Authors

Discussion

My paper considers cinema criticism as an arena in which an indigenous critique of orientalism emerged in the Soviet 1920s. This autochthonous critique of ideas such as “vostokofil’stvo,” “ekzotizm,” and, in certain domains, Romantic representations of foreign peoples and lands, might be loosely classed under the rubric of anti-orientalism, which proliferates through various film journals during the period as critics assess a range of national cinemas. The paper will focus on such critics as Sergei Vel’tman, whose The East in Literature(Vostok v literature, 1928) reveals how the discourse of anti-imperialism enabled a global reassessment of the Russian cultural past and a hermeneutic for reading West European and American colonial literature and cinema. Secondly, it focuses on how the conjuncture of race and anti-imperialism motivated a far-reaching assessment of Western colonial production, imperial aesthetics, and the representation of race throughout the West. The paper traces anti-imperialism as it operates within the context of socialist revolution and the conceptualization of the ethnic viewer. We find throughout the period a remarkable theorization of the political economy of representing race, in particular an assessment of how the new medium of cinema buttresses colonial exploitation.