Woman, Native, Other
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a writer, film-maker and composer. She emigrated from Vietnam to the United States in 1970 after a year at the University of Saigon, and continued her studies of music and composition, French literature and ethnomusicology in the US and later in Paris. She taught music for three years at the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar, Senegal. She is currently Associate Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Her vast body of work includes the books Un Art sans oeuvre (1981), En Miniscules (poems, 1987) African Spaces: Designs for Living in Upper Volta (1985) in collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, and the films Reassemblage (1982), Naked Spaces, Living is Round (1985) and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989). An essay by her entitled 'Difference: "A special Third World women issue"' was published in Feminist Review No. 25, 1987. Her most recent publication is Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989). Pratibha Parmar spoke to her in Berkeley, California, about 'cultural hybridization and decentred realities, fragmented selves and multiple identities, marginal voices and languages of rupture' all of which are issues raised in the book and in Minh-ha's films.