Cinematic Modernity and Enunciation: Two Priorities for a Decolonial Film Studies

This article engages contemporary discourses of decolonisation in the arts and humanities in order to pose the question: what might constitute a Decolonial Film Studies? The argument proposes two priorities: a critique of the conceptual category of cinematic modernity and a return to (and reinvigoration of) the film semiotic category of 'enunciation'. In the first sense, I offer a critique of uses of modernity in film history and theory – from early cinema theorists to proponents of modernist art cinema – arguing for a decolonial interrogation of the limited geopolitical and cultural frames of analysis, typically employed in such analyses. On the second point, I turn to the dominant category of ‘representation’, which has been described as 'a toxic word in the vocabulary of modernity and modern epistemology’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 108) and propose instead the concept of ‘enunciation’. While a significant concept for film theorists (including Christian Metz, Francesco Casetti and Warren Buckland), I argue for a decolonial redeployment of the term as a productive alternative.