post-Colonial Critic 55). This
short interview is followed by an analysis of Parasher's work by Amy Villarejo.

Gita Rajan: Your videos, especially Exile and Displacement? and Unbidden
Voices address the issue of history and postcoloniality in very specific,
concrete ways. I see it as not simply a revisionist or oppositional history,
but a carefully mediated one. I wish to ask you about your method of
representation. Would you explain how you treat history in the first video,
for example? And then go on to the discussion of postcoloniality?

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