Images: Stills from La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun), 1999, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal, 45’
Class description
This multidisciplinary course places in critical conversation film studies, literature and geography, to explore engagements with the prison as physical landscape and social relation, within global geographies of imperial warfare and abolition. Mobilizing films, prison memoirs and conceptual works primarily, we will examine carcerality, and the unlivable geographies it proliferates, in expansive ways—from the plantation to prisons, police stations, detention centers, military barracks, neoliberal streets, suburban houses, economic zones of exception, and psych wards. Examples will be primarily drawn from freedom fighters, political prisoners, filmmakers and writers, hailing from alternative or oppositional intellectual and artistic traditions, with an emphasis on Black, anticolonial, queer, and feminist avant-garde works.
Learning objectives
- Understand carcerality in its plural dimensions
- Critically examine the relationship between carcerality and the production of space
- Interrogate the relationship between visual technologies (film, photography, cartography) and carceral technologies
- Develop a critical vocabulary and tools to analyse arthouse, experimental films
Grading
- Film analysis (25%)
- Class workshops (25%)
- Notebook (25%)
- Participation (25%)