Bennet Yu-Hsiang Fu (National Taiwan University)
If the Caribbean has always been conceptualized as an epistemological site of displacement and dispersion, representing the Caribbean through aesthetic interventions – precisely through cinematic representations – can facilitate the understanding of its intercultural realities as well as its longstanding anti-imperialist resistances in the age of globalization. In his nine-minute experimental video “Islands” (2002), Trinidad-born, Toronto-based video maker and writer Richard Fung deconstructs John Huston’s film “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” (1957), the story of a shipwrecked American marine and an Irish nun stranded on an island in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. By inserting intertitles somehow incongruous with the montage from Huston’s film, Fung tells the story of his Chinese Trinidadian Uncle Clive, employed to appear in Huston’s film to play one of the Japanese soldiers. In the short video, Fung comments on the Hollywood cinematic displacement such as the Caribbean islands actually shot somewhere in the South Pacific, the Japanese represented by the Chinese Trinidadian, and indigenous Caribbean opossums and agoutis misplaced in the Pacific fauna. In its deconstructionist iconographic semiotics, the short video attempts to intervene in imperial representations (i.e., the Hollywood machine) of the Caribbean in its relationship to the cinematic image. Not only does Fung’s iconography translate the Caribbean into a form of interchangeability with the Pacific, recalling the history of the indentured Asian laborers to the Caribbean, but such cinematic reworking also underpins the ultimate commensurability of otherness through the imperial eyes of the Caribbean and the Pacific islands. With the iconographic techniques of intervention, destabilization, and dislocation, the Caribbean space in Fung’s video silhouettes its oblique relationship with the Pacific and with the West through its nexus with cultural domination and misrepresentation. These cinematic interpellations of divergences and convergences articulate the archipelagic identities of the Caribbean today, still unhinged by geographical boundaries and displaced by hegemonic imaginaries.
