ReFocus: The Films of Trinh T. Minh-ha
Film Studies Series: Edinburgh University Press
Volume Description:
This anthology, entitled ReFocus: The Films of Trinh T. Minh-ha, explores Trinh’s films individually and comparatively with Vietnamese and transnational works. The chapters investigate how this feminist, postcolonial scholar-artist interweaves academic theory and experimental cinema to question truth, imagination, gender, nation, identity, and memory. Trinh’s oeuvre includes nine feature films, many of which have won prestigious international film awards. Scholars often interpret Trinh’s theories through her neologisms of “to speak nearby” and “elsewhere,” and they delve into her artistic relationship with ethnomusicology, montage, and repetition and her views of postcoloniality, feminism, queer studies, refugees, nomadism, boundaries, and dimensions. While individual articles have been published analyzing Trinh’s films, her cinema has not been comprehensively reviewed within a single volume in any language.
This volume holistically analyzes Trinh’s cinematic techniques that visually and sonically present her themes and cultural critiques. These technical and formal elements include Trinh’s iconic use of visual and auditory montage, disjointed audioscapes, repetition, positionality, decentering, and blurring between ethnography, documentary, essayistic, and narrative film design. This text contains an introduction, twelve chapters, and an interview, which functions as a comprehensive conclusion and an opportunity for Trinh to share her thoughts on her current scholar-artist works as she embarks on life after her 2020 retirement from the UC Berkeley Rhetoric Department. The chapters in this volume all present innovative understandings of Trinh’s thematic concerns, intersect her cultural critiques within larger academic dialogues, and deconstruct her cinematic techniques that promote the questioning of received knowledge within global spheres.
Expected publication early Spring 2026
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