Pratibha Parmar maakte haar eerste videowerk met de hulp van Black Audio Film Collective, als “manier om iets te vertellen over de opkomst van Zwarte vrouwen en Aziatische vrouwen als culturele kunstenaars en cultuuractivisten”. Emergence verweeft de stemmen van vier vrouwen van kleur uit de diaspora: Audre Lorde, Mona Hatoum, Sutapa Biswas en Meiling Jin. Door diaspora-identiteiten tegen een achtergrond te plaatsen van ruis en stilte (de soundtrack is gemaakt door Trevor Mathison), van vervreemding en fragmentatie, streeft Emergence naar de re-integratie van sprekende, performende subalterne subjecten.
“Emergence is a performative multi-voiced and multi-enacted ritual visual poem that moves women of color, as the voice-over states, ‘from yesterday’s silence to tomorrow’s dreams’. Woman as speaking subject, gazing subject, interrogating corporeal performative subject owns spatiality in an arena that once depended upon her invisibility, her silence, and the suppression of her performing body. Emergence works to recover subjected forms of knowledge. Parmar invokes a performative ethnographic to move across the landscapes of colonial division, in the process underscoring the need for an ‘ethnographic ear’, as defined by Anglo-Asian cultural critic Jenny Sharpe. Sharpe finds that ethnographic listening ‘exists between and not within cultures ... beside every native voice is an ethnographic ear’.” (Gwendolyn Audrey Foster)
