INTRODUCTION: RACE, INSUBORDINATION, METHOD

Space, entity or knowledge is (a) nowhere or now/here – as Fischlin and Heble claim, it is ‘the here and now of conventional knowing’ – for it embodies an ‘elsewhere that is the “other side” to that “nowhere”’. The ‘epic’ film/cinema is such a space/entity/knowledge, embodied with humanist potential of planetary proportions. Yet two interconnected stumbling blocks, which constitute this chapter's main focus, prevent this humanism from reaching the other side of the epic's nowhere: (1) how that planetary possibility has been constructed, and (2) opaque whiteness. Opacity signifies: the other side of transparency; an obscurity through which whites represented on screen become potentially or actually unknowable; and, from a not-white perspective, whiteness as an obstacle to full knowledge of whiteness's world, though that obstacle (or whiteness or opacity) does not need transparency or cultural destruction, despite being potentially perceived as ‘other’ by not-whites.

Reaching the other side of nowhere is crucial to fully realising the epic's humanist potential, which, in turn, is central to evaluations of the return of the epic in twenty-first-century cinema. Beyond or despite aesthetic differences, the return of the epic film is a changing same, shot through with race and white opacity; following philosopher Édouard Glissant, opacity thus becomes a useful critical and theoretical tool against hyper-visibility or exaggerated transparency, a cultural and corporeal state or process which tends to obliterate difference(s) within and/or between those rendered hyper-visible.