Representations Of Race And Ethnicity In Film

6 Pages 1510 Words

Introduction

The issue of representing race and ethnicity is a controversial one. While ethnicity and race are related concepts, the concept of ethnicity is rooted in the idea of societal groups, marked especially by shared nationality, tribal afilliation, religious faith, shared language, or cultural or traditional origins and backgrounds. Whereas race is rooted in the idea of biological classification of homo sapiens to subspecies according to morphological features such as skin color or facial characteristics. "Ethnicity" is sometimes used as a euphemism for "race". It is a term also used to justify real or imagined historic ties as well. Ethnicity goes far beyond the modern ties of a person to a particular nation (e.g., citizenship), and focuses more upon the connection to a perceived shared past and culture .
Many representations of race and ethnicity are created and shaped by popular culture and media. In the film ‘Black Rain’, the concepts of race and ethnicity are represented to show the conflict between two races; namely the Mongoloid race and the Caucasian race. This paper will aim to criticize these representations in light of related readings in order to question these representations. I will start by examining the representations for the Mongoloid race, followed by the Caucasian race. Due to the length limit of this paper, only the most important points will be discussed and even so, in summary.


Inferior Mongoloid Race

In the film ‘Black Rain’ the Mongoloid race is represented and portrayed as inferior to the Caucasian race. The film is in fact a result of Orientalism; orientalism being the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient (Mongoloid race) – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western (Caucasian) style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Or...