Nomadism in the cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha

The concept of nomadism - which stems from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and evolves into feminist and postcolonial critiques - provides an analytical framework to address the undetermined, multifaceted portrayal of tribal and diasporic women in the cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha. The thesis explores subject positions in selected films by Trinh through the work of Braidotti (2011) and the "mestiza consciousness" proposed by Anzaldúa (1987), that provide an embedded and embodied philosophical basis for a nomadic film aesthetics and frame of analysis. The border is discussed as a site of encounter across cultures and social demarcations of alterity. The second chapter explores the nomadic film strategies that destabilise the time-space configuration of the film narratives in The Fourth Dimension (2001) and Night Passage (2004). Chapter 3 analyses Trinh‘s tactics that create a politics of "speaking nearby" in Reassemblage (1982) and Naked Spaces - Living is Round (1985), and to what extent a nomadic approach can suspend utterance about Third World women. The last chapter looks at borders between Self and Other, the West and the rest, and how these lines are defied, blurred, or displaced in Tale of Love (1995). The history of "Third Cinema" (Solanas and Gettino 1969) is examined as a prelude to a postcolonial position on a cinema of exile. The notion of "third space" in Homi Bhabha's critique of Third Cinema, "haptic visualities" in Laura Marks and the "crossroads" in Gloria Anzaldúa are evoked to examine "spaces in-between", where the border is deterritorialized.