Duke University Press D-Passage: The Digital Way

D-Passage is a unique book by the world-renowned filmmaker, artist, and critical theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. Taking as grounding forces her feature film Night Passage and installation L'Autre marche (The Other Walk), both co-created with Jean-Paul Bourdier, she discusses the impact of new technology on cinema culture and explores its effects on creative practice. Less a medium than a "way," the digital is here featured in its mobile, transformative passages. Trinh's reflections shed light on several of her major themes: temporality; transitions; transcultural encounters; ways of seeing and knowing; and the implications of the media used, the artistic practices engaged in, and the representations created. In D-Passage, form and structure, rhythm and movement, and language and imagery are inseparable. The book integrates essays, artistic statements, in-depth conversations, the script of Night Passage, movie stills, photos, and sketches. Review "In a world of intervals--spaces between things--Trinh has the unique ability to connect things and to articulate their interdependence. Presence requires absence, something nothing, reality illusion, and being nonbeing. Trinh's perspective enables her to shed considerable light on the way digital technology 'impacts upon the foundation of our knowledge and upon our perceptions of the world.'"--John Belton "Film Quarterly" "On formal grounds alone, D-Passage achieves a miraculous level of pushing the basis of academic publishing forward and calls into question the motivations behind any kind of 'safe' work, be it in the name of art or academia. Fortunately, Trinh is not only a provocateur in the best sense, but also a rigorous intellectual who is fully capable of managing experimental approaches without allowing these potentially unwieldy attempts to overwhelm the content of her work. Even better still - she appears to have a wicked sense of humor about it all."--Clayton Dillard "Journal of American Culture" (9/1/2015 12:00:00 AM) "Trinh consistently challenges the readers to deform and form their understandings of digital arts and film, particularly in thinking of the impact of technology on the spirit of cinema. D-Passage transcends the clarity that academic discourse demands and makes itself readable for those who are willing to take up the challenge."--Arezou Zalipour "Media International Australia" (12/13/2016 12:00:00 AM) "Trinh meditates on the complex interrelations between individual selves speaking from unique and particular places in space and time . . . between speakers-writers and readers-hearers. I would argue that embedded in that meditation are the traditional philosophical issues of nature of self, reality, and knowledge. Most important, however, Trinh touches on what I take as the core essence of philosophy, the reinvention of thought adequate to a changing world." --Andrea Nye "Hypatia" About the Author Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, multimedia artist, writer, composer, and postcolonial feminist theorist. Her award-winning films―including Night Passage, The Fourth Dimension, A Tale of Love, Shoot for the Contents, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Naked Spaces – Living Is Round, and Reassemblage―have been shown at film festivals and in museums around the world. She is the author of numerous books, including Elsewhere, Within Here; Cinema Interval; Framer Framed; When the Moon Waxes Red; and Woman, Native, Other. She is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies, and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.