Commodification of Otherness : A qualitative postcolonial analysis of representation in French contemporary cinema

Abstract: This thesis investigates how colonial legacies shape representational practices in contemporary French cinema and interrogates how hierarchical differences are produced and challenged in the cinematic media. Combining the fields of postcolonial theory and culture studies enables a theoretical framework that connects contemporary cultural debates about the politics of representation with the legacies of colonial stereotypes and racialized imageries. Through the application of qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis the thesis strives to make a theoretical contribution to the existing body of litterateur that is empirically driven. Additionally an intersectional dimension will be included as the thesis addresses the question of representations in relation to race, gender, class and sexuality and further how power operates through culture as a production of knowledge. The major findings of the thesis consist of how the empirical material reveals how contemporary cinematic expressions reuse colonial racial stereotypes and appropriate blackness as instrumental in commodification of “otherness”. Accordingly the thesis challenges dominant notions of the impact of race in a French context.   KEYWORDS: Colonial discourse, representation, cinema, intersectional, appropriation, commodification, otherness.