The Eternal Other: (Franco-)Asians through the Lens of Contemporary French Cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACTImmigrant identities occupy the foreground in contemporary French films such as the anthology Paris, je t'aime (Paris) and Entre les murs by Laurent Cantet, signaling the changing cultural and ethnic faces that comprise the Hexagon. Yet the portrayal of East/Southeast Asians remains atemporal, confining them to the realm of the unassimilated other. In comparison, an increasing number of individuals of black and North African heritage are gradually being profiled as more linguistically and culturally—albeit never completely—“French” as in Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, his segment in Paris, je t'aime, and in Yamina Benguigui's television film series Aïcha. Does the political environment in France with respect to immigration create a hierarchy that determines the assimilability of specific racial and ethnic groups and/or do certain characteristics of East/Southeast Asian cultures contribute to crystallizing their other-ness? In order to tackle these perplexing queries, this paper considers how residual colonial ideologies underlying identity politics and citizenship as well as sociocultural elements of Asian ethnic groups help explain the perpetuation of Far Eastern Orientalism in contemporary French cinema.