Interpreting stories from world history (Enrique Dussel)
This is the first of two chapters exploring how to ground a hermeneutics able to interpret transnational histories across a world of cinemas. The emphasis in this chapter is the history on film debate, to show how it can be broadened via more direct engagement with film-philosophy. The following chapter emphasises the ethical dimension of this intervention, more directly than the historical, but in both chapters the two dimensions – ethical and historical – are inextricably intertwined.
The Latin American philosophy of Enrique Dussel underpins the hermeneutics, due to both the importance of world systems analysis in Dussel’s understanding of the history of colonial modernity, and to the ability Dussel provides for us to realise the correspondence between cinematic encounters with the past and their rendering on screen as ethical encounters. Simultaneously, the introduction of Dussel provides a new departure for film-philosophy, which typically engages with thinkers from the (Western) Analytical or Continental traditions. There is thus a (further) decolonisation of both the history on film debate, and the mainstream of film-philosophy with this interpretative work. It unlocks the inherent potential of both fields, due to the history on film debate having a similar (but rarely acknowledged) emphasis on liberation in its origins to that of a Dusselian film-philosophy.
History on film
There is a long tradition of scholarship exploring how films tell the story of history. This field is based on the premise that ‘films can do history [… ] can produce different but equivalent accounts of the past to those produced by historians’ (Westwell 2007, 580). Typically this historiographical debate is understood to reach back many decades (for example, to include E. H. Carr’s emphasis on interpretation in the writing of history (1961, 23)), with important interventions for the study of film in the 1970s (e.g. Marc Ferro’s argument that cinematic constructions of history have the potential to challenge or oppose established or dominant understandings of the past (1977, 19–20)), and a gaining of momentum since the 1990s (Westwell 2007, 579–581; Treacey 2016, 2–3).
Hayden White remains an influential voice due to his observation regarding how history is constructed poetically, historians fashioning ‘a “story” out of the “chronicle” of events contained in the historical record’ (1973, 427). White foregrounded the constructed nature of both written and celluloid histories, arguing that: ‘It is only the medium that differs, not the way in which messages are produced’ (55). For White, history, whether in books or on screen, is a story (imperfectly) told, a point since developed by such pivotal figures as Robert Rosenstone, Marcia Landy and Robert Burgoyne.
Although recent texts on film and history illustrate the continued importance of the nation as the context which history films are commonly thought to negotiate (Carlsten and McGarry 2015, 10), the history on film debate has followed Film Studies’ recent transnational turn by investigating histories beyond those of the nation.1 For instance, in Revisioning History (1995a), Rosenstone argues that what he considers the ‘New History Film’, which is marked by a self-conscious complexity in its investigation of historiography, is a ‘global phenomenon’ emerging from ‘postcolonial nations [… ] societies where political systems are in upheaval [… ] recovering from totalitarian regimes [… ] [made by] ethnic, political, social or sexual minorities’ (5–7). Other pertinent examples include Rosenstone’s analysis of films from various parts of world which examine the Holocaust, deterritorialising his historical analysis from the national context (or at least, not engaging with them as works of national cinemas (134–153)), and Landy’s examination of how popular genres construct counter-historical narratives using examples from various nations (2011; 2015). Albeit, importantly for this discussion, neither author attempts to ground such cross-border analysis within world history per se.
That said, what kind of history underpins the interpretative act is a question increasingly foregrounded by scholars addressing history on film. Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu’s Companion to the Historical Film (2013) aims to give a ‘worldwide perspective’ (1), to relativise the importance of the nation with regard to the recognition of colonial legacies (transnational depictions of slavery, immigration, African histories, the European ‘discovery’ of the Americas). Yet precisely how, or rather, from where, such a ‘worldwide perspective’ is provided, is greatly influential with regard to the conclusions drawn.
An illuminating example of this problem is the difficulty with an argument made by White, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. White’s ‘The Modernist Event’ was published in Vivian Sobchack’s The Persistence of History (1996). Sobchack’s anthology is organised into three parts, the last of which is entitled ‘the end(s) of history’, evoking Francis Fukuyama’s (1989) infamous pronouncement. As various critiques of Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington (1996), and others indicate, attempts to re-map the post-Cold War world as one in which the Hegelian future had arrived with US global supremacy (see the Introduction) served only to eradicate history from culture, and foster what Ali A. Mazrui terms ‘global apartheid’ (1997, 29; see also Appadurai, in Elden 2009, 7–8). Yet the Eurocentric view of world history which enabled Fukuyama to draw such a conclusion regarding the end of history underpins White’s argument and shapes his conclusions.
White argues that modernity has produced events in the Twentieth Century (the Holocaust enacted by National Socialist Germany, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the USA) that make it difficult for people to grasp, not the magnitude of history, so much as its meaning for the present. Whilst such events cannot be forgotten, nor can they be ‘adequately remembered’ such that their meaning for the present can be unambiguously assimilated by the collectives, communities, or societies affected. Due to the modern event, for White, films like Oliver Stone’s JFK (France/USA, 1991) may provide uncertainty over what actually happened and the fictional recounting of it, offering the possibility that the two may become ontologically indistinguishable (1996, 19). For White, in such a situation the usefulness of examining the past to enable a better present (and by extension, future) is at risk: ‘What is at issue here is not the facts of the matter regarding [historical] events but the different possible meanings that such facts can be construed as bearing’ (21).
Yet, White’s argument, that the ‘holocaustal’ events of the Twentieth Century ‘could not possibly have occurred before’, nor could any previous age have ‘imagined’ its ‘nature, scope and implications’ (1996, 20) displays a glaring absence in his understanding of world history concerning the centuries of genocide and enslavement enacted by European forces. As decolonial thinkers noted as early as the 1940s, the arrival of European technologies and diseases in the Americas provided just such a world-changing shift in people’s lives (Ortiz 1940, 99). As Caribbean philosopher Charles W. Mills more recently observes, echoing predecessors like Aimé Cé saire (1955, 36) and Paul Gilroy (1993, 213), the National Socialists’ genocidal extermination of millions of Jews during the Second World War only brought home to Europe the same techniques for eradication of others which had been used globally against non-white populations since 1492. After all, Stam and Shohat note, the Twentieth Century’s Holocaust was conceived of with previous European colonial atrocities in mind as concrete historical precedents (2012, 157–158). To demonstrate how un-unique the event was, Mills discusses ‘the killing through mass murder and disease of nearly 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas [… ] the single greatest act of genocide in human history’ (1997, 98) alongside the ‘slow-motion holocaust of African slavery’ (99) and various other atrocities of colonial modernity (105). Thus, after Fernando Ortiz, Mills, and Dussel (who likewise describes the millions of dead indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans as the ‘first holocaust of modernity’ (2003, 177)), we can see the limitations of White’s conception of what modernity is (his emphasis on technology indicating once again the Hegelian view of history as ‘development’ and its attendant denial of coevalness (see the Introduction)), and how the resulting Eurocentrism of his ‘worldwide perspective’ limits the conclusions White draws from the films analysed.
In fact, what White’s anxiety over the historical revisionism of films like JFK indicates is not the malaise of the supposed end of history, but the danger of the eradication of the past by a fake version of it: doublethink. The irony here, of course, is that this is precisely how Eurocentric visions of world history have eradicated genocidal colonial acts from the official record for centuries. Rather, then, understanding how transnational histories are created on film relates to various attempts which have been made to, historically, ‘reorient’ (Frank, 1998), ‘provincialize’ (Chakrabarty, 2000), ‘recenter’ (Iwabuchi, 2002), ‘de-imperialize’ (Chen, 2010), or ‘decolonize’ (Mignolo and Escobar, 2010) a globalised world.
Seen in this light, cinematic transnational histories offer ways to challenge, resist, and unthink the Eurocentrism of history. The supposed ‘dead end’ of history (Sobchack 1996, 11) only ever seemed as such from a Western perspective due to the prevailing Hegelian view of world history. What a world of cinemas offers, by contrast, is the opportunity to reclaim lost pasts from their eradication by doublethink. To better understand this, we need to grasp how what is depicted on screen can be understood to relate to a ground which is more world, than national, historical. And, indeed, how the worldview which offers this ground provides an alternative to Eurocentric conceptions of history. As one such way forward, I turn to world systems analysis.
World systems for a world of cinemas
A world of cinemas is often compared to other categorical constructions of ‘worlds’, such as world music or world literature, to illuminate the homogenising tendency of all such categorising of the West versus the exotic ‘world’ beyond it. By considering a world of cinemas with regard to world systems analysis, however, a more encompassing paradigm emerges within which to situate history on film. Yet why world systems, or rather (as this paradigm has already influenced engagements with a world of cinemas that draw upon Franco Moretti (2001; 2013) (e.g. Andrew 2006; 2010; Smith 2017; Caughie 2018) see further below)), why this model for transnational histories on film, from amongst the many possible ways there are to proceed?
Considering history in terms broader than the national is not new. Historians, for example, increasingly engage with the question of what it means to research history as a transnational or global phenomenon (Clavin 2005; Chakrabarty 2009; Sachsenmaier 2011; Iriye 2013; Frankopan 2015). Before this there have been countless examinations of history crossing borders, including, influentially, those focusing on trade in regions like the Mediterranean (Braudel 1949; 1998), the Atlantic (Glissant 1990; Gilroy 1993; Shannon 2004), or the Pacific (Jones, Frost and White 1993; Matsuda 2012; Armitage and Bashford 2014). What, then, is so special about world systems analysis?
Immanuel Wallerstein famously argues that a world system exists (a capitalist world-economy (2004, 17)) which is a product of Europe’s expansion from the Fifteenth Century onwards (1974). This began, for Wallerstein, as a ‘world’ (‘a spatial/temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units, one that represents an integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules’ (2004, 17)), but this ‘world’ ultimately expanded from its Atlantic roots to encompass the whole world (23). Crucial to the role that the development of this idea would play in the philosophy of Dussel (and other Latin American philosophers (see Mignolo 2011, xxv–xxvi)) was the role of the North Atlantic trade circuit in fuelling Europe’s (and latterly the West’s) transformation from global outlier to central world power block (Dussel 1998a, 9–13). This was the circuit via which ships left Europe bound for Africa, where their cargoes were unloaded and sold, and their holds filled with slaves. Once transported to the Americas the slaves were sold, and the ships’ holds filled with the materials produced from the environment (land stolen from its former indigenous inhabitants) with the sweat of their labours (silver, cotton, tobacco, and so on).2 These materials, once shipped back to Europe, were processed into goods to be sold at home and abroad. The North Atlantic trade circuit, then, was the murderous engine of colonial modernity, which shifted the global centre of economic power away from the Mediterranean (Dussel 1998a, 11) (see Chapter 4).
In the wake of Wallerstein’s intervention, the ensuing debate illuminated the Eurocentrism to his findings. Was Europe at the heart of the first world system (world in the sense of an enclosed, border-crossing world), replacing an interstate system as Wallerstein argues? Alternative views suggest that the world system is closer to five thousand than five hundred years old (Frank and Gills 1993; Dussel 1998b) and that Europe’s rise only transferred power from within the existing world system’s centre in Asia, to the West (Abu-Lughod 1989; Chaudhuri 1990; Frank 1998).3 Although such debates remain unresolved, the weight of evidence indicates the need to ‘reorient’, as Andre Gunder Frank (1998) puts it, our understanding of Europe’s place in world history, and its reliance on centuries of exploitation (Galeano 1971). However the cloth is cut, Europe is a recently emergent superpower in a system (be it an enclosed entity or an interstate system) previously dominated by Asia – in particular the region now known as China which increasingly looks likely to re-emerge as the dominant global player.4
The most important points to take from Wallerstein, and the use of world systems analysis by Dussel, are: firstly, that modernity is not exclusively the domain of the Enlightenment, democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and so on, but commenced several centuries earlier in the Fifteenth Century; and secondly, that in the world system everything is related – centre and periphery develop together in a dynamic inter-related system, typically with centre growing at the expense of periphery. But to answer the question of what is so special about world systems analysis, it is less that this specific theory is so important, as it is that the engagement with it in Latin American philosophy (especially by Dussel, Aní bal Quijano and Walter Mignolo) developed it into the underpinning world history of a decolonising philosophy (Mignolo 2008). It is the role of world systems analysis in creating this particular ‘worldwide perspective’ that is key to its usefulness for interpreting a world of cinemas.
World systems analysis indicates that what is at stake in research into a world of cinemas (along with what is perhaps more obvious to Film Studies scholars, namely, of a more accurate understanding of the reality of film financing, production and distribution illuminated by the transnational turn) is the critique of what the nation means to the historical centrality of Europe in the world system. It is not solely the ‘limiting imagination’ of national cinema (Higson 2000) that is being rejected by the transnational turn, but also the imperialism of the nation as a historical construct. For Quijano, the origins of the modern nation-state lie in the emergence of ‘small political nuclei that conquered their space of domination and imposed themselves over the diverse and heterogeneous peoples, identities and states that inhabited it’, the first centralised states in Europe emerging ‘simultaneously with the formation of the colonial empires’ (2000, 558; 2008, 206). Similarly, É tienne Balibar observes of the notion of the border that, from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries onwards:
Drawing ‘political’ borders in the European sphere, which considered itself and attempted to appoint itself the center of the world, was also originally and principally a way to divide up the earth; thus, it was a way to organise the world’s exploitation and export the ‘border form’ to the periphery, in an attempt to transform the whole universe into an extension of Europe, later into ‘another Europe’, built on the same political model.
(2003, 7)
Nationalism, the ‘civic religion’ (8), along with the European export of the notion of the border, thus leads to inequality in terms of who is included and excluded nationally, but also globally, during Europe’s rise to global prominence (Dussel 2003a, 176). Balibar writes in the context of post-Cold War Europe, where, simultaneous with the redrawing of Europe’s outer borders, immigration has moved the contact zone from the margins to the centre of the public sphere, creating an internal border between Global North and South which Balibar likens to apartheid (9). Thus, with the nation so integral to the Eurocentric control of the world system, departing from a focus on the nation is necessary to better understand how the stories of world history are told across borders, in a world of cinemas. Hence, what is special about world systems analysis is that, in underpinning Dussel’s philosophy (providing the grounding for the ‘worldwide perspective’ which informs his ethics), it can also underpin the exploration of transnational histories across a world of cinemas.
Dussel’s recourse to world systems analysis situates him between what might be considered the ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ models of transnational or world history. The former suggests that history be understood in broad historical sweeps. In spite of upheavals in social affairs, over the longue duré e history appears to take place at ‘a slower tempo, which sometimes almost borders on the motionless’ (Braudel 1969, 33). Such a view is particularly attractive to the right of the political spectrum, as it suggests the impossibility of individual or collective action being able to change society. Thus it is evident in the thinking which underpins contemporary economic theories like neoliberalism (see Chapter 6) and its attendant denial of mankind’s role in accelerating climate change (see Chapter 3). By contrast, the ‘fast’ view sees change, or its potential, as possible. Often deployed by those on the left, politically, it foregrounds the role which individuals and collectives can indeed play in changing history – for instance, Eric Hobsbawm’s Marxist history of Europe, including The Age of Revolution (1962) which charts how the Industrial Revolution (originating in Britain) and the French Revolution together helped propel Northern Europe to a position of global economic centrality.
The complex coexistence of ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ is integral to historical works grappling with the Anthropocene (placing human history within a much larger nonhuman history of the Earth/Universe) (Christian 2004; Chakrabarty 2009) (see below and in Chapter 3), and is also a feature of Dussel’s work. Whilst Dussel echoes Fernand Braudel’s belief in the consistency of a longer term view of several centuries of mercantile capitalism (1969, 33) (after world systems analysis, which itself looks to the longue duré e (Wallerstein 2004, 15–22)), Dussel also focuses on the role humans have played in shaping and changing this history. This is, in large part, what makes Dussel so useful for interpreting how the story of history is told across a world of cinemas. It is appropriate at this point, then, to introduce Dussel’s work in depth, before returning to the history on film debate towards the close of the chapter.
Dussel, world systems, colonial modernity
Dussel is an Argentine philosopher who has been based in Mexico since his exile in 1975. Key texts from his immense oeuvre are increasingly being translated into English. For my argument here, impetus is drawn primarily from Philosophy of Liberation (1971), The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the ‘Other’ and the Myth of Modernity (1992), The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Rorty, Taylor and the Philosophy of Liberation (1996), Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology (2003a), Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (1998b), the anthology Coloniality at Large (with M. Morañ a, C. A. Já uregui 2008), and selected relevant shorter works (2006; 2013). These particular works together illustrate what Dussel’s philosophy brings to the study of a world of cinemas. This is because Dussel works at the nexus of a view of world history that develops upon world systems analysis, coupled with a post-Levinasian ethics of alterity which historicises otherness as a result of the global structural inequality fostered by colonial modernity. As such, it can expand our grasp of the hermeneutics involved in interpreting history on film, and in relation to film-philosophy can indicate the need to decolonise its current Western orientation.
Dussel is well known internationally for his work towards a philosophy of liberation, which is considered one of the driving forces behind the emergence of a distinct Latin American philosophy, one independent from the European canon (Martí n Alcoff and Mendieta 2000, 19–21; Gandolfo 2013, 185–187; Má rquez 2013, 301–307). This movement stems from the theology of liberation, outlined by Peruvian Gustavo Gutié rrez in 1971, which argues for the need for the liberation of the world’s impoverished, within the context of a world economy which, by design, keeps the Global South indebted to the Global North (xxiv). Liberation theology remains a pertinent doctrine despite its denouncement by US President Ronald Reagan (Dussel 1996, xiii) and persecution of its adherents during the Cold War (such as the murder of Archbishop Ó scar Romero, amongst others, in El Salvador in 1980), which exemplified the war waged against liberation theology under US foreign policy (Chomsky 2016, 11–13). For example, in May 2015, Pope Francis (whose own position during the Argentine military dictatorship remains unclear (Goni and Watts 2013)) invited Gutié rrez to speak in Rome.5 Noticeably, liberation theology echoes the concerns of the earliest Christian decolonial critiques of colonial modernity, like that of Bartolomé de Las Casas (also an influence on Dussel’s ethics) on his arrival in the ‘New World’ nearly five hundred years previously (1552, xxvii), not to mention indigenous critiques of colonial modernity and the role of Western philosophy in perpetuating it (e.g. Deloria 1972).
Dussel’s philosophy of liberation follows a ‘specific liberating rationality’ which has developed over planetary history for many thousands of years (1998b, 3–9). Re-emerging from the Global South under colonial modernity, it offers hope for those at the periphery of the modern world system in its capacity for ‘the recovery of a history that incorporates the counterdiscourse that is nonhegemonic and that has been dominated, silenced, forgotten, and virtually excluded – that which constitutes the alterity of modernity’ (1998b, 46). For this reason it provides a suitable historical ground for the interpretation of how a world of cinemas offers viewers ethical encounters with different transnational histories – offers them the chance to recover the other face (or faces) of colonial modernity.
Dussel situates the commencement of modernity, and the origin of contemporary structural inequality, with the encounter with Europeans from 1492 onwards6 (Dussel 1992, 9). Writing against the notion that Europe’s rise to world prominence was due to its exceptionalism (creating a modernity which was then spread further afield), Dussel argues instead that modernity, whilst a European occurrence, ‘originates in a dialectical relation with non-Europe. Modernity appears when Europe organises the initial world-system and places itself at the centre of world history over against a periphery equally constitutive of modernity’ (9–10). Although Europe’s expansion was based on a several centuries–long quest for access to the riches of Asian markets (Frank 1998), even so both modernity and capitalism are the result of Europe’s discovery, and exploitation via the North Atlantic trade circuit, of the New World (1998b, 26).
Drawing on world systems analysis, Dussel notes the importance of recognising the first waves of European colonisation, involving the southern European nations of Spain and Portugal in propelling modernity. These tend to get written out of notions of modernity which emphasise the Industrial Revolution and the Northern European colonial powers which came later – Holland, Britain, and France (1992, 11; 2003a, 61), and then the USA (2003a, 61, 213). This longer time frame makes explicit the link between coloniality and modernity, as opposed to the more apparently ‘detached’ idea of modernity emerging from Northern Europe’s rapid industrial, technological, and urban development in the West. For Dussel:
Europe’s centrality reflects no internal superiority accumulated in the Middle Ages, but it is the outcome of its discovery, conquest, colonization, and integration of Amerindia – all of which give it an advantage over the Arab world, India and China. Modernity is the result, not the cause, of this occurrence.
(2003a, 11)
Understanding modernity as co-created via the interaction of the (initially European, latterly Eurocentric) centre – the ‘West’ – with its (colonised) peripheries, renders ‘structural oppression’, or ‘structural servitude’ (the structural inequality of capitalism) a direct product of the (co-)creation of modernity from coloniality (2003a, 223–224). Colonial modernity thus describes the manner in which the world system after 1492 is managed from a centre which exploits its peripheries – shifting recently with the growth of the Pacific Rim back towards East Asia (Frank 1998, 7; Mignolo 2010b, 14), notwithstanding the altogether harder to locate (geographically) model of multinational corporations able to exploit the Global South wherever it appears worldwide (Dussel 1971, 13; Wallerstein 1974, 99).
The world system helps us realise that colonial modernity relies upon an interconnection between Europe and its other. As Frantz Fanon succinctly summarises of the colonial plunder of Latin America, China and Africa: ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World’ (1961, 81). This is not to say that the idea of colonial modernity supersedes or is divorced from those of ‘multiple modernities’ or ‘compressed modernity’ which describe Asian experiences of, and engagements with, modernity – as its influence migrated from West to East (geopolitically speaking) (Chang 1999, 30; Lau 2003, 102). All such experiences of modernity are, in fact, connected world historically.7 Nor am I arguing that a continuation of the then-existing world system, the Asian-centric hegemonic structure which had established itself prior to 1492, would necessarily have been better (or worse) than the modern world system. Rather, what is crucial about the interconnection between Europe and the rest of the world enabled by colonial modernity is that it indicates how the emergence of the world we now inhabit was a product of 1492. As the various contracts explored by the films analysed in the later chapters indicate, there is no escaping the fact that – for example, concerning the racial contract – the white supremacy which exemplifies Eurocentrism emerged as a global force with 1492 (see Chapter 4). If a world of cinemas is against doublethink, then, it is because it posits the historical reasons for colonial modernity’s global dominance in the discovery of the Americas. Thus it is in Dussel’s notion of transmodernity, which links directly to 1492, that we see how entwined his ethics is with this (world) historical viewpoint drawn from world systems analysis. This is not an ethics bidding for a nostalgic return to a perhaps imagined or utopian pre-Columbian state (regarding this kind of circuitous, potentially revolutionary logic, see further in Chapters 2 and 5 on the idea of the social contract), but one which considers, through the recognition of otherness (and in a world of cinemas, other pasts) how to imagine the future otherwise than doublethink.
Transmodern ethics
At times, misunderstanding may surround the term ‘transmodernity’. Dussel’s philosophy is familiar to many in the West because of his intervention into the postmodernity debate, including English translations of his works in several seminal anthologies (Beverley, Aronna and Oviedo 1995; Jameson and Miyoshi 1998; Dussel, Morañ a and Já uregui 2008). Yet, whilst Dussel does critique postmodernism for its Eurocentrism (1995, 75) he is more interested in moving beyond modernity (2002, 221), such that an alternative, inclusive, planetary vision can be offered instead. He states:
The ‘realization’ of modernity no longer lies in the passage from its abstract potential to its ‘real’, European, embodiment. It lies today, rather, in a process that will transcend modernity as such, a trans-modernity, in which both modernity and its negated alterity (the victims) co-realize themselves in a process of mutual creative fertilization. Trans-modernity (as a project of political, economic, ecological, erotic, pedagogical and religious liberation) is the co-realization of that which it is impossible for modernity to accomplish by itself: that is, of an incorporative solidarity, which I have called analectic, between center/periphery, man/woman, different races, different ethnic groups, different classes, civilization/nature, Western culture/Third World cultures, et cetera, in the intertwined exploiter/exploited aspects of Europe/Americas.
(1995, 76)
Thus, Dussel considers his ethics to be ‘transmodern’ in that it seeks to encounter, engage, and liberate all those excluded from Eurocentric colonial modernity, globally. It is in this respect that Dussel’s ethics is historicised rather differently to Levinas’s. Dussel agrees with Levinas’s emphasis on ethics as first philosophy, due to the Cartesian egocentrism of ontology – a ‘philosophy of injustice’ which reduces the other to the same (Levinas 1961, 43–46). Yet Dussel’s philosophy does not offer the transcendental promise that Levinas holds to (the notion of an escape from the self in the encounter with the other), but rather of a transcendence of modernity (trans-modern) (Má rquez 2013, 305). For Dussel, such an enterprise must ‘always begin by presenting the historico-ideological genesis of what it attempts to think through, giving priority to its spatial, worldly setting’ (1971, 1). Levinas’s ethics sought transcendence in the encounter with the representative figures of alterity (often noted to be Biblical figures, although in fact they are historical as well8 ), of the stranger, widow and orphan (along with the poor) (Levinas 1961, 199–210). For his part, Dussel seeks a recognition not of a primordial otherness, but of colonial modernity in the encounter with modernity’s ‘colonised’ or excluded other – understood historically and geopolitically (2003a, 26). Accordingly, Dussel’s historicised other relates to the world system after 1492, encompassing: ‘The poor, the dominated, the massacred Amerindian, the Black slave, the Asiatic of the opium wars, the Jew of the concentration camps, the woman as sexual object, the child under ideological manipulation’ (1996, 80). Dussel’s other, then, is a product of the world system which underpins colonial modernity, both historically and into the present. As Linda Martí n Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta observe: ‘Dussel’s argument is that the Other is concrete and historical, existing in time and space. In our time, the Other is the poor of the Third World, the populations that have been forcibly excluded from globalization and whose exclusion, through starvation or environmental genocide, is in fact necessary for the current form of globalization to be maintained’ (2000, 10).
Globalization, on this view, is but the latest phase of colonial modernity (Dussel 2013, 5) (see Chapter 6). As Mignolo indicates, to arrive at globalisation, this five-hundred-year history has proceeded through various overlapping phases. From an initial Southern European Christian mission, to a Northern European civilising mission (mercantile, imperialist), then (in North America) to a belief in Manifest Destiny, before (post-World War Two) the emergence of (US-led) developmental and, finally, the market expansionary phase of transnational capital. Globalisation brings in a new phase of ‘nonterritorial’ or ‘global coloniality’, retaining the impetus and rationale behind the former phases (2000, 280–281). Under globalisation there remains a ‘coexistence of successive global designs that are part of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system’ (Mignolo 2000, 280–281).9 Dussel’s historicised other, then, emerging from world systems analysis, along with his reconsideration of both Levinas and Marx is extremely pertinent for today’s globalised world and its cinematic constructions of history.10
In colonial modernity we find the origins of the contested subjectivity and history which scholars note when contextualising the emergence of contemporary concerns with ethics: such as Rosi Braidotti regarding the importance of the women’s movement for challenging the phallogocentric nature of subjectivity (1994, 125), and Thomas Elsaesser concerning precisely how universal such legacies of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as human rights are, and over who in the postcolonial era has ‘interpretative authority over, and thus the discursive ownership of the past’ (2011, 2). Dussel’s ethics is concerned precisely with the conjunction of these two points, at the origins of colonial modernity – the construction of the Eurocentric ego, after 1492, which, in its genocidal plunder of the Americas, banished the distinct histories of the indigenous peoples conquered to the ‘primitive’ past of Europe (as per the critiques of Johannes Fabian and Quijano explored in the Introduction). For Dussel, playing with the Spanish terms ‘descubrir’ (discover) and ‘encubierto’ (cover over or perhaps cover up), Europeans eradicated the difference (and different histories) of the indigenous people they encountered:
By controlling, conquering, and violating the Other, Europe defined itself as discoverer, conquistador, and colonizer of an alterity likewise constitutive of modernity. Europe never discovered (des-cubierto) the Other as Other but covered over (encubierto) the Other as part of the Same: i.e., Europe.
(1992, 12)
The Christian Europeans turned the other into the primitive version of the self-same (denying its coevalness by banishing it to Europe’s past), obscuring its alterity, destining it for development or destruction (32). The genocide which followed was enacted against people considered not-as-yet fully human (35). In Levinasian terms, once deprived of its ‘divine exteriority’ (Dussel 2003a, 210), the other no longer enables the transcendence of the self, and the Christian prohibition against killing seemingly no longer applies. The other ‘is reduced to the level of an idea. The meaning of the other is formulated in terms of the “I” who dreamed it into existence’ (2003a, 30).
In his critique of Descartes, Dussel provides a specific origin to the Western emphasis on ontology as first philosophy observed by Levinas. The European arrival in the Americas originates the intertwined histories of the development of Eurocentric egocentrism (central to Western philosophy’s emphasis on ontology) and the initial colonial interaction between Europeans and indigenous Americans. He states that: ‘the use of the term “dis-cover” implies that the point of departure in this process is the European ego which is a constituent element of the historical event: ‘“I discover”, “I conquer”, “I evangelise” (in the missionary sense) and “I think” (in the ontological sense)’ (2003a, 221). Dussel’s critique of the ‘birth of modern subjectivity’ (1992, 17) in the European invasion, sees the European ego surface ‘in the person of Herná n Corté s’. In the conquest of Mexico, the conquistador’s lust for gold reduces people to enslaved commodities to be traded for wealth in the mercantile capitalist economy (26 and 38). The Western ego’s relationship with the world which it colonises, after all, stands in stark contrast to the pre-Columbian ethics of reciprocity between humanity and cosmos of indigenous cultures of the Americas, in which humans are understood to live in balance with the world (Maffie 2013, 11–21). In Corté s, and thereby from discovery via conquest and evangelical civilising, Western philosophy comes to privilege Descartes’ solipsistic ‘I think’.
The colonizing ego, subjugating the Other, the woman and the conquered male, in an alienating erotics and in a mercantile capitalist economics, follows the route of the conquering ego toward the modern ego cogito. Modernization initiates an ambiguous course by touting a rationality opposed to primitive, mythic explanations, even as it concocts a myth to conceal its own sacrificial violence against the Other. This process culminates in Descartes’s 1636 presentation of the ego cogito as the absolute origin of a solipsistic discourse.
(1992, 48)
As a result, the Global South’s role in the development of modernity was written out of its history by (Northern) European notions of exceptionalism during the Enlightenment. With a Hegelian narrative of Westward development over two centuries (from Italian Renaissance to Lutheran reform in Germany to scientific revolution to bourgeois political revolution in England, North America and France), the Global South became associated with Europe’s ‘past’. It was rendered seemingly unconnected from the apparently ‘exceptional’ thinking which leads to Descartes’ solipsistic conclusions regarding thought and being (2006, 1–2).
By contrast, Dussel emphasises the vibrancy of the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Century Atlantic crossings of philosophical thought between the newly colonised Americas and Spain and Portugal (2006, 13–14), focusing on the ‘modern Iberian-American philosophers before Descartes, who opened up the problematic of modern philosophy’ (7). At the heart of the tradition which Descartes inherited were the Jesuits who, after arriving in the Americas in the mid Sixteenth Century ‘drove the first steps of a modern philosophy in Europe’ (13) in a context where the process of parsing humanity by race (Dussel notes Sixteenth Century debates in Spain regarding the ontological status of indigenous Americans) was being used to justify colonial violence (10–14), and, in part, from whose schooling in meditation arises Descartes’ individualistic notion of being (5–7). Descartes’ thought, and the Western emphasis on ontology over ethics, is thus the product of this longer history of colonial modernity. It emerges due to the influence of the first phase of modern philosophy, from the Transatlantic South, in Amsterdam, a city formerly a Spanish province, from a thinker schooled within a Spanish religious order (Dussel 2013, 10). Not as though seemingly out of a vacuum in a disconnected Northern Europe (Dussel 2006, 5).
Colonial modernity is thus Eurocentric both geopolitically (in terms of the world system) and philosophically (in terms of the privileging of ontology over ethics) (Dussel 1971, 34–35, 48). Moreover, with the birth to the modern world system in 1492, came the denial of ‘ecological civilization, popular democracy, and economic justice’ in the pursuit of the wealth which Europe would ultimately use to force its way into the centre of the world economy (116–117). The concerns flagged by Braidotti and Elsaesser with regard to the reason for the contemporary emergence of a cross-disciplinary interest in ethics are thus both evident in what is excluded by Descartes – the otherness of the self, which can be discovered (after Levinas) in the encounter with alterity, and the otherness of history which can likewise be realised in the same encounter. That is, if the coevalness of the other is acknowledged it can be situated not as a primitive forerunner, but as the product of an altogether different history, inhabiting an altogether different, but copresent, ‘time’. With such a viewpoint in mind, conjoining world history (from world systems analysis) with a historicised ethics of alterity which aims at the ‘philosophical decolonization’ (2008b, 38) of the Western canon, I turn to what is at stake for the field (for Film Studies, and the interdisciplinary area of film-philosophy), in such a decolonising move.
A Dusselian ethics for film-philosophy
The ever-expanding engagement with ethics in film-philosophy has not produced entire agreement as to what a cinematic ethics entails. A broad working definition would be that it is less concerned with morality (a code defining right from wrong by which to live our lives) than it is with how an encounter with a film can change the way we consider our interaction with the world. In line with a long-standing argument that films can ‘do’ philosophy (Deleuze 1983 and 1985; Mulhall 2001; Wartenberg 2007), the ethical turn explores how films can prompt ethical change. For Jane Stadler, ‘narrative film can be a source of ethical understanding [… ] we reflect on, deliberate about, and discuss ethical situations rationally and lucidly by narrating and interpreting stories’ (2008, 4). Cinema thus has ‘the potential to bring about transformations in perspective, responsiveness and understanding’ (6). Similar sentiments are echoed in subsequent works (Downing and Saxton 2010, 1; Choi and Frey 2014, 1; Sinnerbrink 2016, 3).
Levinas, an influential voice early on in this film-philosophy, remains prominent (Landsberg 2004, 151–152; 2009, 227; Cooper 2006; 2007; Downing and Saxton 2010; Girgus 2010; Hole 2016). Increasingly, however, a plurality of voices is in evidence, albeit as yet nearly all are drawn from the Western philosophical canon.11 This proliferation is in itself encouraging, in the context of the worrying de-politicisation of theoretical work on film in recent decades – the privileging of approaches informed by analytical philosophy which ‘attempt to redeem “theory” for film by placing it in the context of a philosophy of science’ (Rodowick 2007, 98). Considering that Dussel is gradually being adopted in Film Studies (Bermú dez Barrios 2011, 1–2; Richards 2011, 201; Martin-Má rquez 2011; Martin-Jones 2016; Brown 2016 and 2018), the role of a Dusselian ethics in enhancing this debate, providing a perspective from outside of the Eurocentric canon, is overdue.
The introduction of Dussel revivifies an until now submerged engagement with Latin American thought in Film Studies, stemming back to the third cinema manifestos (Rocha 1965; Solanas and Getino 1969; Julio Garcí a Espinosa 1969), through the use of the writings on cannibalism of Oswald de Andrade to analyse Brazilian films (Stam 1997, 70–78), to Dussel in the 2010s (Richards 2011; Martin-Má rquez 2011). After all, the historical conditions which led to the third cinema debates remain as pertinent under neoliberal globalisation as they did during the Cold War. Whilst Dussel’s category of ‘the poor’ (‘poverty as the absolute limit of capital’ (1998b, 40)) might seem sententious, the World Health Organization considers that around 1.2 billion of the world’s seven and a half billion people live in extreme poverty (on less than one dollar a day),12 with different estimates of global poverty ranging up to almost half of the world’s population. Dussel’s ‘poor’ summarises the historical fact of structural inequality as ongoing legacy of centuries of colonial modernity, his ethics thus resonating with previous writers on colonialism (e.g. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944)), as well as with many contemporary thinkers on globalisation (Guattari 1989; Hardt and Negri 2000 and 2005; Gilroy 2005, 9 (citing Dussel 1992); Appadurai 2006; Graeber 2011; Dabashi 2015).
Bringing Dussel to bear on this debate in film-philosophy, this book aligns itself with a broader consideration of what kinds of philosophy can best address the problems of globalisation. It moves beyond the dead end of attempting to engage the division in Western philosophy (between the so-called ‘Analytical’ and ‘Continental’ traditions) with the question of modernity (Pippin 1991; Glendinning 2006; Sinnerbrink 2008) towards a viewpoint that can encompass a plurality of approaches from a world of philosophies (Martin-Jones 2016). This is to address directly what Peter K. J. Park describes as the racism which shaped the formation of the Western philosophical canon (at the height of its imperial activities), such that, from 1780–1830 (from Kant to Hegel), Africa and Asia were written out of the history of the discipline (2013, 2).13 The denial of coevalness, then, extended even to the world’s philosophies, which were banished to the ‘pre-history’ of (European) thought (4–5).
Engaging with Dussel also aligns this film-focused project with existing decolonising critiques of Levinas, the problems in whose approach to otherness include: the normative position of patriarchy and the father-son relationship in his ethics (1961, 151–157 and 278–280); his difficulty acknowledging parity to all forms of global alterity (especially to Palestinians and to Africans) (Levinas 1989, 294; Bazzano 2016, 32); and, in spite of its usefulness for reconsidering subjects like ecology and postcolonialism (Sparrow 2013, 73–83; Drabinski 2011, xvii), the Eurocentrism of his worldview. As Dussel argues of Levinas’s inability to see the Holocaust within a broader world history: ‘Levinas remains inevitably Eurocentric, despite discovering the irrationality of the totalization of modern subjectivity, since he could not situate himself in the exteriority of metropolitan, imperial, and capitalist Europe’ (2008b, 39). Dussel enables us to move past these issues with Levinas, who remains popular with film-philosophy scholars, when considering the ethics on offer across a world of cinemas.
Dussel also provides a perspective distinct from other post-Levinasian predecessors like Jacques Derrida (1967), Alain Badiou (1993), Sara Ahmed (2000), Judith Butler (2004), or Slavoj Ž iž ek (2006).14 For example, Badiou critiques Levinas’s ‘pious discourse’ on ethics, arguing that the absolute alterity of the other and the transcendence attained in the encounter with it is simply another way of considering the presence of God (1993, 22–23). Whilst Badiou might be right in arguing that alterity is simply ‘what there is’ (25), such a conclusion, if viewed from the perspective of colonial modernity, must also include the similarly ubiquitous nature of inequality. Thus Badiou does not escape the Levinasian failure to recognise the geopolitics behind the structural unevenness which conditions global outlooks on alterity. Again, Ž iž ek’s conclusion, that ‘others are primordially an (ethically) indifferent multitude’ and that to rack focus on to the one, in the Levinasian encounter, is to deny justice to the ‘faceless many left in shadow’ (2006, 182) encounters the usual problems of Ž iž ek’s Hegelian dismissal of other world histories beyond that of Europe (136). Ž iž ek’s multitude remains, precisely, a primordial, and not a historically material one. Instead, Dussel can illuminate the very real transnational histories of colonial modernity, without retreating into an undifferentiated same (Badiou) or a blurry, abstract collective other (Ž iž ek).15
Most importantly for this discussion, Dussel provides a way of understanding how a world of cinemas explores histories in a manner which requires ethical engagement. With a ‘worldwide perspective’ after Dussel, these two things – history and ethics – appear inter-related. Put simply, to understand the importance of the lost pasts of colonial modernity is to realise that this requires the provincialisation of the centrality of our own history with regard to those marginalised by colonial modernity.
Naturally, Dussel’s ethics is not the answer to everything,16 but it can at least unlock the relationship between Eurocentric views of world history and those evident in time-image films across a world of cinemas. Jennifer Lynde Barker argues, after Levinas, that films which provide us with encounters in which we are awakened to a responsibility for the other enable us to see the fascist in ourselves and resist it (2013, 85). But it is with Dussel that we can realise how this process is one in which the viewer can potentially resist, or at least reorient, a worldview historically. To summarise: if, in a Levinasian cinematic encounter we might realise the unknowability of the other (and be shaken from our complacency regarding the centrality of our self to the world), then the cinematic encounters explored in this book indicate the unknowability of lost pasts (after Dussel, shaking us out of any complacency regarding the centrality of our past within world history).
Distant viewing history on film with Dussel
With this introduction to Dussel in place, I return to the question of how to ground an interpretation of history on film in relation to colonial modernity across a world of cinemas. In the Introduction I briefly mentioned that this work would be an exercise in, after Franco Moretti, ‘distant viewing’. Famous literary theorist Moretti, influenced by world systems analysis, discusses the need to break away from close reading of texts within established canons. Instead, he argues for ‘Distant reading: where distance [… ] is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units which are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems’ (2013, 48–49). To Moretti’s list we can add histories or, more precisely, how time-images create transnational histories across a world of cinemas. In fact, Film Studies has been distant viewing across a world of cinemas for many decades, in various ways. Even amongst those scholars to recently undertake such a task, directly acknowledging the encouragement of Moretti’s work, there are a mixture of approaches in evidence: some favour distance for the detachment from the text that it offers (Andrew 2006; Caughie 2018), some – like myself – prefer to retain a degree of close textual analysis even when distant viewing across a world of cinemas (Smith 2017). What is key for this study is not exactly how close or distant the position taken, however, but the worldview which influences the critical position adopted from distance.
Historically, scholarly attempts to draw connections between films across borders (with respect to themes, genres, and modes), often entailed the homogenising of a diverse range of auteur or art films from around the world: either through a focus on their aesthetic (Bordwell 1979) – which threatened to obscure the embeddedness of such aesthetic forms in national institutions, artistic heritage, and cultural discourse, all in spite of their international appeal (Neale 1981) – or through the positioning of, say, a Japanese director like Yasujirō Ozu as modernist, at least when considered in comparison to an assumed (seemingly globally) normative Hollywood aesthetic (Thompson and Bordwell, 1976). In fact, as more recent research reveals, Ozu’s work engages with Japanese aesthetic tradition, translating this heritage into cinematic form (Geist 1994; Nagib 2006, 32). With such critiques now well known, this book emerges at a particular moment of historical development in the discipline, towards the increased observation across borders of ‘the world’s expanding storehouse of stories and storytelling styles’ (e.g. Constanzo 2014, x), but with greater sensitivity to context (whether understood as national or transnational).
For instance, two influential predecessors for this book emerged in the early 2000s, examining (often disparate) diasporic histories. Laura U. Marks’ The Skin of the Film (2000) posits that diasporic cinemas are becoming a transnational ‘genre’, with ‘shared concerns about style and content’ (2), and Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema (2001) likewise notes the shared features of films by exilic and diasporic filmmakers worldwide (their displaced situations creating the cinematic ‘accent’), in spite of the very particular cross-border histories they navigate (3). In both instances the histories involved are, by definition, transnational, negotiating diasporic or exilic situations and memories of a now-distant homeland. This approach to uncovering transnational histories by focusing on diaspora is also discussed by Dina Iordanova as ‘watching across borders’, a process designed to free interpretative analysis from the limitations of situatedness in national contexts. The advantage of such an approach is that, for Iordanova, it can reveal ‘the global processes that bring the whole phenomenon of migratory and diasporic creativity into existence’ (2010, 61).
There are many reasons for this scholarly shift in perspective, causes geopolitical and industrial in particular.17 Yet this changing trajectory is also a reaction to a change in the manner of considering a world of cinemas which occurred in the wake of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994). This influential text indicated a way to explore films across borders whilst remaining sensitive to originary meanings, making connections across a ‘history of multiply located oppressions’ dating back to colonialist discourses commencing in 1492 (5). Shohat and Stam examine contemporary global inequality in relation to, amongst other global theories, world systems analysis (17). This text’s influence is widespread, being evident in, for example: attempts to foreground the ‘regional aesthetic styles’ which national cinemas inflect (Chaudhuri 2005, 2); the development of ‘positive’, inclusive definitions of world cinemas without singular origin or centre (Nagib 2006, 34); the emergence of postcolonial cinema studies (Ponzanesi and Waller 2012); and re-mappings of a world of cinemas (along lines longitudinal and latitudinal) to negotiate ‘how local tensions and worldwide transformations interact’ (Stone, Cooke, Dennison, and Marlow-Mann 2018, 1).
What I am arguing for, after such predecessors, is that we maintain the rigour of historically embedded interpretation (understanding each film as, historically, the product of a national or transnational context, at least of production), but that we also feel encouraged to then lift films out of these contexts so as to examine their commonalities with movies from elsewhere. These new groupings, I would add, can be seen to explore transnational histories, themselves part of the much larger world history. Likewise, in Dudley Andrew’s conceptualisation of (after Moretti) an ‘atlas’ of world cinema, he offers various ways of mapping the global terrain which complicate the fitting of cinemas within national borders. As he succinctly states: ‘Displacement, not coverage, matters most; let us travel where we will, so long as every local cinema is examined with an eye to its complex ecology’ (2006, 19). In this way, then, we can see how the study of a world of cinemas can be grounded world historically.18
History on film as liberation philosophy
The usefulness of a Dusselian ‘worldwide perspective’ for distant viewing world history in a world of cinemas returns us to the history on film debate. What I am arguing for here is a latent potential in this debate, even if it takes a reconsideration of a world of cinemas, via Dussel, to reveal it. In spite of the Eurocentrism of White’s perspective on world history outlined earlier, recent arguments for White as a historiographer of liberation align him with Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, and indeed, the engagement with philosophy in the history on film debate in general. This is because, at its core, the history on film debate attempts the liberation of history from doublethink.
In Metahistory (1973), White considers history to be a form of writing which follows ‘the path or paths of story-types endemic to the culture to which the discourse belongs’ (xxvi–xxvii). Scholars construct histories stylistically via a ‘combination of modes of emplotment, argument and ideological implication’ (28), such that different histories take generic forms (not unlike those of the romance, comedy, or tragedy). By turns, these forms are predicated upon ideas about what is real (different ‘historical realisms’ (39)), pre-existing in the understanding of the historians. History, as a story constructed poetically from the historical record, should be understood not with regard to its veracity in respect of the past, but for its moral and aesthetic values for the present (xxxii). It is, thus, with respect to the political intent behind our re-viewing of the past (in which respect White builds upon his previous discussion of the need for the historian to ‘participate positively in the liberation of the present from the burden of history’ (1966, 124)), that White’s work indicates how cinema can work against doublethink.
In Metahistory, the reason for White’s later conclusion in ‘The Modernist Event’ is evident with respect to the philosophy which inspires his thinking. White observes a critique, emerging in late Nineteenth Century Western thought from Friedrich Nietzsche onwards, of the prevalent historical consciousness. This critique solidifies following the mechanised slaughter of World War One, including in modernist art and literature. Hence, much later in White’s career the same emphasis is placed on how ‘holocaustal’ events in the Twentieth Century require a modernist form of aesthetic treatment. The Eurocentrism of White’s position aside, it is consistent in its search for a way of telling the story of history dynamically (considering the usefulness of the past for the present, for challenging accepted notions of historical reality), as opposed to reiterating historical facts to justify the present as status quo (1966, 133). White thus calls for ‘liberation’ from the past through a study of history which provides ‘a specific temporal dimension to man’s [sic] awareness of himself [… ] less to remind men of their obligation to the past than to force upon them an awareness of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from present to future’ (132). Although I examine a world of cinemas in a different manner to that of White (the films herein are not the ‘non-stories’ he favours, but Deleuzian time-images), the emphasis on the temporal/historical and the ethical is precisely that of White, due to the emphasis on liberation which White shares with Dussel. As Herman Paul outlines, White produces in the 1960s and 1970s a ‘liberation historiography’:
White envisioned a world in which historians would not do their work ‘properly’[… ] but would stop in order to reflect upon what is ‘proper’ in the face of social unrest and political injustice. In White’s world, philosophers of history would [… ] redefine the concept of history in such a way as to include those previously despised as ‘people without history’ [… ] [T]he ideal that White defended in these years may be described as liberation historiography.
(2011, 55)
White argues that choosing a history to inform the present is a moral and aesthetic choice. It has a political intent which, in line with Dussel’s inclusive approach towards global alterity, indicates precisely the potential for cinema to oppose doublethink.19
The particular nexus being examined here, of liberation philosophy from the 1960s and 1970s, politics, history, and a world of cinemas, returns us to the question of this work’s relationship to a cinema of resistance. The chosen films from a world of cinemas explored herein illuminate a critique that is not dissimilar to that of third cinema during the Cold War, in its engagement with the geopolitics of global structural inequality. As the subtitle of Teshome H. Gabriel’s Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (1979) indicates, third cinema emerged in different parts of the third world as a form of resistance to global hegemony (whether to imperialism or neo-colonialism, or to the spread of neoliberalism after the early 1970s), seeking liberation for subjected peoples.20 This similarity is in part due to scholarship on a world of cinemas building upon previous debates regarding third cinema. As Nagib indicates: ‘the “national” project, in cinema, which was at the core of the Third Cinema movements of the 1960s as a reaction to and resistance to global capitalism [… ] achieved their historical aims and needed to move forward towards closing ranks with movements of resistance across the world’ (included in Fisher and Smith 2016). In this context, Nagib argues, a ‘polycentric approach’ can ‘organise world cinema according to “creative peaks” and look at them through recurrent tropes [… ]. Though strongly connected with a region, a nation and a culture, these films connect across borders’ (included in Fisher and Smith 2016).
Scholarship on diasporas, third cinema, and Deleuze’s concept of ‘modern political’ or ‘minor cinema’ (Sutton and Martin-Jones 2008, 51–64; Brown 2014; Holtmeier 2016) reveals the similarities of approach to globally shared concerns appearing in cinemas around the world. As Kathleen Newman summarises:
What is now at stake in film studies is the question of how motion pictures register, at formal level of narrative, broad and long-term social transformations, that is, changes in the capitalist world-economy at the regional and global scales and over multiple decades.
(2010, 9)
As this book exposes, a world of cinemas explores transnational histories which may account for several centuries of such transformations. To conclude this chapter, then, I consider how my approach to the story of history which emerges across a world of cinemas provides a slightly different kind of cinema of resistance to the ‘capitalist world-economy’ than such previous political conceptualisations of world cinemas (third cinema; minor cinema) have suggested. The distinction is that, when grounding such an interpretation in the ‘worldwide perspective’ provided by a Dusselian critique of colonial modernity, resistance becomes more broadly conceived as that which resists the global capitalist world ecology. To see why this is requires that the Cold War context in which such cinemas emerged be reconsidered as part of the longer history of both colonial modernity and the Anthropocene. This is the focus of this chapter’s final section.
A cinematic ethics for the Anthropocene
The Road (USA, 2009), Interstellar (USA/UK, 2014), Mad Max: Fury Road (Australia/USA, 2015): science fiction films foretelling apocalyptic disaster for humanity are the kind typically used to illustrate discussions of the Anthropocene – the idea that we now live in an era defined by humanity’s influence on the planet, evidenced by measurable geological traces of humanity’s impact on the globe like radiation from nuclear detonations which can be found in rocks (Macfarlane 2016). This choice of films supports the type of narrative about the Anthropocene which emphasises the imminent collapse of contemporary society, what Christophe Bonneuil considers the ‘eco-catastrophist’ way of telling the story of the Anthropocene (2015, 26–27). It also evidences a Hegelian pre-occupation with the link between technological development under modernity – in the West, a period still understood with respect to the imperialism and scientific discoveries since the Enlightenment, rather than the broader colonial modernity driven by Europe (and North America) since 1492. How scholars attempt to understand this ecological idea by selecting certain specific representative films is very revealing of the structuring presence of Eurocentric views of world history within scientific thought, and the limiting grasp of what it means for a world of cinemas to resist global structural inequality. For example, Bruno Latour’s (2015) choice of Gravity (UK/USA, 2013) to discuss the Anthropocene focuses us more on technology than ethics. Again, Selmin Kara (2016) coins the neologism ‘Anthropocenema’, to describe what she considers the ‘becoming cinematic of the Anthropocene imaginary’, analysing depictions of technological waste in the sci-fi films Gravity and Snowpiercer (South Korea/Czech Republic/USA/France, 2013) (see also Kara 2014; Martin-Jones 2016).
As with scientific theories situating the commencement of the Anthropocene in the Industrial Revolution (Crutzen 2002) or the Nuclear Age (Carrington 2016), the focusing of our attention on technology in science fiction films both eradicates any sense that the Anthropocene is a condition inextricably linked to the uneven distribution of wealth (it keeps the focus instead on development), and perpetuates the questionable idea that newer forms of greener technology can stem the trajectory we are on towards environmental devastation (Hickel 2016) even in the midst of the acceleration of the world’s sixth mass extinction event (Ceballos et al. 2015). If our long-held beliefs as to the potential of modernity to provide freedom from poverty are no longer self-evident (because the result of development would now seem to be environmental catastrophe), and the ones whose conditions are most likely to get worse initially are those excluded from modernity (Chakrabarty 2009, 208–216), then should the focus not instead be on liberation from the structural inequality of colonial modernity? It is here, in fact, that a Dusselian ethics chimes with recent attempts to date the Anthropocene to 1492, which, by turns, reveals something fresh regarding the cinema of resistance, and its accompanying cinematic ethics for the Anthropocene offered by a world of cinemas.
Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin (2015) suggest the possibility that the year 1610 might be considered for the commencement of the Anthropocene. This date refers back directly to 1492, linking such an idea not only with world systems analysis (which Lewis and Maslin mention in passing (175)), but also with the world historicised ethics of Dussel (who himself includes ecological concerns in his overview of colonial modernity (1998b 32; 2003a, 68) (see Chapter 2)). The argument put forward by Lewis and Maslin starts with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492 and the resulting reduction in the indigenous population by around fifty million people.21 As a consequence of this staggering genocide, the same quantities of trees were no longer felled to create the space for farming or to provide fuel for cooking. The extensive regeneration of forest and grasslands that occurred over the following one hundred years thus resulted in a decline in atmospheric CO2 levels between 1570 and 1620. This created the measurable impact of humanity on the environment – the so-called Little Ice Age – which is now recorded in Antarctic ice core records (175). This reforestation, along with the various other indicators of global change created by the meeting of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds (misnomers illustrating once again the denial of coevalness), referred to as the Columbian Exchange (the globalisation of crops, animals, and diseases, as well as human travel, trade, and interaction (174)) lead Lewis and Maslin to conclude that: ‘colonisation, global trade and coal brought about the Anthropocene’ (177).
This correlation between the world system and the Anthropocene has a history, including in the emerging ‘eco-Marxist’ critique (Bonneuil 2015, 29). This direction finds its neatest academic expression in the concept of the ‘Capitalocene’ as capitalist world ecology (Moore 2003; 2015). Jason W. Moore draws on world systems analysis to describe an intertwined relationship between capitalism and nature which stems from the long Sixteenth Century (2003; 2015, 12). Capitalism, for Moore, is ‘a way of organising nature’ (2015, 2; 192). Nature is thus not something external to capital, which it controls or exploits exactly, but is the ‘web of life’ (3) within which capital operates: ‘humans make environments and environments make humans’ (3). Moore’s conceptualisation of capitalism as ‘world ecology’ (3) provides a direct correlation with modernity, where the latter is understood very much as in Latin American philosophy: colonial modernity. The link between colonial modernity, the 1492 Anthropocene theory, and the need for an ethics which can engage with our intertwined historical relationship to others (whether people or species) is clear in Moore’s observations regarding the coproduction of modernity by both humanity and nature (7): ‘Modernity is a capitalist world ecology’ (4). It is this, then, which a world of cinemas now resists.
To briefly give one example, illustrating how much more a world of cinemas can offer to the Anthropocene debate than just doom-laden science fiction films, Embrace of the Serpent (discussed in the Introduction) indicates that it is not ‘greener’ technology that we must turn to at a time of environmental devastation by capital, but to a different ethical relationship with otherness. This requires that we recognise the histories of those excluded by global structural inequality, which by turns requires a provincialising of the relative centrality of normative ideas of world history.22
What the depth of history to the eco-Marxist approach provides (correlating the 1492 Anthropocene theory with colonial modernity) is another way of thinking about the role of inequality, ethics and the denial of coevalness in the Anthropocene debate. Understanding ‘modernity as environmental history’, after Moore, reveals that it is not technology which is the problem (and so ‘greener’ technology is not the answer), but the coloniality of power upon which colonial modernity rests. Moore’s discussion of the so-called ‘Four Cheaps’ – food, labour power, energy and raw materials (1008) – with which capitalism transforms nature, indicates how capitalism thrives by appropriating unpaid labour, including that of ‘women or slaves’ (in terms of humans – themselves, of course, a part of nature) or ‘extra human natures, such as forests, soils, or rivers’ (63). Moore’s argument, then, effectively places Latin American philosophy’s critique of global structural inequality within an ecological framework.
The contemporary focus of thinking on technology, in both scientific definitions of the Anthropocene and explanations of it which explore science fiction films, suggests that the threat we face is a recent one, relating to Western modernity’s global expansion after the Industrial Revolution. This present-focused discussion obscures, for example, the massive global population growth (the horrendous death toll of the indigenous of the Americas and elsewhere notwithstanding) enabled by the spread of New World crops like maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes and beans in the centuries which followed 1492 (Crosby 1972, 165–207; Mann 2011, 210–303). The North Atlantic trade circuit, in effect, formed an ‘ecological corridor’ to enable the global spread and exchange of not only foodstuffs, but more generally of viruses, parasites, bacteria, crops, insects, and animals (Mann 2011, 43). The origins of colonial modernity, which gave Europe a comparative advantage over Asia as it rose to global prominence on the back of slave labour and indigenous genocide, was the millions of square kilometres of land they colonised in the Americas after 1492 (Dussel 1998b, 32). Yet now this ‘civilizing process’ is reaching its ‘terminal crisis’ in ‘the ecological destruction of the planet and the extinguishing in misery and hunger of the great majority of humanity’ (Dussel 2003a, 69). Thus, as Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz note, dating the origins of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene back to the Sixteenth Century enables us to grasp that it is the ecologically ‘unequal’ nature of the Columbian Exchange (2016, 225) which provides the origins of the technological leaps made during the Great Acceleration of the post-war period (leaps which, after all, increasingly exacerbate inequality due to the labour they render redundant). And it is here, then, that the Cold War origin of a global cinema of resistance is recast.
After World War Two, the natural resources of the third world were drained by the Western powers: ‘the driving phenomenon of the Great Acceleration embarked on in 1945–73 was the tremendous ecological indebtedness of the Western industrial countries. These literally emptied the rest of the world of its materials and high-quality energy, a phenomenon that is key to the Cold War’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, 250). The emergence of a worldwide cinema of resistance during the Cold War, then, relates to the much longer history of colonial modernity, and its ethics, similarly, relates to the Anthropocene. It is in ecological historical worldviews like those of Moore, and Bonneuil and Fressoz (themselves so close to Dussel’s position), that we find the intersection of ethics with the importance of recognizing the impact of the denial of coevalness (that defining feature of colonial modernity) on our current state of global structural inequality. This is not often a feature of science fiction films, but it is of many others – like Embrace of the Serpent – across a world of cinemas, as Chapters 3 through 6 further illuminate.
The multitudinous plurivocality of global cinema considered as a totality offers a chance to shift our focus towards the recognition of coevalness, towards equality with others within the world we inhabit. This is not a case of art cinema vs Hollywood, or third cinemas vs first and second, but of understanding how transnational histories emerge across the cinemas of the world (in genre movies, art films, documentaries, and so on). To grasp this, we need to realise that the transnational histories being explored on film coincide with the ethics demanded by the denial of coevalness that is a feature of the ecological history of colonial modernity. Accordingly, in the next chapter I deepen the ethical dimension to this study by exploring the importance of hesitation in time-image cinemas.
Notes
1. The transnational turn in Film Studies has been ongoing since the late 1990s, Deborah Shaw outlining no fewer than fifteen different ‘inter-connecting and overlapping categories’ of the term transnational now in use (2013; Fisher and Smith 2016). A great diversity of views exist with respect to methodologies used, and as to which analytical dimensions meet in transnational studies of films (Fisher and Smith 2016). This may be because the transnational turn is the product of a much broader shift in the field towards the study of a world of cinemas. The earliest of the texts on transnational cinema, after all, explored Chinese cinemas (Lu 1997), Chinese and diasporic/postcolonial cinemas (involving France and the Maghreb) respectively (Higbee and Lim, 2010), and international coproductions involving a range of countries, including China/Hong Kong, France/Belgium/Tunisia, Denmark/Scotland (Hjort, 2010).
2. The silver which European powers mined from the New World using slaves (150,000 tonnes between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 80% of the world’s output (Mann 2011, 189)), became Europe’s chief export, enabling it to compete in the then Asia-dominated world market (Frank 1998, 5), and to pay off its structural balance of trade deficits (albeit the influx ultimately became inflationary and thus increased inequality in Europe (74–75; 131–139; 277–283)). Specifically, Mexican and Peruvian silver funded the building of the Armada which gave the Spanish control over the Mediterranean from the 1570s (Dussel 1998a, 11; 1998b, 31; 2003a, 60).
3. Peter Frankopan’s claims to an alternative view of history Eurocentrically overstates the originality of his intervention in light of this long-standing debate (2015, xix).
4. Chinese ships may have landed in the Americas earlier in the Fifteenth Century than Columbus, who may himself have been following a Chinese map (Menzies 2002).
5. The Pope’s concern with inequality under capitalism’s ‘economy of exclusion’ is evident in his Papal proclamations (Pope Francis 2013, 45; 2015, 1) (notwithstanding the irony of the Roman Catholic Church’s wealth (Kirchgaessner and Watts 2015), nor its intertwinement with colonisation after the 1493 Papal Bulls of Pope Alexander VI seemingly gave permission for the enslavement of indigenous Americans (Minnich 2005, 281)).
6. Of course, Vikings had visited centuries previously, and likely the Chinese earlier in the Fifteenth Century (Menzies 2002). Other precursors include the possibility of ships from Japan, and long before them the Romans and Phoenicians (Deloria 1972, 110). Yet only the arrival of Europeans after 1492 would influence the world system so profoundly.
7. The idea of ‘compressed modernity’ usually refers to South Korea. The argument is that ‘South Koreans have experienced Westerners’ historical development of two or three centuries over merely three or four decades’ (Chang 1999, 30). ‘Multiple modernities’, more broadly, explores how modernity has emerged differently in various East Asian contexts, ‘Western modernity’ having ‘travelled to the East’, before being ‘transformed’ due to the distinctive characteristics which have marked its emergence in different locales (Lau 2003, 102). Admittedly, Dussel’s position, oppositional to European exceptionalism, could be said, paradoxically, to place too much emphasis on Europe. Challenging the view of Europe as an ‘enlightened’ beacon (shining the light of rational thought, scientific development, and democracy) risks only producing a dark mirror of this, of coloniality (Europe as engine of genocide and theft on a global scale) as sole world-changing agency. After all, world history since 1492 has seen many events which seem entirely unconnected to Europe’s growth, and which many might consider just as problematic (e.g. the modernisation of Japan and the emergence of its empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, culminating in such horrors as the Nanking Massacre of 1937; or the growth of Communism in China, and the starvation of millions from 1959 to 1961 during the Great Leap Forward). In fact, the global perspective of colonial modernity can illustrate their connectedness. Behind the growth of the world system to encompass the globe lies the European desire for access to Asian markets. Herein lies the connection between the encounter with Spanish ships landing in the Americas in 1492; British ships in China in 1839 (the Opium Wars giving the British Empire its longed-for foothold into Chinese markets via the cession of Hong Kong, which in turn influences Chinese history dramatically – including the emergence of communism, and ultimately the millions of deaths during the Great Leap Forward); and with US ships in Japan in 1853 (opening up the closed kingdom to trade on terms determined by others, which influences Japanese history – including the emergence of the Japanese empire, and ultimately the war crimes committed at Nanking). Europe is not the sole causal agent of either of these Asian events. There is Asian agency as well. Yet in the world system, after 1492, even ‘distant’ events (distant from the newly emerging Atlantic centre) are all connected within it.
8. Dussel notes that Levinas’ representative figures of alterity are from pre-Christian ethical systems in, for example, areas of the world like Western Asia (1998b, 8).
9. This history is part of a longer heritage of subduing nature and all other religious worldviews in Judeo-Christian culture, stretching back centuries prior to the modern world system (Deloria 1972, 107 and 183; Fabian 1983, 1–35; Serres 1992, 47–50). Yet, it is with 1492 that it influenced the entire world system.
10. Dussel offers an interpretation of Marx pertinent to ‘a critique of globalized capitalism’ (1988, xxxii), emphasising that in Marx’s theories, surplus value under capitalism stems from the surplus labour of workers (the proportion of the labour they provide which is not valued by the wages they earn (xvii, xxvii, 3–8)). Living labour, then, is the exterior ground upon which capital rests: or put differently (colonial) modernity is fuelled by its excluded underside (18). For Ivá n Má rquez, Dussel offers a ‘new interpretation of Marx [… ] not as a dialectician and heir of Hegel, but as an analectic thinker who tries to fight the totalising efforts of the most important totality of his time, i.e., capitalism’ (2013, 304). Accordingly, whilst Dussel can be described as providing a ‘Levinasian Marx’ (Mendieta 2003a, 9), equally, he provides a ‘non-Eurocentric’ and ‘proto-postcolonial’ Marx (Martí n Alcoff and Mendieta 2000, 22–23).
11. Downing and Saxton situate Levinas with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Ž iž ek. In addition, see: Levinas and Deleuze (Girgus 2010; Grø nstad 2016), Nussbaum (Stadler 2008), Kant (Wheatley 2009), Badiou and/or Ranciè re (Nagib 2011; Ling 2011; Elsaesser 2011), Deleuze and/or Cavell (Bogue 2010; Rodowick 2010; Boljkovac 2013; Chaudhuri 2014; King 2014; Sinnerbrink 2016), Aristotle (with Nussbaum) (Choi 2014), Foucault (Noortwijk 2014), Lacan (with Levinas and Badiou) (Piotrowska 2014), Nancy (with Levinas) (Scott 2014; Hole 2016).
12. http://www.who.int/hdp/poverty/en/
13. The Eighteenth Century view, that philosophy originated in ‘the Orient’ (Park 2013, 2) (typically focusing on its Indian and Egyptian roots (74)), was replaced, in an act of Eurocentric myth-making, with Greece, as the starting point of a timeline which was geographically focused on the European development of thought (as in G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History (1837)) (Park 2013, 85; see also Quijano 2000, 552; 2008, 192, 200; Dussel 2000b, 465–466; 2013, 12).
14. Dussel’s glaring absence from existing accounts of post-Levinasian critiques indicates the continued Eurocentrism of this field (Hand 2009, 109–121; Boothroyd 2013).
15. Both Dussel and Ž iž ek, who share a disbelief in Levinasian transcendence and a grounding in Marx, explore the potential for a recuperation of Christianity to address global structural inequality. In both cases, critiques have revealed the homogenising nature of their respective understandings of precisely who those others are who are excluded by global structural inequality (an issue which is, by turns, the product of the flaws inherent to their respective philosophies). Ž iž ek’s idea of a Christian community, as it were, without faith, is of ‘a fighting collective grounded in the reference to an unconditional universalism’ (2003, 130). The historical precedent for this, evident in Ž iž ek’s reincarnation of St Paul as Lenin, is the Bolshevik Revolution (2003, 9). In this we see Ž iž ek’s continued emphasis on class as an undifferentiated mass (2000, 110–111; 2003, 48), indicating his failure of ‘historical imagination’ and how his ‘Eurocentric perspective [… ] blocks a materialist conceptualization of colonial history in relation to contemporary globalization’ (Stam and Shohat 2012, 122 and 129). Although Dussel provides more nuance to his understanding of the region-specific nature of revolutionary movements like that of the Zapatistas (1998b, 385–388), even so, similar critiques are levelled at Dussel’s postcolonial Christianity as they are at Ž iž ek’s pagan Christianity. Ofelia Schutte and Elina Vuola, for example, critique Dussel for the presumed lack of agency he gives to those in need of liberation, the possible return of God as philosopher in the one who thinks the underside of modernity seemingly from outwith the world system (and perhaps the one to whom the other presumably appeals), the difficulties Dussel has reconciling the liberation of alterity with a conservative and seemingly Catholic gender politics, and the authoritarianism of such an absolutist position on ethics, derived from religion (Schutte 1993, 175–190; Vuola 2000, 153–162).
16. Indeed, there is much more to the concrete realisation of Dussel’s ethics than is necessary to outline for this discussion of cinema (Dussel 1996; 1998b; 2011).
17. Geopolitical: revolutionary movements of the Cold War enabling third cinema debates in Latin America; postcolonialism and third cinema debates in Africa; the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberal globalisation ensuring an increasing focus on diasporic, refugee, immigrant and other cross-border movements. Industrial: regional or global reach of industries like Hollywood or Bollywood; the increasing importance of multinational capital in globalising cinema; the increase in international coproductions and runaway productions globally; the growth and global reach of the film festival circuit as distribution platform and producer of ‘world cinema’ (Falicov 2007; Villazana 2008; Ross 2010, 2011; Martin-Jones and Montañ ez 2013a), the rise of online distribution, etc.
18. My approach is distinct from Franco Moretti’s attempt to explore a world of cinemas in terms of a broader ‘world system of culture’ (2001, 101), which takes a rather one-dimensional economic approach. It is also different from Dudley Andrew’s much more nuanced explorations of a world of cinemas via world systems analysis (which take Moretti as something of an inspirational jumping off point (2006; 2010)), due to the world historical/hermeneutical emphasis placed herein on the evocation of world systems analysis.
19. Several scholars working on history on film emphasise this film-philosophical heritage without acknowledging it as such. The legacy of Nietzsche’s ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1874) is apparent in the field, as is Michel Foucault’s work on ‘counter-memory’ which he develops from Nietzsche. Counter-memory requires, for Foucault, an ‘effective history’ (affirming of ‘knowledge as perspective’) that is of use for the present, rather than affirming of first causes to history, which are often illusionary and retroactively posited (1977, 156–160). This legacy is evident in Deleuze’s adoption of Nietzsche’s text for his exploration of the historical film, White’s emphasis on history’s usefulness for ‘life’ in ‘the present time’ (which runs through the field generally) and attempts to read history on film as engaged in the construction of counter-histories. Deleuze, for his part, is utilised by several scholars (Landy 1996, 2001, 2015; Barta 1998, 9–10; Burgoyne 2008), his presence in the debate being acknowledged by the inclusion of the time-image in The History on Film Reader (Hughes-Warrington, 2011a).
20. Work on third cinema historically centred on Latin American and African cinemas (Gabriel 1979; Pines and Willemen 1989; Martin 1997; Wayne 2001; Guneratne and Dissanayake 2003), due to the emergence of three manifestos from Latin America in the 1960s advocating for various forms of resistance to the global hegemony of US and European cinemas (Rocha 1965; Solanas and Getino 1969; Julio Garcí a Espinosa 1969) and the importance of filmmakers like Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene in the postcolonial growth of African cinema. There is much to challenge about this model, such as whether third cinema filmmakers see themselves in this way, whether works of second cinema may have as revolutionary an impact ‘in spite’ of their use of conventional forms, what role indigenous aesthetic traditions play (Ukadike 1994, 97–104), into which category to fit Bollywood (historically and now) and Nollywood, as well as indigenous filmmaking, so-called ‘fourth cinema’ (Barclay 2003), etc. Yet it remains an evocative way of using film-philosophy, often blending Marx and Fanon, to include within world cinemas ‘a cinema of decolonization and for liberation’ (Gabriel 1979, 1).
21. Some estimates suggest it may even have been double this amount, and if so, the toll may have accounted for the death – primarily by disease – of as much as 95% of the population of the Americas. This was perhaps around one fifth of the world’s population at the time (Mann 2005, 93–94). Curiously, although the likelihood that much of the Americas was densely populated at the time of European arrival has been known to Western academia, and the general public, for some time (e.g. Heckenberger 2005; Mann 2005), even now reports of ‘findings’ to this effect, such as explorations of ruins in Guatemala and Mexico via Lidar scanning (aerially deployed laser technology), published in early 2018, are greeted in the West as breaking news (Davis 2018; BBC 2018). This is a history, it seems, which we prefer to keep on losing, due no doubt to the inconvenience of this truth for a Western narrative of colonial intervention which prefers to emphasise a supposedly developmental (as opposed to, in reality, a murderous and exploitative profit-seeking) agenda. Or perhaps things are simpler even than this. Perhaps what is being celebrated, and what will be remembered here, is the achievement of Western technology in creating such laser technology, rather than the lost pasts – revealing, ironically, of the destructions wrought by Europeans in their supposed developmental quest to civilise the world – which it might uncover.
22. By contrast, it is rather ironic that the dystopian imagining of a settler colonial culture’s future after a nuclear holocaust (a technologically produced disaster) in Mad Max movies effectively reduces the inhabitants of Australia to the same position which Europeans did to indigenous Americans after 1492. After all, European ideological displacement of the indigenous to the past, as noted in the Introduction after Quijano, mirrored the actual reduction of large and complex civilisations by disease, warfare and enslavement (in places such as the Amazon, now only recorded in archaeological traces) to what have become, by the Twenty-First Century, isolated, tribal, ‘often fugitive [… ] social groups’ (Heckenberger 2005, xii), not dissimilar to those more fantastically imagined in Mad Max movies.