Narrating Race, Nation and Gender is the latest addition to Michael Shapiro's growing archive. This polemical work engages with a multiplicity of worlds that emerge from political theory, international relations, cultural studies, gender studies, literary theory and cinematic aesthetics. Following Immanuel Kant's critical trajectory and temporal sensitivity, Shapiro adopts, assembles and inflects the glosses of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin to present a cinematic-genealogical reading of contemporary political tales. The idea is to direct an approach that is genealogical in scope and cinematic in method. Genealogy attempts to find and disclose the relations of power that are taken for granted or hidden.
Cinema is complimentary to genealogy.
Shapiro's cinematic praxis is twofold. A cinematic style of critique recognizes the capacity of aesthetic technologies to rethink and reread contemporary political events. Shapiro contends that modern cinema, through its assemblage of camera shots, enacts a temporal rhythm that is critically more cognizant than an earlier cinematic attitude which privileged the spatiality of a situated viewpoint. As long as the camera merely followed action, the image of time was indirect, presented as a consequence of motion. But the new 'camera consciousness' is no longer defined by the movements it is able to follow.