Robert Stam

Robert Stam is a University Professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. He wrote with Ella Shohat Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Robert Stam completed his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Stam’s graduate work ranged across Anglo-American literature, French and Francophone literature, and Luso-Brazilian literature, a confluence which explains a basic feature of his scholarship – a tendency to cross-reference all of these cultural zones. His dissertation-later-book Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1985) traced reflexive strategies from Cervantes to Jean-Luc Godard, tracing three broad types of artistic reflexivity based on the basic impulses undergirding them– ludic and playful (Fielding, Keaton), aggressive and avant-garde (Jarry, Buñuel); and didactic (Brecht and later Godard).

Stam has authored, co-authored and edited some seventeen books on film and cultural theory, literature and film, national cinema (French and Brazilian), aesthetic and politics, intellectual history, and comparative race and postcolonial studies. With work that has ranged across a number of different fields, Stam has participated in a number of post-structuralist and postcolonial “turns” within film and cultural studies. A 1983 Screen essay “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation” brought post-structuralist theory to bear on issues of representations of colonial history and racial oppression. Attempting to go beyond the methodological limitations of the then dominant paradigm of “positive image” and “negative stereotype” analysis, Stam argued for an approach that emphasized not social accuracy or characterological merits but rather such issues as perspective, address, focalization, mediation, and the filmic orchestration of discourses.

The concern with issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, race, and cultural difference also found expression in a number of seminal texts co-authored with Ella Shohat. Their 1985 Screen essay “The Cinema After Babel: Language, Difference, Power,” introduced a Bakhtinian “translinguistic” and trans-structuralist turn into the study of language difference, translation, and postsynchronization in the cinema. Their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994) formed part of and helped shape the surge of writing about race, colonialism, identity politics, and postcoloniality in the 1990s. Hailed by many critics, including Edward Said, as a “brilliant” and landmark book, Unthinking Eurocentrism combines two strands of work – an ambitious study of colonialist discourse and Eurocentrism – and a comprehensive and transnational study of cinematic texts related to those issues. One striking feature, which came to characterize all of the Stam-Shohat collaborations, was to see such issues within a longue duree by placing at the very center of the debate the various 1492s – i.e. the Inquisition against Jews, the expulsion of the Muslims, the conquest of the Americas, TransAtlantic slavery – at the center of the debates. A related strategy was to stress the centrality of indigenous peoples for the history of radical thought and resistance in the Atlantic world, which they began in their 2006 book Flagging Patriotism to call the “Red Atlantic.” Unthinking Eurocentrism addressed such issues as “Eurocentrism versus Polycentrism,” “Formations of Colonialist Discourse,” “The Imperial Imaginary,” “Tropes of Empire,” the “Esthetics of Resistance,” “postcolonial hybridity,” and “indigenous media.” (A 20th anniversary edition with a substantial update-Afterward was published in 2014).

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