White women in racialised spaces, or Claire Denis’s double vision of ‘Africa’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article proposes an examination of the white woman’s positionings within the French postcolonial structures of race and gender in two of Claire Denis’s films: Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Using an intersectional frame of reference which combines postcolonial theory, Third World feminism and geography/spatiality, this article demonstrates that these two films unearth structures of power and inequality that situate the white female of the colony not as subjugated by the patriarchal order, as has been argued, but as an agent of imperialism in herself. This analysis shows that Denis’s films anchor their aesthetic sensibility and narrative discourse within pictorial and narrative practices specific to, or appropriated by, imperialism, such as mapping, landscape painting and cinema. These films reveal a rhetorical and visual inventory of colonial tropes that ineluctably structure Denis’s cinematic Africa as a space which, through racial privilege, the white woman claims as her own.