Post-Third-Worldist culture: Gender, nation, and the cinema

At a time when the grands recits of the West have been told and retold ad infinitum, when a certain postmodernism (Lyotard) speaks of an "end" to metanarratives, and when Fukayama speaks of an "end of history," we must ask: precisely whose narrative and whose history is being declared at an "end"?1 Hegemonic Europe may clearly have begun to deplete its strategic repertoire of stories, but Third-World peoples, First-World minoritarian communities, women, and gays and lesbians have only begun to tell, and deconstruct, theirs. For the "Third World, this cinematic counter-telling basically began with the postwar collapse of the European empires and the emergence of independent nation-states. In the face of Eurocentric historicizing, the Third World and its diasporas in the First World have rewritten their own histories, taken control over their own images, spoken in their own voices, reclaiming and reaccentuating colonialism and its ramifications in the present in a vast project of remapping and renaming. Third-World feminists, for their part, have participated in these countemarratives, while insisting that colonialism and national resistance have impinged differendy on men and women, and that remapping and renaming is not without its fissures and contradictions.