What About China?

In 1986, Trinh T. Minh-ha was the guest editor of a special issue of Discourse titled “She, the Inappropriate/d Other,” which included, among other texts, a translation of Roland Barthes’s “Alors la Chine?” More than thirty years later, in What About China? Trinh reprises Barthes’s question by revisiting footage she shot in the country in 1993 and 1994. Images of rural life are accompanied by a polyvocal narration that includes passages from writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo’s 2017 book Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up, read by the author. Taking the concept of harmony and the omnipresence of disappearance as guiding interests, Trinh’s multilayered and multidisciplinary film continues her long-standing inquiry into the possibilities of counter-ethnography.