Sites of oppositional consciousness: the construction of an alternative cyborg in Trinh T. Minh‐ha’s Night Passage

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Sites of Oppositional Consciousness:

The Construction of an Alternative Cyborg in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Night Passage

By April Baca

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS

May 2018

Copyright 2018 April Baca
2

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to express my sincere gratitude for my primary reader, Amelia Jones, whose guidance,
direction, and expertise in the ever-shifting field of gender and digital new media was
instrumental in the formation of this thesis. I consider myself fortunate to have had the
opportunity to work alongside her while at USC and am forever grateful for the continued
kindness and support that she has shown me. I would also like to thank my second and third
thesis committee members, Patty Chang and Karen Moss, for their generosity in providing
routinely thoughtful, critical, and constructive feedback. Karen, thank you again for your
continued guidance and encouragement, which I consider equally instrumental to the
development of both this thesis, and my time, at Roski.

I would also like to thank Chela Sandoval, whose seminal essay “U.S. Third World Feminism:
The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World” (1991) was
foundational in my examination of the issues discussed in this text.

Finally, I would like to thank my son, Hunter and partner, Andrew, for supporting me in all my
endeavors and patiently waiting for me to finish writing. I love you both.

3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 2
Abstract 4
Introduction 5
The Cyborg 6
Introduction to Night Passage 21
Synopsis of Night Passage 23
Theory and the Cyborg in Night Passage 28
Conclusion 43
Bibliography 45

4

ABSTRACT

This thesis will look towards the state of marginalized groups and the role of identity as a
construct in cyborg theory as well as the possibility of reformulated configurations of (or
necessitated resistance to) the construction of the cyborg. I examine here why even cyborg
theory often ends up reinforcing white and patriarchal norms. I hypothesize that this is due in
part due to the separation of postcolonial discourse from digital new media theory (dominated by
assumptions of whiteness), thereby shortchanging feminist and of color creativity in relation to
any theory relating to new media or new technologies. I consider these points through the lens of
the work of US-based Vietnamese film-maker and feminist theorist, Trinh T. Minh-ha, in
particular her film Night Passage (2004) which exemplifies a convergence of an alternative
construction of the cyborg and postcolonial theory. My consideration of these theories will
similarly be framed utilizing Chela Sandoval’s notion of differential consciousness as examined
within her seminal text “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional
Consciousness in the Postmodern World” (1991). Sandoval’s employment of differential
consciousness, or a preemptive subjectivity, endures as a theoretical strategy rooted in one’s
subjective difference as a key element in responding to and opposing hegemonic power.

5

INTRODUCTION
Theories of gender and sex and race and ethnic identity have long tended to develop
around areas of cultural studies relating to people of color, queers, or feminists, whose work is
often reduced to their identity. Discussions about identity have been glaringly absent in areas of
scholarship such as techno-theory, which are implicitly seen as identity neutral (i.e., white, male,
heteronormative). This thesis examines the case of cyborg theory in relation to a particular film
practice—the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha—in order to interrogate the bias in techno theory and
come to a greater understanding of how cyborg theory often ends up reinforcing white and
patriarchal norms.
To this end, this thesis will look towards the state of marginalized groups and the role of
identity as a construct in cyborg theory as well as the possibility of reformulated configurations
of (or necessitated resistance to) the construction of the cyborg. I examine here why even cyborg
theory often ends up reinforcing white and patriarchal norms. I hypothesize that this is due in
part due to the separation of postcolonial discourse from digital new media theory (dominated by
assumptions of whiteness), thereby shortchanging feminist and of color creativity in relation to
any theory relating to new media or new technologies. I consider these points through the lens of
the work of US-based Vietnamese film-maker and feminist theorist, Trinh T. Minh-ha, in
particular her film Night Passage (2004) which exemplifies a convergence of an alternative
construction of the cyborg and postcolonial theory. My consideration of these theories will
similarly be framed utilizing Chela Sandoval’s notion of differential consciousness as examined
within her seminal text “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional
6

Consciousness in the Postmodern World” (1991).
1
Sandoval’s employment of differential
consciousness, or a preemptive subjectivity, endures as a theoretical strategy rooted in one’s
subjective difference as a key element in responding to and opposing hegemonic power.
THE CYBORG
Instances of the triangulated relationships among whiteness and creators of color, gender
theory, and the construction of the cyborg can be traced back to the most recognized elaboration
of the cyborg within Donna Haraway’s seminal text “The Cyborg Manifesto” (1984). Haraway’s
conception of the cyborg here unfolds as one of the first theories of a “post-gendered”
2

identification, deliberately functioning in direct opposition to the rigidity imposed by gender
roles and otherwise essentializing feminist thought (i.e. ecofeminism and feminist paganism)
prevalent throughout the 1960s through the mid-to-late 1970s. Haraway situates her cyborg as “a
cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a
creature of fiction…a creature in a post-gender world;”
3
she explores the cyborg as in relation to
a techno-human backlash
4
intended to challenge the hegemonic doctrines of gender, class, and
race within white feminism. And while many theorists have since critiqued Haraway’s implicit
fetishization of women of color, namely her conception of the mestiza who functions as the
quintessential cyborg, Haraway nevertheless remains instrumental in initiating a conversation
that bridged the conception of the cyborg with people of color, particularly so in her

1
Chela Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the
Postmodern World,” Genders, no. 10 (University of Texas Press, 1991).
2
Though Haraway identifies the cyborg as a post-gendered construct, gender is explicitly utilized as key mobilizing
element in the construction of the cyborg throughout Haraway’s text.
3
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century,” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), 291.
4
Or, a feminist inversion and inevitably co-opt of the patriarchal military industrial complex.
7

considerations of the fractured identity that comes as consequence to othered bodies via the
“contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.”
5

Haraway’s prescient, and at times hyperbolic, examination of a rapidly transforming
technological landscape in relation to the body operates foremost through the lens of feminist
theory. The manifesto’s denaturalization of technological apparatuses and transformations (both
of which have never been neutral) grounds itself as explicitly working against the Euro-
American, patriarchal grip on digital and techno theorizing, or, the “masculinist reproductive
dream.”
6
This is made perhaps most clear in Haraway’s examination of the destruction caused by
a white, patriarchal capitalist paradigm, including but not limited to, militarized AI (artificial
intelligence) and the exploited corporeal body in relation to labor (labor here referring to both the
labor workplace, disproportionately comprised of people of color, as well as female reproductive
labor). Haraway notes that the inevitable instrumentality of the body within these structures,
“views the body as a kind of private satisfaction – and utility-maximizing machine [unveiling]
the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female gender roles.”
7
For women and people
of color, this is hyperbolized through what Haraway deems to be a bimodal structure, a
“homework economy”
8
that promotes surveillance and control of our day-to-day relations which
remain mediated by high-tech apparatuses and corporations.
Haraway’s schematic of what she has classified as the “informatics of domination”
explores this transformation of power ushered in via the blurring of the relationship between
technology and the body.
9
Specifically looking at the techno-corporeal relationship that

5
Ibid.
6
Ibid, 293.
7
Ibid, 307.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid, 309.
8

transpired at the close of the twentieth century, Haraway’s diagnosis of power relations via
informatics focuses explicitly on the governing of bodies via digital tech networks. This
conception of power wielded within digital technologies marks a shift similarly noted in Gilles
Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992), which also examines the move away
from a modernist logic of power as symbolized by the panopticon towards a more diffused
matrix of purposefully opaque control. With French philosopher Michel Foucault’s elaboration
of panopticism in Discipline and Punish (1975) the panopticon endures as the signifier of
disciplinary surveillance.
10
Expanding on this, the Deleuzian diffusion of control has graduated
in its distribution of disciplinary control in a way that, despite the illusion of “freedom,” “the
diffusion of power places us all the more under the forces of capitalism.”
11
Framing the
informatics of domination through a feminist lens, Haraway calls for the reconfiguration of
counter-informatics where the task is “to survive in the diaspora” of domination.
12
Beyond
questions concerning the creation, dissemination, and control of information in the digital sphere,
material survival for those dependent on these apparatuses remains one of the most concerning
elements of these relations. Though Haraway briefly touches on the erosion of the welfare state
that comes as a result of these structures, it seems unlikely that those reliant on these systems
would be able to access the utopic cyborgian identity proposed at the start of Haraway’s
manifesto, an identity that, Haraway asserts, “is the self feminists must code.”
13
This assertion
prompts questions regarding those whose identities are carefully withheld from particular data

10
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 177).
11
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” October, 59 (Winter, 1992), 5.
12
Ibid, 308.
13
Ibid.
9

spheres (such as undocumented persons) and the increasingly complicated relationship all
twenty-first century people have with surveillance and the construction of a digital identity.
14

Despite the positive force of Haraway’s manifesto, which functions still as a seminal
fixture for conversations surrounding the cyborg, her comparative approach to race, gender, and
the cyborg seems indebted to a more common, universalist methodology that remains typical
within white feminist theory. That is, she examines the construct of race as an oppression that
functions in addition to gender rather than as a separate condition to be diagnosed altogether.
15

This is typified by Haraway’s specific introductory examination of contemporary feminists and
feminism within Manifesto, only later adding the woman of color (or, race to gender) as a
galvanizing figure. While Haraway’s article nonetheless represents an unusual bridging of the
then usually disparate discourses of new media theory, postcolonial theory, and feminist theory,
considerations of the histories of subjugation, exploitation, and informatics in relation to women
and people of color remains largely missing. This is made explicit within Haraway’s claim that
women of color have always already functioned as “natural” cyborgs because of their non-
whiteness, noting that “‘women of color’ might be understood as a cyborg identity, a potent
subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical
layerings of her ‘biomythography’.”
16

14
This engagement with technology/technological apparatuses and the digital sphere can range from the
complicated relationship between undocumented workers and unregulated workplaces that benefit from its
exclusion, the surveilled policing of bodies (as within correctional institutions), state surveillance of information in
exchange for welfare programs, and more.
15
This is not to reduce the complexities of white feminism to a singular, universalist paradigm since, while these
modalities remain pervasive, recent efforts to address the issue of race has made tremendous progress in comparison
to earlier texts. This also encompasses Elizabeth Spelman’s notion of additive analysis, explained further below.
16
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century”, 311.
10

Haraway’s explicit mention of the relationship between physical labor and women and
people of color in her informatics of domination has since been countered by theorist Maria
Fernandez’s analysis of Haraway; Fernandez claims that the “liberational aspects of the cyborg
apply least to women forced to do repetitive work, who in [Chela] Sandoval’s words ‘“know the
pain of the union of machine and bodily tissue’.”
17
The role of labor facilitated by women and
people of color is magnified when considered in relation to the material consequences of this
labor, which includes but is not limited to exclusion from workplace social benefits and living
wages. Alongside Haraway’s fetishization of women of color, the bridging of the virtual body
and the physical body introduces a complex web of relationships that, despite Haraway’s
endeavors, remain bound to the power relations that dictate them. While the mechanized
cyborgian body is presented as a space of plurality, giving “primacy to the individual…as an
opportunity for self-development and (re)creation,”
18
I would stress that the corporeal gendered
and raced body retains the lived experience and inscriptions of exploitation, marginalization,
and/or subjugation. In conjunction with these material implications, there remains questions of
culture and cultural practices as a component of one’s identity and cultural agency and of how
those are then transfigured within the borders of the technosphere. These questions are similarly
hyperbolized when considering how marginalized histories also factor into this.
Scholar Lisa Nakamura’s “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing
on the Internet” (2001) examines the additional dilemma of racial and cultural appropriation in
the digital sphere in what she identifies as identity tourism. With the plurality granted by (at the
very least) partial concealment of a users’ corporeal identity the presence of one’s online

17
Maria Fernandez, “Postcolonial Media Theory,” Art Journal 58, no. 3 (Fall, 1999), 60.
18
Ibid, 62.
11

subjectivity may be crafted into any number of forms.
19
Commercial algorithmic tracking, chat
rooms, social media, and netsurfing all function as the media onto which users “can describe
themselves and their physical bodies any way they like; they perform their bodies as text.”
20

Defining one’s gender, race, etc. as something emblematic of the user’s desired form has become
as simple as generating a Photoshopped image, creating an avatar, online identity theft, or using
a non-person image emblematic of the user’s desired identity.
Recent applications such as the increasingly popular Bitmoji permits users to craft a
cartoon avatar that is representative of the user’s desired gender, race, body type, and more.
Unlike the less popular avatar application, EmojiMe, Bitmoji does not require users to upload a
personal photo that the application would in turn use to create an avatar. Like other online role-
playing platforms, the “real identities of the interlocutors are unverifiable (except by crackers
and hackers, whose outlaw manipulations of code are unanimously construed by the internet’s
citizens as a violation of both privacy and personal freedom).”
21
For users opting to identify and
define themselves online with a race they don’t corporeally identify as, “racial otherness is put
into play as performance” with the guise of an online racialized identity functioning as a sort of
mask, or, tourism.
22
Without consequence of the corporeal ramifications that afflict persons of
color, online racial identity tourism for women of color likewise acts as a double oppression in
its perpetuation of both gendered and racial stereotypes.
Considering that both postcolonial and digital media discourses have foundationally
similar aims of destabilizing singular notions of being (or at least of purportedly examining

20
Lisa Nakamura, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” Reading Digital
Culture, ed. David Trend (Oxford and Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 226.
21
Ibid, 227.
22
Ibid.
12

decentered subjectivities produced through colonialism and digital media), the still somewhat
limited research that addresses both components together (such as, discourses about the
postcolonial cyborg) remains concentrated in the work of a handful of individuals. This is, of
course, by no means meant to dismiss these seminal texts that have been published and sought to
address and bridge these concerns. Works such as Jennifer Gonzalez’s “The Appended Subject:
Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage” (2000) Maria Fernandez’s “Postcolonial Media
Theory”(1999) and Chela Sandoval’s “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology
of the Oppressed” (2000) have all been instrumental in bringing postcolonial theory to new
media discourses. With many of these texts published in the late 1990s and early 2000s during
the height of engagement with digital new media, few articles and books have addressed race in
techno-theory since this time, with many contemporary discussions surrounding the inert
whiteness of new media practices frequently disseminated across discourses or reserved for
inclusion exclusively within compilation readers.
A glaring example of the tendency to purvey white masculinist values under the guise of
a universal or “neutral” techno-theory can be found within The New Media Reader (2003), edited
by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, both professors in digital and computational media.
Presented as a comprehensive survey of texts that chronicles both historical and contemporary
developments of new media, the contributors to The New Media Reader are nearly 90%
apparently white Euro-American men.
23
Meanwhile, only eight texts (out of the 56 essays)
featured within the reader are by female-identified authors.
24
A more contemporary example of
an additional new media reader that purports itself as being “a core reading” within new media

23
The New Media Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003).
24
A glaring 60 male authors out of a total 68 authors (88%) have texts featured within the reader. Collapsing these
numbers even further, 54 of the 60 (90%) male contributors can be characterized as white while out of the 8 female
authors (12%) only 1, Nam June Paik, being a creator of color (1.8% in the larger schema of the total 68 authors).
13

studies is New Media: A Critical Introduction (2009) authored entirely by Martin Lister, Jon
Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran Kelly.
25
Each of the similarly white European
male authors are currently on faculty in the Department of Culture, Media, and Drama at the
University of the West of England, Bristol. With the text situating itself not only as a core
reading, but a contemporary endeavor looking towards both the present and future state of new
media technologies, the book’s thematic indexical content surpasses even that of The New Media
Reader with a staggering 47 subsections and 31 case studies.
26
Magnifying the same white
masculinist trends found within The New Media Reader, New Media: A Critical Introduction
foregoes the inclusion of any female or of color contributing authors and dedicates a dismal three
subsections on considerations of embodiment within virtual reality tech and cyberspace. With all
three sections condensed into a mere 7 pages (out of the over 400 pages of text), considerations
of the body and new media are divided into a general overview of posthuman cyborg theory,
anonymity, and the “retreat from physical facticity in our experience of identity”
27
in relation to
more hybrid cyborgian constructions.
These brief considerations of identity issues retain the ideological foundation of retreat
from corporeality in favor of a platform that, the authors claim, “filter[ed] out interaction with no
physical codes to locate gender, race, or class.”
28
The existence of these signifiers, of course, is
not restricted or even inherent to any specific physical state(s) (or code), as each has identifier is
sustained only as a socio-cultural construct. The supposition that one could locate gender with
specific physical demarcations remains a dangerously shortsighted equivocation of gender with

25
Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran Kelly, New Media: A Critical Introduction (New
York: Routledge, 2009), 14.
26
Ibid, 6.
27
Ibid, 211.
28
Ibid.
14

sex. Challenges to this supposition have since been written about extensively within feminist
theory, ranging from Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal book The Second Sex (1949) to more
contemporary texts by scholars such as Judith Butler and Royona Mitra, to name a few.
Similarly, evidence of the class status of users within new media beyond physical demarcations
can be evidenced in any number of ways, ranging from access to these technologies (be it due to
income-based limitations, educational, cultural, etc.) to its inevitable use.
29
Instances of racial
identity tourism (outlined earlier within a brief review of Nakamura’s identity tourism) alongside
the history of exploitive of color labor that has facilitated (and continues to facilitate) these
technologies likewise complicates New Media’s inference of physical racial codes having been
filtered out from the digital sphere. In relation to analog material production enabled by of color
labor, the codes of race outlined within New Media on the contrary seem to be not only
embedded within the technosphere, but a foundational precursor to its existence. Indicative of the
same commercial upgrade culture (or, the capitalist mode of production that functions to serve a
consumerist desire for material novelties) that sections of the text recurrently address, that is,
focusing predominately on novel first world issues relevant primarily to those with access to
industrial capitalist technologies, New Media at least devotes a handful of subsections to the use
of new media technologies in cultures outside of Euro-US traditions.
With figures as alarming as these within a compilation that purports itself to be a
“representative collection of critical thoughts, events, and developments from the computer’s
humanistic and artistic past” with “writings [that] are the most influential encapsulations of new
media’s most significant concepts and critiques,”
30
it is clear that questions concerning what

29
This includes pragmatic net use such as accessing job listings, child care and child care subsidy resources,
community services, housing, etc. in contrast to those who have the economic and educational wherewithal to
engage with the more theoretical capabilities of the technosphere.
30
Ibid xiii, xi.
15

remains at stake for women and people of color in digital new media theory, namely cyborg
culture, remains a central concern when discussing alternative and contemporary constructions of
the cyborg. Furthermore, the absence of representation by marginalized groups within cyborg
theory has numerous effects, the most obvious being the utopian reformation of subjectivity
within the technosphere via the cyborg figure.
The utopian construction of the cyborg, however, seems indicative of the larger division
within digital new media theory, in particular the complete absence of postcolonial discourse
within it. The binary of absence and/or presence of race is perhaps most clearly evidenced
between VNS Matrix’s “Cyberfeminist Manifesto,” which situates gender/female embodiment as
the sole ground to be transgressed wherein “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix”
31
while the
incorporation of race within Chela Sandoval’s “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the
Methodology of the Oppressed” outlines Sandoval’s notion of differential consciousness and the
technologies constituted within it.
32
With VNS Matrix’s “Cyberfeminist Manifesto” functioning
as an extension of Haraway’s argument about the cyborg and Sandoval’s paralleling it, both
formations (the absence/presence of race within the cyborg figure) nevertheless reveal the
infinite contradictions that are inherent within the interface between the body and machine,
particularly in relation to female embodiment.
33

31
VNS Matrix (Julianne Pierce, Josephine Starrs, Francesca da Rimini), “Cyberfeminist Manifesto” (1991)
https://vnsmatrix.net/the-cyberfeminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century/
32
Chela Sandoval, “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed,” CyberSexualities: A
Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark (University of Edinburgh Press, 2000).;
Sandoval’s notion of differential consciousness implies a new formation of subjectivity that is developed under
conditions of multiple oppressions. This subjectivity is self-consciously fluid and is manifested within the
framework of U.S. peripheral world feminism. Sandoval’s mode of differential conscious has been incited as the
theoretical foundation upon which this paper is written.
33
Haraway gave Sandoval full credit within her Cyborg Manifesto for helping her initially to develop the ideas in
the essay.
16

In Elizabeth V. Spelman’s article “Theories of Race and Gender: The Social
Construction of Whiteness” (1982) the critique of this additive approach is undertaken
specifically in relation to the erasure of black women, which Spelman notes as “treating
racialized oppression as if it were a further burden than her oppression in a sexist but non-racist
society, when in fact, it is a different burden.”
34
Of course, the lineage of examining both gender
and race as additive can be traced back further than the myriad of white feminist ideologies that
preceded Haraway’s cyborg. With people of color (in particular women of color) marginalized,
infantilized, exploited, displaced, and/or tortured via the colonial power wielded by white men,
in North American and Euro-American contexts, white women retained a conflicted position in
their ability to continue to benefit from white, racist power structures despite their oppression
within its patriarchal and heteronormative order. With anthropological typology providing
pseudoscientific genetic and/or phrenological support for nationalist/racist ideologies,
35
both
historic and contemporary structures of power continue to make clear that individuals seen as
different or other in relation to the hegemonic structures of whiteness, maleness, and Christian-
ness would suffer any number of consequences prompted by anxieties around such perceived
difference. Considering the legacy of violence perpetuated by colonialist, patriarchal, and
imperialist endeavors, it seems not only egregious, but a violent reiteration of these very power
structures to suggest a supposed fluidity for bodies to exist purportedly free from any power
relations within the technosphere.

34
Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Theories of Race and Gender: The Social Construction of Whiteness,” Quest: A Feminist
Quarterly 5, vol. 4 (1982), 43.
35
On this point, see Katharina V. Hammerstein, “Imperial Eyes: Visuality, Gaze, and Racial Differentiation in Texts
and Images Around 1900,” Colloquia Germanica 43, no. 4 (2010), 299.
17

This problem is even more the case when agency is removed from the corporeal body as
seen in recent theories speculating on post-human ontologies, which decenter the body in favor
of a reconceived being that inhabits a disembodied, digitized subjectivity. Examples of this post-
humanist approach since the 1990s include the work of literary theorist Katherine N. Hayles,
who asserts that “there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily
existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot
teleology, and human goals.”
36
An additional example of contemporary post-human cyborg
theory is similarly found within medical ethicist James Hughes’ Citizen Cyborg: Why
Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (2005) which
outlines Hughes’ proposition for a nomadic break from our corporeal subjectivity. Hughes’
proposition for the death of the (embodied) subject in lieu of what he deems to be a shared
“desire to control the body”
37
ignores the historical decentering of people whose subject-hood
has not been recognized and/or denied and looks instead to how posthuman cybernetics would
yield a “tremendous improvement in our abilities, societal outcomes, the nation’s productivity,
and the quality of life.”
38

Outside of the frightening implications of the total abandonment of the body, this post-
Cartesian approach to reformulated subjectivities within the digital sphere by Hayles, a white
feminist techno-theorist, unfortunately comes as no surprise. One only needs to look back to both
the prevalence of whiteness and implicit masculinism within digital new media making and
theorizing as well as the historical marginalization and erasure of the body of the other from this

36
Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3.
37
James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future
(MA: Westview Press, 2005), 7.
38
Ibid.
18

domain to understand the urgency of reconfiguring this discourse. For if one’s identifications
already coincide with a privileged subject position of the hegemonic order, one has always had
access to the ability to separate oneself, at least in the abstract, from the material consequences of
racialized embodiment. This access is not available, at least not in the same way, to people
perceived as racially other to the dominant order. It remains worth noting that despite any
attempts to attain immanence (or, the ability to imagine oneself as disembodied) this will always
remain an impossibility, even for those most likely to be able to sustain the mirage (i.e. white
men in our culture).
39

Looking back to the cyborg, Haraway’s conception, alongside the theories of numerous
others, seems to come in tension with its own binary logic as it re-inscribes the fantasy of
technology as obviating the body. She claims for the cyborg a radical function of undermining
western binary constructs; for Haraway, the cyborg endures as a transitionally liminal being, one
that exists “between the self and other, subject and object, [it] permits quasi-tactile manipulation
of computational objects that exists on the boundary between the physical and the abstract.”
40

The historical trajectory of the cyborg in the 1990s, when the internet was still in its nascent
stages and the formation of a fluid, digital identity was still seen as possible and as potentially
radical, evidences this shift perhaps most clearly. Recent conceptions of the cyborg, however,
have remained somewhat stagnant and interlocked within the varying power dynamics that
dictate the technosphere; this is exemplified within considerations of the prevalence of digital
surveillance, concerns about accessibility and the digital divide within the technosphere, and the

39
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York:
Vintage Books, 1952).; notably utilized by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, the concept of immanence or
imagined disembodiment examines the possibility of the subject existing outside of a Hegelian master-slave
dialectic, or as the sovereign other.
40
Zoe Sofia, “Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View” Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and
Cyberspace ed. Jenny Wolmark (1999), 56.
19

material implications for the non-technological body that come as consequence of outsourced
labor production. Similarly disconcerting instances of this can be seen in the rapid acceleration
of social media and the production of new kinds of “selves” as well as the looming threat of
artificial intelligence and robotics to the corporeal, working body.
The complex web of interchanging relationships that compose these systems in the social
sphere and the work place, purposefully opaque in their nature, inconspicuously operate too
abstracted from anything that can be clearly identified or diagnosed by those not already familiar
with their processes. The intentional obfuscation of these systems and their developments
inevitably hyperbolize the alienation of the subject from the same operations that facilitate the
creation of digital subjectivities. Of course, the cyborg remains in other ways entirely
emblematic of our present moment. With all the advances in digital capital that have been made
since Haraway initially discussed the issue in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” or what she deemed to be
“cyborg colonization work…uncoupled from organic reproduction,”
41
we’re left presently
immersed in an orgiastic realm of cognitive stimulation that monetizes our psychological
impulses.
42
The current rise of social media exemplifies this perhaps most clearly with apps such
as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat whose growing net worth (each app currently estimated
around $300 billion respectively) remains contingent on the triad of user sign-ups, in-app gaming
and/or upgrade expansions, and revenue accumulated through ad tracking.
43
The mass
production of the technological apparatuses that facilitate these cyborgian spaces occludes and
haphazardly attempts to remove the material consequences that arise from the space of

41
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 292.
42
Social media is a primary example of this capital, wherein the user is rewarded with emotional/sensory stimulation
upon receiving likes, friend requests, digital currency for online games, and so on via their interaction with the
platform. Robotics and artificial intelligence likewise generate this type of stimulation.
43
Estimated social media net worth taken from a February 2018 NASDAQ stock estimate of each company
(Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat).
20

production to facilitate ease of purchase. Here, the user can have all of her/his physical impulses
transferred into a digital interface that inevitably monetizes interactive labor (social media being
perhaps the pinnacle example of this). With apps such as Facebook and Instagram, the body is
obscured again as the consequential basis for a digital subjectivity, one composed via third party
algorithms and online tracking, formulating a cyborgian iteration of the user composed via data
collection. Here, however, the subject is still far from escaping the power relations that govern
this space, as there is still a production of disembodied labor via the circulation of signs,
knowledge, and information. Reiterating the western dualisms that the cyborg figure seeks to
negate, this production of labor (both material/immaterial) is inevitably reproductive both in and
outside of the technosphere.
44
Far from the fluidity promised within the cyborg texts of the
1990s, the construction of the cyborg in present day endeavors remains a monetized composite
collated from a fragmented engagement with its user.
Contemporary engagement with the cyborg and attempts to rectify its paradoxical
construction as a fragmented amalgamation of power relations and user subjectivity is perhaps
best exemplified within the US-based Vietnamese film-maker and feminist theorist Trinh T.
Minh-ha’s film Night Passage (2004). Collapsing concerns ranging from gender and (corporeal
and digital) embodiment, cross-cultural representation, and mobility and accessibility within the
technosphere, Trinh’s Night Passage converges postcolonial and digital new media theory in an
exploration of the of color and gendered cyborg subject.

44
When considering issues of reproductive labor, questions concerning gender likewise come back into play.
21

INTRODUCTION TO NIGHT PASSAGE
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s digital film Night Passage unpacks questions central to my
exploration of the limits of cyborg theory. Despite it calling forth elements from the bodies of
digital new media theory, feminist postcolonial theory, as well as cyborg theory, the film has
rarely been discussed in larger conversations surrounding these discourses. Exemplifying a
rigorous attempt to redress the all too common separation of postcolonial discourse from new
media theory, the film presents a visual navigation of the phenomenology of body/tech relations
through a transculturalist, or cross-cultural, and feminist lens. Rather than diagnosing difference
as an additive set of categories or a streamlined, stable state of being for those deemed to inhabit
the category, intersectional cultural, gendered, sexual, and racial differences here undermine
fixed notions of identity via plural subjectivities within the digital sphere while keeping viewers
aware of relative power relations dictated within and beyond it.
Explicitly theorizing through making, Trinh materializes through Night Passage a
postcolonial, feminist, and new media critique that succinctly interlocks a milieu of
contemporary issues and considerations surrounding the construction of the cyborg. Trinh’s
explicit knowledge of avant-garde cinema and art (as well as their respective surrounding
theories) since the mid-20
th
century is exemplified within the film through her experimental
cinematic strategies, all of which lend themselves in the visualization of the film’s theoretical
framing. Within this convergence Trinh similarly brings mid-century avant-garde strategies to
both feminist and postcolonial theory and vice versa. Trinh’s cinematic strategies as well as
narrative elements and characters reveal the plurality of her engagement with varying issues and
concerns surrounding identity and the contemporary cyborg figure. Strategies including, but not
limited to, the use of light, time, film cuts, and editing alongside the detail given to character
22

development and the film’s narrative work jointly to actualize a theory that addresses both race-
ethnicity and sex-gender while providing a cyborg theory through the film.
Acting as Trinh’s interpretation of Miyazawa Kenji’s novel Night Train to the Stars
(1934) Night Passage functions at its very inception as a reformulation of a previous state (or
narrative, to be more specific) as well as a reformulation in terms of medium. A pseudo-
hallucinatory voyage through time and space, Night Passage raises larger questions of
representation, form, gender, race/ethnicity, and cyborgian embodiment via its protagonists and
immaterial existence as a digital film. Many of the events depicted within Night Passage are
shown by means of fragmentation with either single images framed as sequences through a train
window or more subtly incorporated jump cuts between scenes. In the former, the train performs
liminality by literally transporting the characters between various states of being. The passage of
time, also a primary narrative point within the film, facilitates what Minh-ha has deemed as a
“time interval in which time intervals contain one another potentially ad infinitum” which
enables the film to run cyclically and “transcend visible realities…with tools that are inter-,
cross-, and transcultural by nature.”
45
Likewise, the formal Structuralist format of the train
windows seems to imply a sort of lens for the viewing eye (as well as the viewing ‘I’, or self),
implicating a sort of panopticon while traversing material/immaterial boundaries.
Though Trinh’s Night Passage retains thematic similarities to Miyazawa’s Night Train to
the Stars, in the larger scope of the film, Night Train to the Stars endures as an entirely separate
narrative. Following the story of a poor young boy, Giovanni, Night Train to the Stars relays the
story of a social outcast whose best friend accompanies him aboard a phantom train that travels

45
Trinh T. Minh-ha, D-Passage: The Digital Way (London: Duke University Press, 2013), 76, 54.
23

through wildly eccentric dimensions. At the end of their journey, Giovanni’s friend disappears
and is later discovered to have drowned. Upon hearing this news, Giovanni later returns to his
home to continue his work and bring milk to his mother.
46
While the major plot device employed
within Night Train to the Stars seems to revolve around the question of “true” happiness, Night
Passage looks instead to the cyclical nature of being and transformation.
Night Passage opens with a fragmented train window frame on loop, reiterating the
cyclical nature of both the film itself as well as its engagement with time, gender, culture,
geography, and technology. Repeated and undefined characters can be seen interacting with
others within their respective booths with their reflections hazily imprinted onto nearby
windows. With the color scheme primarily muted, instances of hyper-saturation within the film
hyperbolize pivotal narrative moments while simultaneously cuing Trinh’s interest in the cultural
significance of certain colors. With the majority of the film taking place in primarily gray-toned
sets, Trinh’s interest in the color gray as a color of mutual reflection parallels the relationship
between the film’s protagonists as well as that of the viewer and the protagonists, and/or the
viewer and the technosphere.
47
The in-betweenness of the color gray likewise seems to reiterate
the interstitial relationships, identities, and experiences found within the film.
SYNOPSIS OF NIGHT PASSAGE
The film’s protagonist, Kyra, is shortly introduced after the film’s Structuralist celluloid
framing of the night train where she can be seen going through a seemingly day-to-day routine
working at a furniture fabrication factory before heading back home on a train. Once aboard the

46
Kenji Miyazawa, Night Train to the Stars and Other Stories, trans. John Bester (New York: Kodansha, 1987), 2.
47
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Twilight Walk,” Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared (New York: Fordham University,
2016), 49.
24

train, Kyra reunites with a hallucinatory apparition of her best friend, Nabi, whose wet hair and
apprehensive appearance prompts Kyra to suddenly reminisce over her late mother’s
disappearance. Following Nabi and Kyra’s brief reunion, a young boy that the two girls know
(later revealed to be a family friend named Shin) as well as two conductors appear. The
conductors’ introduction is immediately followed by the train’s first station stop to a beach
where mounds of colored sand elicit sound when stepped on. Dancing and moving their way
directly across from where a small band is playing, the group of friends come across a large
outline of a body lit by multiple strands of light. With Nabi’s suggestion that they follow the
lights, Nabi, Kyra, and Shin proceed to jump into the outlined body of lights and immediately
disappear.
Following the group’s interdimensional jump, Night Passage shifts into a more
traditional engagement with the cyborg through a corporeal hybridity in relation to analog
technologies. Arriving at what is presented as a dinner party, Nabi, Kyra, and Shin find
themselves escorted by a woman who welcomes them while harnessing sensors, electrodes, and
wires around Kyra and Nabi’s bodies. A seemingly disoriented Shin proceeds to leave the dinner
table only to immediately find himself walking around what appears to be an industrial plant.
Concerned about his whereabouts, Nabi and Kyra leave to find Shin, after which their sensors,
wires, and electrodes all immediately disappear. A woman dressed in a bright red ensemble
confronts the two girls (with Shin suddenly in tow behind them) and utters loudly to herself,
“leopards, a member of the cat family that lives in Africa and Asia. He is a clever hunter. He. He
is a hunter. Of course, only ladybugs, cows, hens, and mother animals with their young are called
‘she’. The one you see here is not a woman.”
48
The woman’s voice echoes throughout the

48
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Night Passage, 2004, film, 35:14.
25

confines of the space as her body is strewn into slowed down and stretched out fragments.
Following Nabi, Kyra, and Shin’s fragmented and, at times, nonsensical conversation with the
woman in red, a violent vibration takes hold of the entire room. Proceeding the shaking the group
of three then find themselves in a labyrinth of corridors which ultimately lead back out to the
night train. Climbing aboard and then immediately exiting without the train having moved, Nabi,
Kyra, and Shin find themselves in a metalworking shop where they’re invited to paint a large
metal sculpture. After a moment of painting the film cuts to an interlude of a black screen after
which all three are returned to the night train.
While aboard the train Nabi, Kyra, and Shin pass through what appear to be tunnels filled
with fire, later revealed by a nearby passenger to be scorpion fires. As the passenger proceeds to
recount a fable of a scorpion tormented by its need to sustain its life by consuming others and its
desire to be freed from this cycle, the frame of the film runs on loop and is intermittently broken
up with red blocks. Concluding the story of the scorpion it is announced that the night train has
reached its last destination, the dance and light station. Holding onto one another’s hands and
walking across a large field almost indiscernible in the darkness of the night, Nabi and Kyra soon
find themselves in a small room filled with ankle deep water. Partially removing their clothes,
they stand in front of a wall marked with a painted, red circle and find themselves once again
being transported. Two dancers intermittently appear throughout the space of the wormhole,
embraced in the arms of one another and swirling around in circles in the center of the room;
both of their bodies visually overlaid with a film strip of ebbing water. Nabi closes her eyes and
the two girls once again find themselves in the field, hand in hand, making their way through the
dark. Approaching a beach after having made their way through an expansive field, Kyra (now
alone and without Nabi) comes across a beached ship with a white mask attached to the bow.
26

Placing the mask onto her face, Kyra finds herself confronted with a being whose body has been
painted entirely in white. Moving slowly towards with her in sweeping, rhythmic gestures, Kyra
then mirrors the movements and initiates a seemingly ritualistic dance. Nabi appears suddenly
from behind the two and waves a red ribbon in a circular motion nearby as the being proceeds to
climb the ship, dropping a yellow umbrella to Kyra shortly thereafter. Moving slowly with the
umbrella, Kyra quietly disappears into the shadows of the night.
Following Nabi and Kyra’s encounter on the beach, the two find themselves on a boat
rowing past a group of fire dancers on a nearby shore. Moving closer to the shore, Nabi and Kyra
then find themselves in a room lit only by a white rectangular screen with both of their
silhouettes neatly framed within it. After speculating on their shared sentiment of feeling
watched, Nabi and Kyra leave the shadow space and wander into a room filled with small white
cubes which both presume to be the source from which the gaze was projected. A man whom
Kyra addresses as Uncle Boris along with his lab assistant, Helis, then approach both Nabi and
Kyra, welcoming them both to the House of the Immortals. The cubes, which are identified as
the immortals, are noted to be in the process of being capable of both language and song. Noting
that each of his robots are capable of smoking, Boris goes on to explain that “it’s less a bad habit
than an index of humanity. Something that we and they can share, so that theirs is not just an
empty immortality bearing the passage or the trace, even a small trace, of humanity.”
49

Concluding their conversation Nabi and Kyra travel back through the room of shadows
and enter the laboratory of Uncle Boris’ colleague, Dr. Kennedy. A few large screens situated
behind the group play sonographic images of what appears to be an amalgamation of various

49
Ibid, 1:10:44.
27

body parts and wires, each pulsating in conjunction with one another. As the doctor goes on to
explain the issue of energy convergence into reanimated matter, the camera begins to pan away
from the group, moving to highlight a shadow screen with the silhouette of a woman actively
using a video camera until the screen gradually fades to black. Following the brief interlude of
darkness Nabi and Kyra come across a still lake with a figure in white crouched over. The figure
is shortly thereafter approached by another figure, also dressed in white and wearing a traditional
Japanese Noh mask.
50
The approaching figure moves rhythmically in conjunction with the muted
flutes playing in the background as the shear cloth draped around her shoulders flutters in the
breeze. The two figures parallel each other’s movements until the masked figure’s cloth is
removed by the other dancer, their intertwined and jerking bodies both slowly submerging into
the water.
Suddenly back aboard the train Nabi and Kyra rejoin Shin and the other passengers, one
of which gifts Kyra a small lit candle. Taking the candle from him, Kyra turns around to discover
that both Nabi and Shin have disappeared. Frantically searching for Nabi, Kyra begins to cry as
she rests on one of the arms of the train car; her small candle now extinguished. Closing her
eyes, Kyra then finds herself in a field back in the fourth dimension where she picks up a bike
that she then rides away from the sound of a nearby train. The film then pans in on a receding
body of water with paper lanterns drifting alongside the current as an overlay of Nabi dances
alongside them.
Riding her bike along the pathway of a river, Kyra comes across a group of people
frantically searching the water. A woman runs up to Kyra and informs her that Nabi had jumped

50
The mask worn by both figures appears as a variation of a Noh Masukami mask. Masu, meaning more or
increasing, and kami meaning hair. The Noh Masukami mask is traditionally used as an invocation of an active
female goddess.
28

into the river to save Shin from drowning, but neither has come back to the surface. After
speaking briefly with her father, Kyra grabs her bike and leaves the beach. On her way home she
pauses at a bridge overlooking the river where Nabi presumably drowned; she proceeds to twirl a
red ribbon. As Kyra calls out for her friend, Nabi’s face is overlaid in the background, her gaze
looking out from beneath thick strands of wet hair. Kyra hunches over and begins to weep until
once again getting back onto her bike and continuing her trek over the bridge, marking the
conclusion of the film.
THEORY AND THE CYBORG IN NIGHT PASSAGE
The gender shift within Night Passage from that of Miyazawa’s story, that is, specifically
following two female protagonists rather than two male ones, is unsurprising considering Trinh’s
longtime engagement with feminist politics. Beyond a feminist reorganization of a traditionally
male-oriented story, gender within Night Passage elicits what Trinh denotes as being a “passage-
interval that characterizes women’s time”

and “recognizes the double political gesture, which
consists of inserting women into history, all while refusing the limiting linearity imposed by
history’s time – [time] as departure, progression, and arrival.”
51
The film’s thematic interest in
time specifically that of women’s time, can likewise be seen in the metaphoric function of the
train itself. Specifically functioning as a referent to Julia Kristeva’s text “Women’s Time”
(1981), the question reiterates Kristeva’s central argument that female subjectivity remains
divided between monumental time (eternity) and cyclical (biological, gestational, etc.) time.
52

With the division of both conceptions of time functioning against a linear historical time, the
attempt to self-incorporate and “gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history” is

51
Trinh T. Minh-ha, D-Passage: The Digital Way, 93, 76.
52
Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Signs, 7, no. 1 (1981).
29

iterated through Trinh’s conception of the night train.
53
Acting as a sort of transitional womb, the
night train carries its passengers through both time and dimensional variants, functioning as a
sort of nocturnal third space in between its station stops.
Trinh’s engagement with the construction of the self (selves) within the digital realm,
unlike utopian constructs of the cyborg separated from corporeality, is elicited in the film’s
emphasis on embodied and experiential knowledge (i.e., dancing, touching, etc.). Retaining the
plurality afforded to the cyborg figure, the bodies of the characters featured within Night
Passage (be it the protagonists, peripheral characters, or others) though physically similar
through the film, remain capable of interdimensional travel. This communication between the
phenomenal and the digital, or virtual, raises larger questions concerning the self/the other and
seems to iterate Trinh’s conception of the inappropriate/d other, or, “one who moves with always
two gestures.”
54
Here, the inappropriate/d other functions as both a subject incapable of being
appropriated as well as an inappropriate (or, according to Trinh, not quite other and not quite the
same) subject.
55
In relation to the cyborg figure, the inappropriate/d other remains applicable not
only as the subject incapable of being fully assimilated into the digital (or, the inability to
separate entirely from corporeality) but also as a subject situated within and between the physical
and digital plane. This is rendered in Night Passage through the protagonists’ physical inability
to be fully appropriated into the technosphere while simultaneously inhabiting a differential, or
inappropriate, subjectivity. Trinh’s engagement with the notion of duality can be seen within her
explicit interest in the politics of representation and form (the foundational premise to the film)

53
Ibid, 18.
54
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and
Difference,” Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory, eds. Karen A. Foss, Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin (CA:
Sage Publications, 2004).
55
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Inappropriate/d Artificiality,” An Interview with Marina Grzinic (1998).
30

as well as within the milieu of considerations surrounding reconfigurations of the cyborg, time,
gender, and liminality.
Looking back to the narrative of the dinner scene, the viewer is re-introduced to the
cyclical nature of the film and Trinh’s larger interest in the flexibility of technology and the
relationship between human and machine. That is, the group consisting of Nabi, Kyra, and Shin
are perpetually entering a new dimension via a tangible wormhole and are provided with context
to their surroundings only be means of engagement with side characters. Trinh’s subtle (and later
explicit) interest in the machine and the body (specifically, the female of color body) produces
especially this latter body as working in tangent with the digital and the analog as a cohesive,
though fused, vessel that is continually renewing and destroying itself. The various politics of
death, renewal, and gender at play in Night Passage are each presented in the context of the
storyline as “truths” (albeit implicitly unstable ones); each of these inevitably disintegrates
through various characters’ own admissions of their production, induction, and extension. This
dissolution of stability within the film is eschewed in favor of an embodied, experiential
knowledge that’s gained from both tangible and immaterial (light, sound, apparitions, etc.)
interactions within the varying dimensions.
The film’s subtle incorporation of our contemporary familiarly and consequential comfort
within the technosphere is illustrated by Trinh through Nabi and Kyra’s placation with being
connected into the digital via the analog technologies offered and attached to them. This is
illustrated within various scenes including, but not limited to, the dinner party where guests are
attached to sensory measurement devices and miscellaneous wiring as well as the material
wormholes the protagonists often readily jump into. Whether under the premise that the world is
illusionary (or not), knowledge in each dimension is understood among the characters to be
31

transmitted physically. The tangible transmission of knowledge likewise accounts for the
immaterial emissions (of sound, light, etc.) always occurring in connection to the material. In this
experiential space afforded to each of the characters, “the real, nothing else than a code of
representation, does not (cannot) coincide with the lived.”
56
The shared and implicit
understanding that any type of identification with these codes of representation (here, the “real”
is always only related to representation) continually remains of unimportance in the face of the
lived experience of knowledge within Night Passage.
57
Trinh’s cinematic framing via light and
sound within Night Passage meanwhile clarifies that which is otherwise obfuscated (namely, the
technology used in creating the film) in her earlier documentary style films including, but not
limited to, Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen (1983), Naked Spaces: Living is
Round (1985), and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989).
Eschewing the tendency towards portraying a narrative that is seemingly separate from
the devices used to produce it, Night Passage continually makes visible the film’s ideological
and material relationship, both of which remain dependent on technology. Trinh and Jean-Paul
Bourdier, who is credited with co-directing and producing the film, iterate the fictitious nature of
the film through the ongoing reveal of the camera itself (alongside the characters recognition of
being watched) which at different points in the film is in place to film scenes, specific characters,
as well as the viewer. Here, the function of representation (or of being seen) is paralleled
alongside Trinh’s use of an interdimensional character cast that is primarily comprised of people
of color. The thematic use of lighting in Night Passage is similarly utilized as additional, visual

56
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue,” Woman, Native, Other: Writing
Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 87.
57
This is likely why the characters within the film never try to ascertain any kind of explanatory truth from their
ability to cross dimensions and transverse time.
32

language, consolidating (or confusing) the relationship between what is being said and/or done
within varying points of the film. The narrative importance of light is also clarified by Trinh in
its implementation as the literal passage for character’s interdimensional travels within the
technosphere. Aside from the night train, whose relationship with light (or the lack thereof) is
made clear by means of the name itself, the incorporation of light and lighting within Night
Passage also acts as a referent to the issue of visibility. In pair with Trinh’s use of primary
and/or muted colors, Trinh’s employment of light exemplifies her interest in the “social
connotation of primary colors in working with multiplicity and the racial color line.”
58
The
visibility of color (both literally as well as in regard to its conceptual connotations to race) within
the digital sphere is perhaps the most explicit example of Trinh’s convergence of considerations
of race and ethnicity within the cyborgian landscape.
Reviewing the doubling of the self within the context of both Night Passage as well as
within Trinh’s written theoretical work, alliances and friendships can be seen working against the
difference (or, division) “between entities comprehended as absolute presences.”
59
This notion is
also made clear within the film through Nabi and Kyra’s close friendship which, despite their
inevitable physical separation at the conclusion of the film, is consistently represented as two
subjects that are simultaneously each other and themselves (as well as in the broader scope of the
technosphere, not themselves and/or each other). This is visually reinforced both through the
visual layering of Nabi’s face over Kyra’s on screen and vis versa, as well as verbally, such as in
a scene where the two girls are told by another character, “let’s start with a double. Friend is

58
Trinh T. Minh-ha, D-Passage: The Digital Way, 74.
59
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue,” Woman, Native, Other: Writing
Postcoloniality and Feminism, 88.
33

another self.”
60
Complicating the notion of the singular which remains indicative of the
“outgrowth of a dualistic system of thought,”
61
the self is conversely seen here in an infinite state
of being (me to me, you to you, you to me, me to you, ad infinitum).
Trinh’s notion of the multiple presence, or infinite layers, resonates with Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the chiasm, wherein the non-self and the self are always already
intertwined through seeing/being seen. Within the idea of the chiasm, “every relation with being
is simultaneously a taking and a being held, the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the
same being that it takes hold of.”
62
This intertwining likewise unfolds through repeated speech,
such as within the recording of Nabi and Kyra’s conversation that was played in the background
of the dinner party scene. Beyond the dinner party the group’s ongoing phenomenological
engagement with their surroundings, alongside the immaterial sound and light which so
frequently accompanies it, iterates the doubling and circularity of the self. The importance of
corporeality within the film, despite the body’s many im/material transfigurations and
adaptations (or, the occupation of both physical and non-physical states of being within the
technosphere), consequently endures as both experiential, tangible flesh as well as a sublimation
of itself as an interdimensional vessel that is simultaneously visible and invisible.
63
An extension
of this visibility and invisibility in relation to the doubled self likewise parallels Trinh’s emphasis
on the I/i/eye within the film. With the triad of the I/i/eye deferring, according to Trinh, “to

60
Night Passage, 39:00.
61
Ibid.
62
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 162.
63
This visibility and invisibility is visually materialized through both literal disappearance during interdimensional
travel as well as not/being seen by characters within the dimension that the film’s primary characters are occupying.
Similarly, Nabi’s brief appearance within what is characterized as the third dimension remains recognized only by
Kyra who, rather than inquiring as to how she’s come to the night train, instead muses on her own mother’s
disappearance.
34

infinity the layers whose totality forms ‘I’” the multiplicities of the self inevitably subverts the
capacity to attain any sort of fixed or affirmed identity.
64
It is worth noting here that the in-
betweenness of this triad takes place as woman’s I/i/eye in relation to traversing boundaries and
territories and shifting hegemonic positionalities. This is iterated through Trinh’s visual and
conceptual emphasis of a narrative that takes place primarily through the wavering perspectives,
stories, and choices of the film’s female protagonists, Nabi and Kyra.
The rules of night passage as conveyed by one of the two conductors during an
interdimensional transitory scene exemplifies the transitional nature of life into death and the
interchangeability between these passages that is afforded to those aboard the night train. Prior to
leaving the train, both Kyra and Nabi are told to “remember the rules of night passage, don’t stop
in the dark or you’ll be lost.”
65
Illustrating the necessity of movement whereby stagnation results
in death, be it corporeal or theoretical, the exploration of life and death exemplified within Night
Passage resides in the fluidity offered by means of the liminal, or, in-between spaces. Rather
than a linear system of boundaries, each of the characters (as well as the train and to an extent,
the film itself) likewise traverse various planes and time fluxes whose dimensional “realities”
remain constantly in motion. Trinh’s use of sound likewise remains in flux, at once temporal,
mystified, and then reattached to human or analogue causality. Trinh similarly disturbs the space
of the digital with the analogic, interrupting the spatial dynamics of how characters move
through the frame. The medium of the film itself, digital cinema, also incidentally exemplifies a
broader implication of mobility in its ability to be shown in nearly any location at nearly any
time. Stressing the importance of mobility and fluidity central to the figure of the cyborg, Trinh’s

64
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue,” 15. This will be expanded on later in
relation to Trinh’s engagement with bardo, or the liminal state between life and death in Tibetan Buddhism.
65
Night Passage, 51:20.
35

construction of an interdimensional diasporic cyborg figure inevitably challenges stabilized (or,
dominant) ideological constructs through the separation from any singular meaning, placement,
or relationship.
The thematic enunciation of in-betweenness which is signified via Trinh’s visual and
immaterial use of temporal form/lessness, likewise retains an important relationship and
emphasis on time. This form/lessness is exemplified within the use of characters whose
physicality is simultaneously present and non-present within the night passage. Trinh visually
represents this by having characters physically occupy a seemingly tangible, material space on
screen while at the same time, disrupting through the inference that each character is occupying a
dimension (the technosphere) separate from the film’s initial representation of the “real.”
66
With
concerns surrounding the themes of time and light literally signified within the title of the film
itself, the voyage made between dimensions almost always occurs without the viewer witnessing
any physical alterations to the space or bodies of those traveling. With the movement between
dimensions functioning as a metaphoric state of bardo (both while on the night train as well as
interdimensional travel outside of it), Trinh eschews visual representations of artificial
naturalism (that is, a literal and seemingly mimetic representation of what this transitory state
may resemble), instead suggesting parallels to the Tibetan tradition whereby life is suspended
(either post death or prior to re/birth) and one experiences a variety of phenomena. Trinh’s
application of bardo within the realm of the cyborg which engages both traditional Tibetan
theology alongside a contemporary configuration of the cyborg inevitably facilitates the

66
This is taken even further within Night Passage through each character’s intermittent disappearance and
reappearance within certain scenes, positing that even beyond their occupation within the night passage, each
character simultaneously inhabits their own layered dimension separate from the one shared by their companions.
36

construction of a nomadic figure whose identity endures as a cross-cultural transmutation
residing within both a digital and physical landscape.
With the stages of bardo separated into six different states within Tibetan Buddhism, each
station stop as well as the introductory representation of the tangible world the viewer is
introduced to within the film, inevitably seems to iterate many of the conceptions relative to each
one of the stages of bardo.
67
Within these intermediary states, alternative and purportedly
hyperbolic illusionary constructions fluctuate based on the person’s engagement within this
transitory space. Not strictly allocated to unperceivable and liminal experiential planes of
existence, the present moment also remains “a continual bardo, always suspended between the
past and the future.”
68
While the conception of bardo in its broader understanding encompasses
any transitional experience between states of being (be it corporeal or immaterial) via a Buddhist
lens, the experiential in-betweenness of this state also retains importance regarding the gender
swap initiated by Trinh within Night Passage. The initial identity of each of the characters,
though seemingly consistent with the character, is unveiled as temporal and is consistently
placed into question throughout the course of the film. The fluidity of one’s identity within this
space is iterated by Kyra as both she and Nabi move across the field in search of another
dimension. Holding hands, Kyra utters “die, dissolve, disappear, re-appear”
69
to Nabi, who
seems too concerned with finding a way out of the field to notice her friend’s comment.
Confirming her own corporeal death by means of this statement, Nabi’s intentional dismissal of

67
The six stages of bardo, referred to as the Six Bardos, are comprised of the Bardo of This Life, the Bardo of
Meditation, the Bardo of Dream, the Bardo of Dying, the Bardo of Dharmata (Inner Breath), and the Bardo of
Existence, or, Becoming.
68
Francesca Fremantle, Luminous Emptiness (Boston: Shambala Publications, 2001), 53.
69
Night Passage, 52:02.
37

this statement may likewise signify her own denial of her friend’s death, or determination to find
resolve by means of rebirth for her.
The film’s subtle enunciation of the spectator-observer relationship
70
is exemplified here
through the mask worn by both Kyra and the being, their eyes underneath it entirely
indiscernible. With Nabi as the sole spectator within the confines of this scene (as well as within
the larger schema of the film, since she is the only one capable of traversing the fourth
dimension), Trinh’s incorporation of a female protagonist leaves Nabi and the viewer(s) as the
primary producers of meaning. This shift away from the primacy of the inactive viewer and
scopophilic, phallocentric gaze within cinema, or the “active/male and
passive/female…structures of looking”
71
is reorganized by means of Trinh’s insertion of women
of color alongside the historical markers of “silhouette and shadow work that recalls the
beginnings of cinema.”
72
True to the paradoxical nature of the film, in spite of the intimacy of
the recognition of viewing, Trinh is cautious in her filming of the on-screen characters, all of
whom are ordinarily situated at a distance from the viewer. Allocating this intentionally
distanced space, each of the filmed subjects are enabled with an on-screen, subjective agency
that doesn’t tie their development or representation directly to that of the (possessive) viewer.
The feelings of unease that accompanies this possessiveness is stated by Nabi and Kyra in a
transitory scene while in the House of the Immortals. Standing in front of a large, illuminated
screen, the shadows of both Nabi and Kyra turn towards the viewer and state, “I have a feeling

70
This spectator-witness relationship extends to being watched by Nabi, the being, the viewer, and any unseen
peripheral characters in each night passage. Similarly, the presence of the mask separate from attachment to a
physical body, as in its instance on the bow of the ship, seems to iterate the disembodied viewer surveilling both the
subjects and the viewer.
71
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds.
Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 837.
72
Trinh T. Minh-ha, D-Passage: The Digital Way, 128.
38

we’re being looked at. There are eyes watching us. We don’t see them, but they’re there. I can
feel them.”
73

The hybridization of the corporeal with the machine, outside of the traits exemplified by
each of the characters within Night Passage, is tangibly represented by means of the immortals
found within the House of the Immortals. The incorporation of indexical traits of humanness into
these cubed machines created by Uncle Boris re-signifies Trinh’s hybridized construction of the
cyborg, one that emphasizes the importance of the corporeal body in its fusion with the digital.
Questions surrounding what it means to be human and of what the trace markers of humanness
are comprised illustrates a mediation across a range of relationships including the body and the
exterior world, language and perception, other and the self, and touch and sight, and sense and
the sensed. Engagement with the body and memory (be it physical or immaterial) is likewise
brought into question, as the construction and existence of both the analogue androids as well as
those existing within these interdimensional planes bring attention to memory and its
intertwining with existence, being-ness, and identity. What takes place here resonates again with
Merleau-Ponty’s description of the chiasm: “a subjective component or a corporeal constituent
comes to cover over the things themselves: it is not a matter of another layer or a veil that would
have come to pose itself [between the exterior world and the self]”;
74
arguably, rather, it is the
situating of the body as an active and engaged site of reception rather than as an additional
stratum to be considered.
With both the cubed immortals and the analogic androids residing within the House of
the Immortals, the endeavor to integrate trace elements of humanness that may be sustained

73
Night Passage, 1:07:47.
74
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 7.
39

eternally eschews the mortality bound to the corporeal body in favor of a sustainable, hybridized
future existence.
75
This hybridization, or incorporation, of humanness into the machine (and vis
versa) while considered in relation to the more literal cubes and androids within the House of the
Immortals, undergoes the same cyclical motions that many of the characters, including Nabi and
Kyra, experience within Night Passage. Each dimension, including that of the House of the
Immortals, inevitably seems to cue a cyclical and presumably infinite trace of repeatability. This
cyclicality is due primarily in part to the nature of the night train which permits its riders infinite
access to nearly every dimension within the night passage. Even further within these passages,
each character remains bound within a cyclical, narrative purgatory (presented ambiguously as
both a positive and negative space) where time ceases to pass, installing an iterability whereby
the meaning and/or identity of the characters, objects, and/or beings within each dimension retain
repeatability in any number of circumstances to be received and understood by others at any
point in time. In line with Trinh’s broader scope of filmic work whereby repetition in relation to
identity “implies the partial absence of the repeated,”
76
absent elements of the repeated are
consequently substituted by its repetition and remain, according to Trinh, “constantly in
dissolution on the canvas of time.”
77

The literal shadow of the self as well as that of the other is a reoccurring figure
throughout the duration of the film that acts as a visual cue to the permeability of the self with
the other. Beyond this permeability also lies the question of the recognition, or seeing, of the self
within the night passage, where the shadow of the self (as well the corporeal self and the

75
In relation to the state of bardo, the negation of mortality from the body here seems to iterate the in-betweenness
of one’s existence within Night Passage. Neither born nor near death, each character exists interstitially within the
liminality afforded to this cyclical space.
76
Ibid.
77
Trinh T. Minh-ha, D-Passage, 89.
40

interdimensional self) remain perpetually intertwined in their confrontation with being
seen/seeing. Trinh visually materializes this through various points within the film where Nabi
and/or Kyra mention being seen, shadows reflexively acknowledge the viewer, or
watching/being watched is fore-fronted as a primary narrative point. The plurality of the
self/selves within each of the varying dimensions likewise encompasses multiple positions at any
given time, allotting an inclusiveness that parallels the Trinh’s transcultural/historical take on the
technosphere. Viewing this inclusivity within the context of gender, one may look back to Judith
Butler’s primary assertion within her influential book Gender Trouble (1990) which reminds us
that gendered positions are at once multiple and dissimilar.
78
Outside of its relationship with
gender, constructions of the self/selves and identity seem to remain wholly distinct from one
another whereby the self may be “nonidentical, and yet contain a state, express a feeling, identify
with or assume a position.”
79
Prevalent throughout feminist psychoanalytic texts, the notion of
splitting correlates this dislocation between the two (self/ves and identity) to a Lacanian ontology
whereby “we have no access to a self prior to, not formed through, language…[we must then]
break up the omnipotence of the subject through this notion of its subjection, its irrevocable
split.”
80

In Night Passage the foundational construction of the self through language is also
prominently signaled, perhaps most evidently within the House of the Immortals where each
immortal cube remains in the process of being imbued with the capacity for language. This
dislocation, or displacement, of the construction of the self/selves is less “the shattering of a

78
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990).
79
Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge,
2013), 87.
80
Ibid, 88.
41

boundary to conquer the other side than a questioning of the status of the boundary”
81
where the
possibility of a confrontation between the two is interrupted via dislocation. The work of
philosopher Jacques Derrida becomes of particular importance when reviewing this issue of
dislocation as well as that of the trace, such as its incorporation within the immortal cubes.
Through a Derridean lens (as well as within its employment in Night Passage) the trace is
understood as a self-effacing signifier promising some absolute origin, an amalgamation of that
“other which is forever absent.”
82
When reviewing the function of the trace in relation to
characteristics or capacities associated with that of humanness, the example of smoking is
provided by Dr. Kennedy in the House of the Immortals and is outlined to be understood as the
instance, or mark, of breathing or pleasure. However, neither breathing nor pleasure are distinct
markers of humanness. The trace is consequently both constituted and expunged by our
ascription of its function and origin. Looking back to the issue of dislocation in relation to the
characters and narrative within Night Passage (as well as within the larger body of Trinh’s
work), the issue of understanding humanness is also reviewed via a postcolonial framework.
Considerations of literal, physical dislocation and the transcendence of boundaries (or,
interdimensional borders) by the film’s primary protagonists Kyra and Nabi are unveiled as the
two characters mitigate a milieu of transcultural and historical interactions and transitions.
Framing these relationships at the intersection of postcolonial identity, feminism, and a
theoretical examination of the role of technology, Trinh’s examination of the construction,
production, and perception of difference, identity, and the self mutually inform one another
within her larger consideration of liminal subjectivities.

81
Juliana De Nooy, Derrida, Kristeva, and the Dividing Line: An Articulation of Two Theories of Difference, ed.
Paul Eggert (1998), 68.
82
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Maryland: John Hopkins University
Press, 1967), 4.
42

The instances of involuntary displacement that frequently occur throughout Night
Passage, while simultaneously pointing to deeper socio-political and historical issues of forced
migration, integrate Trinh’s examination of what she has determined as the boundary event.
83

Trinh contextualizes this event as occurring through both literal, material boundaries, as well as
within immaterial or temporal ones. Within the frame of the immaterial confrontation with
invisibility and visibility in relation to boundaries exists within the same liminal plane where
identity and/or the self/selves is/are constructed and transformed.
84
This in-between space
remains defined only by the plane on which it occurs (first, second, third, fourth dimension, and
so on) and inevitably functions as a site of passage rather than of a binary plane of existence
(inside the technosphere versus outside of it).
85
Transfigurations of this liminal state(s) within the
already in-betweenness of these dimensional planes are likewise materialized in Trinh’s ongoing
incorporation of walking, which she denotes as being a mode of receptivity for spiritual
transformation.
86
Trinh’s narrative and theoretical integration of trans-historical modalities
recurrently place each character within a state of instability whereby each individual is
confronted with her relationship to ever transforming exterior worlds.
The transformative role that movement plays within the film (both beginning, consisting
of, and concluding with transit) remains pertinent to both the narrative of Night Passage as well
as its impact on “our very perception of continuity.”
87
The movement of time, light, bodies, the
self/selves, and others remains marked only by the tempo of musical interludes, whose

83
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (New York:
Routledge, 2010).
84
This visibility and invisibility is visually materialized through Trinh’s ongoing incorporation of filmic overlays,
pointing to the dualistic nature of both the scene as well as the narrative at large.
85
Night Passage intentionally refers to each plane as a dimension rather than ‘reality’ v. the illusionary.
86
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event, 36.
87
Trinh T. Minh-ha, D-Passage, 31.
43

fluctuations and intermittent inclusion prove to only further skew our perception of any linear
progression or timeline. Trinh’s stark disassembling of the illusory aspects of film permeates
both the narrative of Night Passage as well as the medium of digital film itself, at once indefinite
in its mobility and (temporally) definite in its digital/screened presence. Looking back to the
incorporation and use of light (and consequently, visibility) within the film, the act of witnessing
likewise signals a transitional passage/reformation. Of course, it’s easy to pair the seemingly
obvious binaries (indefinite/definite, temporal/spatial, light/dark, etc.) against one another with
the space between these binaries acting as the liminal; however, like the night passage, these
designators remain in place to frame the multiple spaces that exist interstitially between them.
Outside of the film’s theoretical implications, these in-between spaces provide the opportunity
for Kyra to overcome the experience of loss through a “healing force of aesthetic experience”
88

that remains, for Trinh, interconnected with the body.
CONCLUSION
In a world that is still so deeply sexist and racist while simultaneously volatile in changes
regarding technologies of the body, the digital liberation frequently attributed to the cyborg
figure endures as a construction worthy of investigation despite its unstable (and inherently
binary) foundation. Though this liberation is false, the liminality of the technosphere as
materialized by Trinh within Night Passage may yet offer an alternative plane of transformation
for the self/selves. Rather than casting corporeality aside in favor of a posthuman or incorporeal
embodiment, the cyborg figure accesses a transformatory state (or, oppositional consciousness)
via embodied knowledge, alliances, and the double dimension (as well as the multiple in-

88
Ibid, 48.
44

between) afforded to digital film. Trinh’s addressing of issues surrounding race and gender in
digital new media (and, more specifically, in relation to the cyborg figure) is most acutely visible
through the variants of witnessing constructed throughout the film. Here, the figure of the
witness mobilized as a state of consciousness within both feminist as well as postcolonial theory
is used in the fullest range of its application, ranging from forms of testimony, the position of an
alternative or third-party witness, or the conveyance from one that has lived through the
experience of an event. With each dimension in the night passage existing as an amalgamation of
the experiences of both Nabi and Kyra as well as the characters that inhabit (and presumably
constructed) these spaces, the cyborg figure comes to terms with its limitations and yet continues
within an otherwise cyclical realm.
The doubling implicit within Night Passage (both the conceptual doubling of the self
within and outside of the technosphere as well as the doubled consideration of both feminist and
postcolonial theory), while pointing to a reconfiguration of identity and of the self/selves,
likewise exists according to Trinh “there where I am not,” enduring as a spectral other that is in
perpetual parallel to the corporeal self.
89
In relation to cyborg and feminist as well as new media
theory, Trinh’s use of doubling may be viewed as the construction of the alternative self/selves in
the digital sphere that are created either intentionally or via data collection and/or targeted
advertising. The doubling in Night Passage extends Trinh’s mediation on the multiplicity of
one’s subjectivity ad infinitum, acknowledging the breadth of spaces in which one may or may
not exist, even after one’s corporeal existence has ceased to be.

89
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event, 40.
45

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Creator Baca, April (author)

Core Title Sites of oppositional consciousness: the construction of an alternative cyborg in Trinh T. Minh‐ha’s Night Passage

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/06/2018

Defense Date 04/06/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag alternative,cyborg,difference,differential consciousness,digital art,Experimental and Molecular Pathology,feminism,film,gender,hegemony,identity,intersectionality,new media,Night Passage,OAI-PMH Harvest,ontologies,oppositional consciousness,postcolonial,Race,structuralism,theory,Trinh T. Minh‐ha,whiteness

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