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 issues such as perspective, address, focalization, mediation, and the filmic orchestration of discourses.
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.
One feature, which came to characterize all of the Stam-Shohat collaborations was looking at theses issues within a longue timespan by placing 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 updated, 20th anniversary edition was published in 2014.)
Stam and Shohat continued with an anthology entitled Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers, 2003); followed by a more political polemic which excoriated the militaristic pseudo-patriotism of the George Bush/Dick Cheney period -- Flagging Patriotism: Crises in Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006).
Contesting the monolingual and Anglo-Americano-centric approach to these issues, the book elaborates such concepts as “the seismic shift” provoked by the decolonization of culture, the radicalization of the academic disciplines, the philosophical centrality of indigenous thought, the “left/right” convergence on identity politics, and “inter-colonial narcissism.” Stam has also been a major figure within the “transtextual turn” in adaptation and intertextuality studies.
Stam's essay “Beyond Fidelity,” included in the James Naremore 1999 anthology Film Adaptation, called for a larger paradigm shift in which authors like Naremore, Dudley Andrews, Kamilla Elliot, Deborah Cartmell, Imelda Whelehan, Thomas Leitch, Jack Boozer, Christine Geraghty, Alessandra Raengo, and Linda Hutcheon moved from a binary novel-film fidelity approach to a more open transtextual approach.
In 1998: Honored by Africana Studies "Evening of Readings from Recently Published Work by Critically Acclaimed Authors" In 1995: a panel was dedicated to Unthinking Eurocentrism as opening for series of book-related events at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco.