At heart, this question is about power: “who has power over the apparatus of image-making.” Mercer quotes Judith Williamson’s observation that “the more power any group has to create and wield representation, the less it is required to be representative.” At that time, the expectation that a film “speak for” its community implicitly lay behind multicultural patterns of funding. Minority filmmaking then became a guarantee of multiculturalism; the more such films were produced, the more multiculturalism was demonstrated. At the same time, states Mercer, “the very notion that a single film or cultural artefact can ‘speak for’ an entire socio-ethnic community reinforces the perceived marginality and ‘secondariness’ of that community.”

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 161