Description
Book SynopsisHerstories on Screen is a transnational study of feature narrative films from Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand/Aotearoa that deconstruct settler-colonial myths. Kathleen Cummins offers in-depth readings of ten works by a diverse range of women filmmakers, revealing how they skillfully deploy genre tropes.
Trade ReviewThis compelling study explores how mainstream narrative films about former white-settler nations, in the hands of an emerging generation of female filmmakers, were reshaped into critiques of dominant frontier myth-histories.
Herstories on Screen articulates how these directors explore the contradictions in the project of nation building, bringing to the forefront the roles of women—white, Black, and indigenous—whose stories have long been overlooked. -- Susan White, University of Arizona
Herstories on Screen is a balanced and robust treatment of films by female directors who take up their home countries' national mythologies. Written in lucid prose, it engages with the feminist film theory canon and its revisions via queer, post-colonial and indigenous interrogations. Cummins deftly weaves theory with consistently astute textual analyses, making it an eminently teachable text. Urging the consideration of film as a political tool, this book addresses what these films do for representations of women, the subaltern, the maternal role, and landscape as metaphor, among many others. -- Berkeley Kaite, McGill University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Herstories in the Counter Narrative Tradition
1. Women’s Storytelling—Narrative, Genre, and the Female Voice
2. Debunking the Cult of True Womanhood/Motherhood on the Frontier
3. Feminist Symbolic Frontier Landscapes
Conclusion
Appendix: The Films
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
