Film Screening: “Concerning Violence”
On May 04th, students of the seminars “Decolonising Research Collaborations” (MA, led by Everjoy Chiimba and Julia Verne) and “Postkoloniale Geographien” (BSc, led by Malve Jacobsen) watched the documentary “Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense”. We screened the movie at the African Music Archive, where Hauke Dorsch opened the doors for us so that we could benefit from the archive’s fabulous sound system and huge screen.
The documentary is from Göran Hugo Olsson (who also made the documentary “The Black Power Mixtape”). The film hauntingly shows struggles for liberations on the African continent in the second half of the 20th century by combining a preface of Gayatri Spivak with interviews and documentaries from archives and Ms Lauryn Hill’s intriguing voice, reading passages of Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth”. Violence stands at the centre, and the movie starts with one of the most famous quotes of Fanon: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
The students reported that the movie went under their skin and that some images and words will stay there. The theories of Fanon will be further discussed in the seminars.
The movie is currently available to watch for free on the website of Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (English with German subtitles): https://www.bpb.de/mediathek/video/248942/concerning-violence/
