Terms of engagement
To begin with, all three terms I am proposing to consider in relation to cinema are either highly problematic or in urgent need of problematization. âLusophoneâ at best cannot be more than a label of convenience, a kind of shorthand notation to refer to all that would be identifiable, at some level, with Portuguese as a language, or the multiple interactions in space and time of Portugal and its former colonies and their inhabitants. At worst, even leaving aside the termâs own vagueness, it would be nothing more than a convenient mask for the continued attempts at self-importance and domination of others beyond the epoch of empire, on the part of the Portuguese, mired in a debilitating form of nostalgia and downright denial of present realities. As such, it only too easily can lend itself to neo-colonial appropriations, even if disassociated from the invention of a cultural âlusophonyâ, and the ideology of âlusotropicalismâ, invoked by many adepts as a form of mythical bond between the various nations in which Portuguese is an official language. Although opinions are far from consensual, there are clear economic and political interests connected with such concepts. In my own perspective, as I have had occasion to reflect at some length (Medeiros 2018a; 2018b), not only are they always already formed by, and made to promote, postimperial nostalgia, they are inextricably linked to cultural fetishism and traumatic hauntings.
By contrast, âAfricanâ might appear much more straightforward. However, that would imply not only that we would have an agreement as to what âAfricanâ actually designates beyond ready-made stereotypes, destined either for Western consumption, or otherwise employed for easy, if ultimately empty, soothing of real and perceived disadvantages in the wake of failed political experiments in the wake of independence. In reality, obviously, and as we can sometimes see with rare clarity in the light of political or economic scandals, nothing is, or could be, that simple. Still, for a moment, let us imagine that âAfricanâ is a relatively stable designation. Even a cursory look at most, if not all, films that we readily would label as âAfricanâ and âLusophoneâ should dispel such a fantasy as they in similar fashion to a large number of film productions the world over, depend on, sometimes even flourish because of, international and transnational co-operations and financing. None of this is new of course. Yet at present I will want to argue for renewed attention to this âtransnationalâ (a term in itself in need of problematization) as an essential characteristic of world cinema. So, let me still briefly focus now on the third term: âworld cinemaâ. The designation of a âWorld Cinemaâ has also long been polemical, in spite of all good intentions its users may have had. As has been remarked by many, at first, it served basically to relegate all cinemas that did not issue from Hollywood directly or, if we want, the various European national studios to a kind of alterity that served in the end to reinforce the very centrality of western cinemas. As if there was cinema, which was unquestionably western and World Cinema, which was everything else. Already in 2006 Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim left no doubts about this as they introduced their edited collection of essays on Remapping World Cinema: â[t]he first thing to note about the concept of World Cinema is its situatedness: it is (âŠ) the world as viewed from the Westâ (Dennison and Lim, 2006, p. 1). This is not an original or isolated move of course and can be seen in operation throughout the very formation of âEuropeâ throughout modernity. Or, as Dennison and Lim further note, âworld cinema is analogous to âworld musicâ and âworld literatureâ in that they are categories created in the Western world to refer to cultural products and practices that are mainly non-Westernâ (Dennison and Lim, 2006, p. 1). The spatial metaphor deployed by Dennison and Lim is important and Dennison will return to it, although in a properly self-reflective and critical fashion in the more recent work in The Routledge Companion to World Cinema (2018). Moreover, I would suggest, âspaceâ must always be viewed together with âtimeâ even if often, rather than a space-time continuum, what modernity offers is more like a disjunction of the two. Yet, any opening of the debate that might be occasioned by any remapping, must always, in my view, be accompanied by a corollary investigation of history if it is to avoid merely becoming a re-inscription of that, which it sought to dismantle in the first place.
Fortunately the discussion keeps evolving and, although, not necessarily in a dependent relation, but certainly a close one, to developments in a renewed discussion of âworld literatureâ both as a result of, and in reaction to, processes of rapid globalisation. What I have in mind at the present necessarily builds on those reflections, yet also diverges from them in at least one salient aspect. More recent discussions of World Cinema in relation to World Literature have tended to align themselves more or less directly, with the notion of World Literature proposed by David Damrosch, which is credited by many as having revitalized the discussion in the literary field. A salient example is Robert Stamâs World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media (2019), in which Damrosch is liberally quoted. As sweeping and innovative as Stamâs work has always been, here the views on World Literature, and concomitantly on the relationship to World Cinema, notwithstanding the actual attention given to some African production, remain surprisingly stale and unwittingly bound to hegemonic conceptualizations. As useful as Stamâs new work is, not only in terms of the overviews provided, the clear presentation of what he designates at the outset as the âterms of debateâ, and the proposal to develop a âtransâ methodology and a âtransartistic commonsâ â on which more later â I miss an actual engagement with critical theory that could have given a different edge to his salient, if all a bit too easy, reflections on the periphery. Damroschâs What Is World Literature? (2013), at once erudite and refreshing, consolidated, so to speak, the efforts that had been initiated by others such as Sarah Lawall (1994), Pascale Casanova (1999), Franco Moretti (2000), and Cristopher Prendergast (2001). Wide ranging though Damroschâs work might be, at the level of a conceptualizing what actually can be seen as constitutive of a work in order to frame it as world literature, it leaves ample room for argument. This too has been amply debated by many, with varying takes and investments on what has become a rapidly expanding, if polemical, field of study and readers so inclined will have no difficulty easily finding their bearings though the panoply of anthologies that keep coming out of the various academic presses. For the discussion I want to have at the moment, I will refrain from expanding on those debates. As it is, they are not very relevant, hinging often on questions of form and genre, as much as of language, canonicity and cultural transmission, that, however pertinent for film, certainly have different inflections given the differences in the kind of media. Instead, I want to note that my perspective is based on the work of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC, 2015) following on from various theoretical premises but with special attention to the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and his âWorld-Systems Theoryâ (2004):
We propose, in these terms, to define âworld literatureâ as the literature of the world-system â of the modern capitalist world-system, that is. That, baldly, is our hypothesis, stated in the form of a lex parsimoniae. Perhaps, therefore, we should begin to speak of âworld-literatureâ with a hyphen, derived from that of âworld-systemâ. The protocol commits us to arguing for a single world-literary system, rather than for world-literary systems.
(2015, p. 8)
In effect, what I am proposing, in turn, is that we see World Cinema as indeed partaking of the âworld systemâ and by that I also mean âthe modern capitalist world systemâ. At the same time, I want to take issue with both the expansiveness of such a definition, as it would be hard to imagine any film that would not always be a product of modernity or enmeshed in the capitalist world system, even when made expressly to wage an ideological fight against that system or the condition of modernity. Furthermore, I also will want to refine the emphasis on a âsingleâ world system. As I see it, whether referring to literature, film, or any other mode of cultural production, we must be aware of multiple, intersecting, and sometimes competing or clashing world systems. This is not to deny the âsingularityâ of the world system, and of modernity, expressed in the work of the Warwick Research Collective, nor to relativize it. In my view, and following Fredric Jameson in his seminal A Singular Modernity (2002), it is crucial to refute notions of separate modernities, that always implied â even in the more recent guise as âalternate modernitiesâ â a belatedness in relation to a central, and founding, modernity, forever associated with western societies, their practices, customs, and values.
From the more recent discussions on World Cinema, the varied work of Stephanie Dennison, Keya Ganguly, and LĂșcia Nagib offers the strongest, and to my mind, most convincing, analytical tools in order to start understanding how the notion of a World Cinema might move away from more traditional and restrictive notions that often turned up reinforcing the very dichotomies they had set up to question. I would like in the present essay to engage with some of their positions, in order to try to inflect the discussion more towards the âLusophoneâ system. In other words, I will want to build on their insights and at the same time change them in light of the conceptualization of world literature advanced by the Warwick Research Collective. As such I will obviously draw on World-Systems Theory and thus also my use of the hyphen when referring to a âLusophoneâ world cinema. I will want to address primarily questions related to the deployment of memory, framing, and haunting, as I think that, without being exclusive, they are marking for âLusophoneâ cinema precisely because of its, even when un-assumed, imbrication in a postimperial condition. A discussion of both the notion of the periphery and the semi-periphery, as well as of the inherent transnationalism of âLusophoneâ cinema remains basic and I will attempt to couple it with the question of belonging as perhaps the one question that dominates and cuts across a cinema that obsessively reflects on personal and collective forms of alienation as well as on the multiple networks that offer some form of solace and survival, even if never completely so. My understanding of the crucial importance of the periphery comes first from the Warwick Research Collectiveâs work in conceptualizing World Literature (WReC, 2015), but is also fully indebted, in many ways whether visible or not, to the work initiated by Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and BelĂ©n Vidal in their volume on Cinema at the Periphery (2010). Indeed, much more work needs to be done so as to better draw on their insights in relation to âLusophoneâ African cinema. Towards the end of the present essay I will refer to a number of films produced in, and across, the countries that come under the designation of âLusophoneâ, even when not African. The reason for doing so, even though my focus will remain throughout on Africa and its importance to form any understanding of âLusophoneâ cinema, should become clear, I hope. And although I will not be able in this space to offer an analysis of any of the particular films â that will be a next step â I would like to suggest that for all the films I am considering, the imagination of Africa and an African presence is of paramount importance â even when to a great extent that presence is always interchangeably an absence, always both real and phantasmatic.
In order to proceed further, I would like now to invoke Adornoâs injunction at the beginning of Minima Moralia: âOur perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longerâ (1978, p. 15). What is at stake, I would say, is a certain critical attitude, much more than any form of pessimism, cultural or otherwise. I realize that Adorno might appear to be the least relevant thinker for a contemporary reflection on cinema given his harsh criticism, along with Horkheimer, of what they designated as the âculture industryâ with film, in its Hollywood guise at its centre. However, not only is such a view simplistic at best when not plainly misinformed, as the scholarship on Adorno and film has shown (I think here especially of the work developed by Miriam Hansen, among others, 1981â1982). Adorno not only revised himself some of his more virulent views on film but started seriously engaging with some formal aspects of film, starting with sound and it can only be expected that he would have continued to evolve his thought, particularly as film itself has also undergone profound changes. That, however, would be another discussion. What interests me now is Adornoâs appeal, a warning even one could say, to pay close attention to the operation of ideology and how it will dissimulate its effects and its control of reality so as to prevent us from realizing that the ârealityâ we thought we knew, ultimately the ethical or moral life in a philosophical sense, has itself ceased to be possible. Such a warning in itself can be seen as a form of resistance to the very conditions it exposes. And it is in that sense that I would like to invoke it because the question of resistance to hegemonic force, be it in terms of the West, capitalism, or the postimperial question â even the puppet of lusotropicalism â is the work of many of the films that I would consider crucial to form a âLusophone world cinemaâ. Even when they might fail and fall back into a reiteration of the very conditions they sought to expose, the notion of resistance, as complex as it is, has perhaps never been more needed since the time of anti-colonial struggle and I will come back to it in my conclusion.
