Polyvocality Essays Examples

In Shohat and Stam’s article “Stereotype, Realism and the Struggle over Representation,” the phenomenon of polyvocality is mentioned in the context of establishing new discourses for representation of minorities and gender in film. In this respect, the authors advocate for polyvocality as a viable alternative to the existing paradigms of criticism, which focus more on image and the strict accuracy of a character’s representation. With polyvocality, the focus becomes not on whether or not a character is accurate to the black experience, for example, but whether or not black voices are allowed to be heard through the subtext to mine greater truth from the proceedings. The authors wish to move away from a search for verisimilitude in gauging the cultural worth or sense of equality in films in lieu of this polyvocality – the ability for discourses to interact and learn from each other.
Perhaps the most valuable thing about polyvocality is the freedom for films to become contradictory in interesting ways. Instead of judging whether a film is valuable based on how much it adheres to real life and accurate representation, polyvocality grants the freedom to examine the various socio-ideological attributes that make up the text, thus granting greater insight into the voices that are presenting the filmic narrative to the audience. Much of this would come from actual minority storytellers and filmmakers being allowed to tell their own narrative, rather than white producers and directors attempting to shoehorn in a white-guilt representation of minorities. If this were to happen, more authentic black voices would be granted the ability to operate in the discourse, as opposed to white liberalism-filtered depictions of race for the sake of tokenism or demographics.