Lindeka´s Book [Elektronisk resurs] Provincializing Malfeasance

• Synopsis: In eThekwini (formerly named Durban), the young woman Lindeka begins reading Malfeasance (2011). In this essay the French philosopher Michel Serres fleshes out an original take of the modern planetary present, not as something that came about with the advent of agriculture, the industrial revolution or even the postwar “great acceleration.” To Serres this is a story about how humans of every day and age have used tactics and practices of pollution and violence to own and create property for themselves. This is a far cry from conventional justifications of property that can be found in economic theory and the social contracts of Locke and Rousseau. Lindeka is fascinated by the reading, but she also finds Serres´ linear narrative increasingly disturbing for what it omits: Where is Durban, or even Africa in this universalising history of our planet?   Striking up a conversation with Michel Serres, Lindeka decides to make her own study of historical difference and global connection in planetary thinking. But not through writing, but through “filmed thought” (Pippin 2020), and by using the possibilities of cinema as a transmodal form for expression. Lindeka engages her filmmaker-friend Vinola and they set about “provincializing” Malfeasance (Chakrabarty 2000) by reading the essay from the locus of eThekwini; thereby allowing Lindeka the reader and her postcolonial port city to kick-back and speak their mind on ownership and environmental concerns to uSerres; now also provincialized through the Zuluization of his name. The result is Lindeka´s Book – an image-book – set in a decolonising moment in South Africa where the registers of film and the city-as-archive play along with, but also trouble the text, the spoken word as the active remains of Eurocentric thought in regards to how we tell stories about our planet and its environments.   References: Chakrabarty D. 2000. Provincializing Europe – Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. University of Chicago Press. Serres M. 2011. Malfeasance - Pollution as Appropriation?. Stanford University Press. Pippin. R. 2020. Filmed Thought - Cinema as Reflective Form. University of Chicago Press. 

Ämnesord

Humanities and the Arts  (hsv)

Humaniora och konst  (hsv)

Genre

government publication  (marcgt)

Indexterm och SAB-rubrik

Global cinematic ethnography; planetary boundaries; provincialization and translation; Southern urbanism; South Africa