In the image of the I : international relations' discourses of difference reconsidered through the cinematic gaze

What insights may be gained from the unorthodox intercourse between international relations and the cinematic text? What may film-analysis contribute to a specifically political study of identity discourses? This thesis hopes to reconsider the Self/Other dialectic upon which so much of i.r.'s ontology and epistemology has been vested from the point of view of 1980-1997 film-making. It will redirect our attention to the underrated notion of 'international responsibility' and the importance of laying the foundations of an exegesis in- and for our discipline : a method through which we will learn how to read texts, before actually reading them. This thesis hence assumes the contours of a journey that will take us from the shores of the familiar (epistemological assumptions and various representational Orientalisms) to the less trodden lands of the Distant or the marginal : there it is China and its Fifth Generation of filmmakers that will be case-studied, as well as the resistant cinematography of African-America. Having thus travelled back and forth will help re-consider the problematic concept of the 'border' — both in its theoretical and practical configurations — and inspire a re-imagining of identity/difference discourses through the gaze of the migrant, the cinematic tales of the exiled and uprooted caught in an elusive quest of 'home'.