The Poetics of Radical Hope in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Film Experience 1498539815, 9781498539814

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The Poetics of Radical Hope in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Film Experience

The Poetics of Radical Hope in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Film Experience Olivier-Jean Tchouaffe

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-3981-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-3982-1 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

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I: On the Genealogy of the Camera-Eye and Sissako’s Poetic Possibilities 1

2

Mapping the Theoretical Terrain: Cinema, Censorship, and the Search for Authenticity in the Age of Neoliberal Rationalities and Islamic Terror Camera-Eye, the Arte Wave, and Afro-Futurism

II: Aesthetic and Film Analysis

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3 35 67

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Sissako’s Cinema: Communal Aesthetic Practices

69

4

Life on Earth (1998): Meditation on Belonging in a Globalized World

79

Heremakono (2002): On African Imaginative Landscapes, Frontiers, and Journeys

91

5 6

Bamako (2006): Africa, Cowboys, and Postcolonial Economic Blues

101

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Timbuktu (2014): Notes on Art, Terror, and Cosmopolitan Politics

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Conclusion: Marginal Subjectivities and Globalization: The Subaltern Speaking

137

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Bibliography Index About the Author

143 149 153

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Acknowledgments

In academia, no one has written a book completely on his own. I extend my gratitude to many people who saw me through this book and provided their support—Drs. Toyin Fayola, Steven Salm, Danielle PorterSanchez, Cacee Hoyer, Tom McCourt, Patrick Burkart, Carmela Garritano, Maryellen Higgins, P. Julie Papaioannou, Hector Amaya, Archer Neilsen, Christopher Jordan and Monny Georges. For all those who participated in helping me get where I am now—my family, notably, Pierre and Nadine Kemeni, Christian and Serges Tchouaffe, Gerard Bertrand Kamdom-Motsebo, Chloe-Maeva Kemeni, Pierre Junior Kemeni, Batiste Tchouaffe, Johan, Mattis, and Rafa Tchouaffe, Emilie-Therese Kemeni, Cecile Tientcheu Djeukam, Florence Nana-Tchouaffe, and Vincent Tchouaffe, and all my uncles and aunts. I could not finish without mentioning my dear friends Dieudonne Dang, Patrick Bouchez, Jean-Marcel Fokam, Joal-Didier Engo, Gregg Bruggebors, Jess Canales; my neighbors Jay Fiorenza, Douglas Max Martin, and Christina Michelle Cones; Kelly Hutchinson and Carl Kieffer, Grooms Street; and my folks at Pecan Street Café, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Haymaker, and The Crown and Anchor Pub down by my place. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer of the original manuscript for the remarks, comments, assistance in the editing and proofreading which is way more than most reviewers ever do. Likewise, being able to be associated with a fresh and creative academic publishing house such as Lexington Books is a huge accomplishment for a young scholar striving to make a name for himself in the field of film studies. I particularly thank Kathryn Tafelski, Madhumitha Koduvalli, and Carissa Marcelle for their invaluable support.

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I

On the Genealogy of the Camera-Eye and Sissako’s Poetic Possibilities

ONE Mapping the Theoretical Terrain Cinema, Censorship, and the Search for Authenticity in the Age of Neoliberal Rationalities and Islamic Terror

This author seeks to comprehensively refocus Abderrahmane Sissako’s work in light of African cinema’s stated goal to establish the historicity of a modern African enlightened subject through an introspective reclamation of African subjectivity from material conditions and realities that continue to impede a proper work of decolonization in the continent. What props up this cinema is the aspiration to develop a singular aesthetic to mediate the production of powerful informative knowledge that defies existing global geopolitical normative knowledge about the continent. This significant cultural work is relevant for the production of counter-hegemonic reparative narratives retrieved from a colonialist ideological project of black abjection for the development of a radical new economy of images and imaginative spaces. In so doing, the African filmmaker aims to level power differentials by operating as a detective from the detritus of global capitalism, what Charles Baudelaire calls the work of the “chiffonier or rag-picker” and Kenneth Harrow calls “Trash” (2013), to sow back together the large tapestry of African modern subjectivity and processes of social recognition at a time where the market ruling ideology and production of the sublime are crumbling through the replacement of the Weberian Protestant autonomous and ethical subject by the Schumpeterian subject thriving on creative destruction and constant reinvention into obsolescence. These cultural processes are predicated on the knowledge that the African subject was always already at the center of the formation of the European modern Western states and that the 3

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development of global capitalism, slavery, colonization and imperialism were in fact a project of modernity. African subjectivity was at the center of these processes albeit forced into a precarious asymmetrical co-dependence embedded in Eurocentric anti-black genocidal politics. And, within that context, the role of the African filmmaker as the “Chiffonier” invested in interrogating and dismantling centuries of symbolic domination, trailblazing paths for new possibilities beginning with a radical new economy of images shining a light on the inner working of the global neoliberal capitalist symbolic regime of domination and affects, and the disqualification of African subjectivity for the emergence of new rationality within the production of egalitarian symbolic forms and reparative narratives. At the outset, Abderrahmane Sissako, born in 1954 in Kiffa, Mauritania, West Africa, composes the second generation of African filmmaker. After the founding fathers, Paulin Soumarou Vieira, Jean-Paul N’gassa, Ousmane Sembene, Jean-Pierre Dikongue Pippa, Daniel Kamwa, Gadelha Guebara, Med Hondo, and Moustapha Allasane set the foundation of the continent cinematic infrastructure, Sissako, alongside Djibril Diop Mambety, Mahatmat-Saleh Haroun, Idris Ouedraogo, Fanta Nacro, Bassek Ba Kobhio, Jean-Marie Teno, Flora Gomes, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Balufu Kayinda, Ngangura Mweze, and Djo Tunda wa Munga complicate the so-called pedagogical, oftentimes, didactic style of the first generation of African filmmaker that was named social realism and experimentally uncreative. Far from being old trees blocking the sun from shining on a new generation of filmmakers, Sada Niang’s Nationalist African Cinema: Legacy and Transformations (2014) challenges assumptions that underlined and structured the reception of that first generation of African filmmakers by retextualizing and reframing African first generation of filmmakers, bringing them from the edges of the frames to front and center. He demonstrates that African cinema was from the beginning in constant conversation, appropriation, and sometimes rebellion with external influences coming principally from the West, where they borrowed visual techniques and tropes from Italian Neorealism, French New Waves, Hollywood genres such as the Western, musical, and animation, as well as from Bollywood cinema. On that score, a cinema that has always synthesized, recombined, and layered all these influences as an expression of deep mutual interest. Niang’s perspective, which reflects my interest in African cinema, is that the debate is really about African modernity and the constant search for fresh ways of expression to map out the terrain of what constitutes the precise nature of progress on the continent. Precisely, the notion that advances in African modernity are not a form of movement flowing forward following a clear teleology, but the capacity of African tradition to absorb and reappropriate external influences, there-

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fore, a constant recombination and layering of what is already there and what is always being reinvented. In the same spirit, this new generation of African filmmakers has absorbed that practice of creating a new architecture of visibility and recognition by way of new productions of living knowledge and experiences to vindicate the complexities of that previous generation. They are, however, making strong claims on the freedom and the attitude to explore visual and narrative forms, tone, and energy of a new African cinema that is fresh, immediate, and urgent, and generates its practices and paradigm. In doing so, they do not shy away to probe their personal obsession which makes this cinema more relatable by a new generation of cosmopolitan Africans. Most importantly, in the following pages, I develop my hypothesis of the camera-eye, as the combination of techniques of perception, sensibility, and intelligibility predicated on the continuity between technology, the eye and the sensible as condition of possibilities and manifestation. The camera-eye participates in the collective social construction of values, an approach of the real reflected in a combination of technology, production of knowledge, transmission, mobilization, and action through artistic work. Particularly, how Sissako poses the question of telling original African collective stories in a world entangled in globalization and information flows. Following the work of Sadr Al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi also known as Mulla Sadra and Sheikh Shahabuddin Yahya Sohrevardi, this work explores Muslim’s metaphysic of light as basis for self-creation and self-revelation. Light becomes a pure and neutral space of phenomenology and ideality where the notion of nature becomes subjective and from which emanates a condition of possibilities and manifestation that Heidegger calls “Lichtung” which is mental processes through which objects, thing, and ideas reveal themselves (1962, 133). In so doing, Herbert Dreyfus writes about perception techniques and intelligibility and the necessary continuity between the eye and sensibility to make claims that “things show up in the light of the understanding of our being” (1995, 163). Through “lichtung,” consequently, cinema, such as, Sissako, comes to mediate notions of temporal continuity and the ephemerality of images. Through Sissako’s economy of images is the agency to act outside of the ideological field of interpellation and evade clichés and stereotypes for fresh insights into lives and histories. Poetic possibilities, consequently, is the idea that radical politics begin with the capacity to produce new images. As such, images become forms of revelations and the complex entanglements between ideas and representation in a biopolitical context haunted by the specter of the erasure of the African personhood. The notion of the camera-eye serves to analyze visual and sound practices of Sissako’s films to articulate the tensions between aesthetic practices, the ineffable and concepts of social and ideological structures the movies reveal. Mainly, how these visual and acoustic practices are inscribed within a particular autonomy of a

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knowledge and symbolic economy. This experience communicates markers reflecting on themes, such as self-expression, cultural norms, and material and immaterial order in term of physiognomy, social spaces, the phenomenology of the self, subjectivity, publicity and ways of living, valuation and transmission practices. In so doing, these visual and acoustic practices connect to a genealogy of figures of speech that express embodied experiences coming to the point of rupture to open up spaces of possibilities. I develop this hypothesis within which Jurgen Habermas calls communicative action and the work of building some proper demos through the building of a rational public sphere and the democratization of knowledge. In practice, managing the role of appearances, interpretation, and the plurality of opinions within the relationship between Spinoza’s notion of potestas and potentia and the redefinition of concepts of idealism, democracy, adversary, enemy, and relationships of domination. Potentia is forged through a creative process of praxis driven by the mutual expansion and sharing of knowledge set in motion against the potestas, the dominating power that rules to instantiate passivity, divide and rule among its subjects. Potentia is predicated on the idea that alone individuals might be weak but are stronger together. Potentia, equally, places the notion of aliveness front and center and how aliveness is the purpose of life. This aliveness, however, has to come from within and how the suppression of aliveness is the beginning of dictatorship. Hence potentia is a social machine that ensure the constant production of idealism, equality of condition, and quality of life. It is a tool ordinary people use to build values, communal life, affect, culture, and constantly reshaping politics and preventing the political elite from colonizing the state. The concept of potentia, consequently, is life affirming. Karl Marx calls it “self-activation,” which is the power of a community to live off its own energy rather than external power. As such, self-activation and potentia are tied to culture because it means the power of the community to produce sensemaking and values. Self-activation is the power Spinoza argues that “the welfare of the people is the highest law, to which all other laws, both divine and human, must be made to conform.” And in this sense, potentia and potestas are mutually constitutive which is also the mutual constitution of might (potentia) and right and functional capacity to absorb the might of the people into effective policies (potestas) (Balibar, 2008, 34). We must recognize, consequently, that to build potent African collectivities, political processes entail making the difference between authority, representativity, representation, and charisma to understand how political authority equally produces forms of imagination in order to control the potentia. And this involves regimes of affects and social bonding. For ways out of these oppressive structures and social construction, Sylvia Wynter calls for the development of liminality through auto-poesis to go beyond the bio-genic programmed homo economicus introduced by col-

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onization to invent new ceremonies that value autonomy and consciousness through a new mastery of the real through new forms of cosmogonies, literature, music, poetry, and other forms of emancipatory art forms (2007, 13). In doing so, it is to keep the idea of the promised land and desire. Desire becomes the essence of life, the will to life and the centrality of hope which is the necessity to keep producing sense and meaning. Sissako’s films participate in these new ceremonies. His cinema synthesizes related themes of tradition and ancient mythologies and contemporary forms of alternative African rationalities. These new forms negotiate spaces for optical and sound waves as a new prophetic tradition made flesh and forms of knowledge that exceed the frames holding them, and turn this new knowledge against conventional realism and into the eyes and ears of African history that reflect the real formation of an extracinematic political subjectivity in Africa. Taking into account the normative structures and social conditioning Sissako’s cinema operates, there is a sociological logic for the camera-eye to expand channels of communications through the mobilization of resources of liminality, drama, and performance to give new life forms in a social context where aesthetic practices define the context of intelligibility. Additionally, as Nietzsche points out, every profound spirit needs a mask along the line of who needs transparency when can have magic and prose over poetry? This notion of the mask is predicated on the idea that there are invisible and hidden frames that structure the visible. The usage of the mask points out to the concept of the filmmaker’s metaphysical ambition to cut through the clutter surrounding the visible. Particularly, to reveal a special treatment of images and sound as a space of revelations and ideas through the fragmentation and recombination of reality that gives way to new forms of syncopated subjectivity and new perceptual possibilities. This notion of mask and anticipation is crucial to tackling the work of Abderrahmane Sissako who is a filmmaker of the Muslim faith. Subsequently, how the global mainstream reads his work, particularly, in a context where Muslims artists, intellectuals, and the so-called “Arab Street” are accused of not doing enough to combat radical Islamic Jihad. In the process, not paying sufficient attention, in this particular case, to artists of the Muslim faith carving a different path out of the economy of provocation and reactions between secular Western liberals and fundamentalist Jihadists that turn into a real clash of ignorance. The mask is necessary to emphasize how Muslims are always already historicized. Most importantly, consequently, Sissako’s work is a useful and practical contribution that highlights different interpretive Muslim traditions and bridges the divide between narrative strategies and the irruption of uncontainable excessive forces to complicate the notion of knowledge, action, paralysis, and the essence of things. 1 Additionally, it closes the gap between the public and the private and the missing images to transform inter-subjective experiences into common objective values with the

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understanding that catastrophes, often, emanate from failures in social relationships. As such, the importance of representation, imitation, and coherent narratives, and a unifying vision of “you are not alone” mantra to elicit sympathy and empathy, through the mimesis of affect and ethics of similitude, in context where emotional discourses are purged from the public sphere. The camera consequently emphasizes the correlation between the agency of observation and the object, and in a world of submission these visual and acoustic practices are driven by indestructible desire getting its legitimacy through a collective agencement of enunciation. More than visual and acoustic description, these aesthetic practices become a signature and a style that emphasize modes of beings and regimes of distinction. How ordinary Africans engage with the monotony, routine, and repetition of their daily lives within their forms of integrity and ethical practices mediated by indigenous metaphysical practices, social knowledge, and challenged by forces of de-historicization. These processes, consequently, are embedded in a native field of vision and a structure of intelligibility producing cinematic forms and a universe of unexpected encounters. Beyond immediate pleasure, this world provides opportunities for new ontological justifications, new modes of thinking and beings, expectations and abilities powered forward by the knowledge that emancipation is tied to the quest for the truth and egalitarian forms of symbolization. The camera-eye is a clear argument for cultural and educational policies built around African indigenous informational literacy and a governing vision for a new cultural order. The specific targets are the definition of proper cultural standards and developing the enabling resources and technologies to put together a vibrant cultural industry. An industry that helps to solve African social problematics by reconciling the social and the economic through education and cultural competency within a paradigm that emphasize creativity and logics of contribution through an anthropology that produces transcendent signifiers for politics and aesthetic legitimation. The camera-eye is predicated on the knowledge that the path toward enlightenment requires overcoming sets of simulacra that multiply along the way. Language becomes the material means to bind content to form through a notion of po-ethics (poetics) that places ethics at the center of the narrative. Jacques Ranciere (2000) calls it the partition of the sensible, how forms are driven by fundamental necessities and contingent encounters and how these propositions unsettle conventional binaries such as life and non-life, nature and culture, object and subject, to elevate the production of beauty as, by essence, a revolutionary act as Sissako does. As such, poetic possibilities is a form of aesthetic education as an innovative practice. In this context, the filmmaker works as an anthropologist of creativity relying on pre-existing materials such as myths, folktales, songs, culture, and history to produce a liminal context that invites scien-

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tific, sociological, and anthropological scrutiny for radical politics. This creative process locates points where the whole structure can be reformed, and cognitive barriers eradicated. In this way, cinematic art is not an object to hang theories on but how this cinema reflects particular politics and emancipatory practices through the redefinition of proper subject position. These emancipatory practices understand language as a normative practice and how language maps out the epistemic and the terrain of intelligibility. Within these processes how there are different forms of knowledge, knowledge as acquisition, the kind of knowledge inside one’s head expressing knowledge as a form of practice and skills. And collective/communal experience, knowledge inscribed in body, words, action, values, taste, and form of tacit and intuitive knowledge, a kind of native knowledge outside of consciousness that ethnographers and anthropologists seek to retrieve and what Pierre Bourdieu defines as habitus. As with Bourdieu, there is always an anteriority of knowledge that is both always present and absent but produced knowledge through what Jacques Derrida calls “Differance.” Derrida’s concept of “Differance” highlights the constant pursuit of new values and how structures are built around these values. In so doing, the camera-eye opens up African cultural life featuring ordinary Africans as creatures of multiple influences and turning spaces into a playground of archives and ideas that pose the central question of what kind of method for what kind of sociological lucidity? In its inception, the camera-eye is the knowledge that awareness of social reality requires an inner authenticity which translates as the hybridization between lived experiences, insights, and technologies of visibility, particularly, on behalf of oppressed humans socially disregarded to engage in the production of alternative modes of productions, living and beings. The camera-eye takes inspiration for Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the “chiffonier” that he defines as a holdover of earlier time representing the new heroic spirit surviving in the modern city and providing the contemporary form of the social and personal message (McLees, 2010, 85). The chiffonier or rag-picker is the figure of the early morning picking up discarded objects, reassembling their meaning and through these processes act as a detective solving enigmas provided by these discarded object. Following from this, Kenneth Harrow redefines the chiffonier’s aesthetic as trash to emphasize movie productions finding values in the detritus generated by globalized commodity capitalism. Trash is the idea that behind the bourgeois, there is always the reality of the bricoleur or the artisan and the practical necessity to think about representation in its many layers of complexity and richness and the socio-political implications of these cultural processes. Therefore, Harrow’s approach aims to provide tools to read African cinema “beyond the narrow ideological and dogmatic on which it originally depended” (2013, 6). It argues that the production of trash has been discounted as a critical object of study for

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too long. For Harrow, trash represents a literal and metaphorical object that says a lot about Africa’s place in contemporary globalization. Harrow’s take on trash represents an original critical study of how Africans are enmeshed in the global socioeconomic systems of the present era and their sophisticated contribution to the global political economy. This perspective does not reduce African art to trash but instead emphasizes how the production of African art interrogates the sociopolitical, cultural, environmental challenges as a developing world—and what Africa faces within global economic processes. So, trash refers to African art and the evolution of the continent’s modernity project. Harrow’s argument is a functionalist thesis and a veiled critique of a strain in academia that has latched onto a narrow ideological and dogmatic reading of African cinema. Harrow’s emphasis is on experience, necessity, and attitude, and a constant interrogation of reality, which is always contextual (Harrow, 2013; Stam, 1997, 2003). Baudelaire’s notion of the chiffonier and Harrow’s aesthetic of trash provide a sociological, rather than discursive, approach embedded in an organizing vision within which conception and execution operate in a symbiotic state. Regarding representational politics, the camera-eye does not mean images that conform to a pre-existing original. The camera-eye is not about the mimetic relationship but the capacity of objects to unlock imagination to elevate the cinematic experience into the poetic and the sublime, on that score, the capacity of the camera-eye to overcome the contingency of the eye by turning the camera’s function into a material, aesthetic, and spiritual experience. Most importantly, as with the cameraeye, is the articulation that there is no stand-alone text in African cinematic practice because the material and social forms through with the effects of these mediated technologies are disseminated must be taken into account. The camera-eye, consequently, addresses emerging rationalities and legitimacy through action which highlight a perfect combination between sociology and stylized cinema. The camera-eye, moreover, is a new wave of the cinematic agency that allows for new innovative ways and spaces for creative negotiation against the structuring effects of cultural conditioning, intimacy, identity, and the macro-level economic conditions. The camera-eye, consequently, is a conceptual apparatus to reflect on the contrast between spatial dynamic within the frames and the information provided on the screen and how these processes are meant to challenge conventional ways the African bodies have been historically formatted in cinema as groups of undifferentiated flesh to highlight new indigenous aesthetic regimes of individuation, distinction, and sensibility as primary signifiers of an African modernity. The camera-eye, therefore, allows for both a formal and historical critique emphasizing social and historical factors that have contributed to the formation of African cinema. In this definition, I agree with Fredric Jameson’s definition of the camera apparatus as that ulti-

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mate subject without subjectivity, that ultimate literal and visual embodiment of the ultimate observer of the ultimate self and the literalization of Jameson’s literary “point of view.” The transcendental hyperspace in which such a transcendental observer finds itself is then simply the infinite regress of point of view, the nothingness on which the attempt to think time and temporality, to think the past and the present, to think the difference between my multiple selves, is founded (2015, 17–22). From here, this book communicates pieces of evidence that Sissako is the most talented and the most sophisticated filmmaker of his generation. His cinema is an incubator of new ways to fashion African film where he operates not only as a filmmaker but as a producer as well. 2 Far from being abstract, however, Sissako resists facile reading and demands a profound engagement with the alterity of the text. And so, Sissako is one of the best filmmakers working today. His cinema constitutes a generative contribution to the contemporary production of intelligibility. This logic of contribution helps to better understand the historical logics and practices of a continent in constant throes of situational emergencies, and confronting its colonial legacies to contemporary globalization discourses, notably, political instability, poverty, illiteracy, digital divide, global warming, food shortages, diseases, and the so-called “clash of civilization,” gripping our contemporary global condition. This book examines the discourses Sissako’s cinema produces and how he manages to position himself as an important interlocutor by synthesizing a broad range of modern social thought across disciplines such as film studies, political science, anthropology, religious studies, development, and globalization. He is the ablest to deconstruct structures and spatial organization of domination, the mise-en-scène of power, determination and constraints structuring lives of marginalized subjectivities in Africa to underline a new knowledge economy and framework of social change. Naturally, as with the uses of these analytical instruments, it is the ambition of a cinema to shine a light on the illegitimate exercise of power. How these processes are naturalized through a chain of events and counter-hegemonic practices to open up spaces to examine networks of competencies and responsibilities, breakdowns and missing links in the chains of causality. These new zones of permissiveness and transgression serve to super-charge capacities for action for emancipatory practices to challenge the fatalities of modernity and modernization. In aggregate, productive ways Sissako’s cinema tackles and executes the notion of commodity fetishism and objectified belief complicates ordinary people’s capacities for self-understanding and democratic participation. For a cinema that covers centuries, Sissako’s films span across multiple temporalities and spatialities to address continuities and ruptures in African knowledge and representational politics. Thus, by moving from an anthropological and ethnographic time to African’s contemporary human conditions, Sissako’s cinema, far from prescribing a teleology, seeks

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to refine epistemological practices and the conditions of productions of intelligibility under which knowledge about the continent is produced and consumed. Taken together, the importance of Sissako’s cinema lies in its urgency and the necessity of priorities to think critically about the crisis facing the African continent. In this sense, Sissako’s movies are poetic of possibilities relying on his craft and imaginative techniques to bring out an aesthetic approach to African sociological representation and how the deficit of these forms of knowledge and representational politics are impacting political and economic conditions on the continent. Most importantly, Sissako’s cinema is an ongoing commentary on the linkages between poetry and utopia and a profound reworking of African archives that debunk the anachronistic colonial and neocolonial fabrication of false and essentialist images of the continent through anthropology and cinematic practices using ordinary Africans as tropes to build Eurocentric colonialist ideology. This kind of colonial archives was incarnated by the work of French scholars such as Maurice Griaule, Michel Leiris, and the ethnographic cinema verité of Jean Rouch. Scholarly work that was compromised by unethical practices such as thefts and looting of African cultural resources and presenting masquerades of African culture as facts and cinema “verite calling into questions the appropriateness of colonial anthropology and ethnographic movies archives to reflect genuine knowledge about the continent.” 3 Indeed, the Africans presented in these colonial projects seem devoid of any forms of authentic existential projects, and the whole thing fetishized and commodified as kitsch for Western consumption, therefore, incomplete. Furthermore, the introduction of audio and visual technologies in Africa, under colonial rules, as scholars such as Brian Larkin (2002, 2008) demonstrates, were embedded in a modernist ideology of development, progress, and formation of a new cosmopolitanism that were supposed to root out ordinary Africans from their backward ways into the European enlightenment. This kind of knowledge formation points directly to the connection between knowledge and power. This issue brings up together the concept of authorship and authority and how both words have the same root to emphasize the construction of a new authentic discourse to reclaim cultural practices, legitimacy, and the production of new sociality, discursive and interpretative communities, and ethical concerns generated through African cinematic practices. Sissako’s is a way to reclaim artistic authority to reestablish proper African subjectivities and cultural citizenship. This restoration begins with a critique of Eurocentric subjective universalism taking into account pre-cognitive mechanisms that distort knowledge production, it means acknowledging cinematic practices as a communal aesthetic embedded in a diversity of opinions and tastes within the longue durée. Sissako’s work allows the opportunity to witness creativity with the longue durée and entanglement of temporalities bringing to the forth a

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new object that this work communicates as the camera-eye” The cameraeye is the idea that there is no pure linearity within the time of production of the artistic object to critique the teleology between tradition and modernity. The camera-eye is equally aware of the role that ideology and outside social perception impact reception practices. Most importantly, the camera-eye is Sissako’s ability to find images, acoustic methods, and words to keep African’s history fluid and relevant through the production of new possibilities. The Poetics of Radical Hope consequently is an original research in the emerging scholarship on self-making practices and the African filmmaker’s artistic sovereignty that communicate a new production of politics emphasizing other forms of power and non-objectified knowledge such as the sociological subject and communal practices, social organization and relationships embedded in quotidian material conditions. This new paradigm takes shapes across disciplinary fields and cinematic technologies, portable and spreadable media such as the Internet, social networks, mobile technologies, and new media practices to collapse production and distribution hierarchies, textual boundaries, and industrial authority to make spaces for emerging marginalized subjectivities and practices. These interrelationships represent opportunities to tackle the significant potential of the African’s cinematic apparatus and my hypothesis of the camera-eye which outcome is to evidence people, objects, and places that might appear banal in the quotidian realities of life but are very significant in the ritual and the social choreography of African daily. In so doing, the camera-eye challenges our basic dismissive practices of disavowal. The camera-eye brings out ways to appreciate the plainly visible by cultivating curiosity, attention to details, and the pleasure to experiment transforming tools at hand to achieve aesthetic defiance and grace, turning out the impossible into triumphant acts of creativity that enrich our quest for individual and collective self-understanding and validation. I define that cinema as a technique of production based on a deeper indigenous archive and logics of perception as the camera-eye. Most importantly, the camera-eye fits into a cinematic re-expressive practice that aims to interrogate contemporary knowledge politics. The camera-eye delocalizes the struggle of decolonization and self-determination from the rhetoric of exception and highly repressive normative practices into the creation of new level-playing fields that resonate with indigenous cultural specifics embedded in universal longings and regenerative practices from the African archives. This demonstration of radical universalist events presents a unique existential perspective on biopolitical power while undercutting regimes and practices of exception and violence. This experience emphasizes radical universalist practices that amplify marginalized subjectivities’ voices and representational politics as the power of interpellation to engage in radical forms of democracy through new capacities of action as a ground for the creation of a higher and more logical

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order. The camera-eye, consequently, is always a generative practice based on transmission. The interaction between the camera-eye and marginalized subjectivities work to refine moments of redemptive practices and critiques that resist subordination to regimes of exception. The aim is to build societies with decolonized subjects occupying a space of empathy and political solidarity to leverage conditions of possibilities in impossible circumstances through self-determination and agency. Thus, the camera-eye poses the problem of decolonization, self-determination, and commodity fetishism as a key entry point to discuss decolonization and the production of neoliberal subjectivities. Commodity fetishism is the belief that objects are imbued with magical power. The camera-eye examines how that theory operates in social relation and issues of power. Particularly, the notion of ideology objectified belief and issues of decolonization and self-determination, and the production of neoliberal subjectivities, where the accumulation of fetishes is a virtue to be ranked higher than all else, and in business practices. Consequently, this turns into a new religion where only people that can exploit and defend resources survive and the rest are crushed and sacrificed for wealth as Sissako points out in Bamako (2006). In Bamako, Sissako makes a subtle distinction between the Muslim’s notion of gift and the Western’s concept of credit. Muslim culture prohibits loan with interest because that will be considered usury which is a sin. In the following pages, I will give evidence how the notion of the gift is constitutive of society, a form of mutual aid and cooperative capitalism while, as Sissako points out in Bamako, credit is mostly destructive. Henceforth, the camera-eye reflects on issues of agency versus conformity to discuss what is invisible and out of the frames from the conventional global circulation of corporate images and imagination. The end goal is to discuss alternative social formations facing barrages of impossibilities. I will provide strong evidences that Abderrahmane Sissako’s cinema participates in the institutionalization of structures of symbolic opposition that allies African indigenous archives with emerging rationalities, with the knowledge that the fight for freedom is never over and the importance of creativity and the constant production of event to face barrages of impossibilities. This author relies on Alain Badiou’s notion of event that he defines as the irruption of marginalized subjectivities disrupting conventional notions of reality. The reality for Badiou is nothing more than the void and the excesses that are cover up by ideology and propaganda to give a sense of normalcy. Badiou’s notion of event, however, shows that even though marginal subjectivities are shaped by the relationship of power, they are capable of critical autonomy and intervention. It is the notion that ordinary Africans are caught up in a plurality of connections, relationships of power and positions, by way of introducing other forms of power, such as the artistic sovereignty, to open up avenues to trace the gap between African subversive marginal practices

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and highly normative and oppressive structures. Creative sovereignty allows for the smuggling of alternative forms of subjectivities and new social systems and the role of artists and prophets to introduce other types of power beyond alienation and symbolic violence. These new forms of authority entail not only tackling the root causes of problems but the generative power of human creativity and dignity. As such, events do not already have a set of frames of interpretation which highlights the fact that language is part of the making of event. Taken together, event brings the correlation between language and knowledge production, particularly, ways that we use words to make meaning. Notion of event, additionally, are instruments to connect historical dots through a cinema that frames spaces as layers to be open to making sense of the sedimented knowledge about Africa for practices of selfunderstanding and logic of contribution. The notion of event, consequently, pays attention to persistent dynamic forces that signal productive capacities in an economy of precarity through the production of living knowledge, living experiences, and recognizability. Badiou’s notion is predicated on the Sartrean’s knowledge that existence precedes essence and becoming human is predicated on the capacity to understand events because the truth is the knowledge that is constructed after the event. In that subjective experience, there are elements of universal values and the ability to recognize these values participate in the universal positive construction of the truth. The universal positive development of the truth that Badiou calls truth-procedure is important to make the distinction between truth, risk, and superstition. The relationship between risk-taking and Badiou’s notion of event is important to define the relationship between excess realities compared to the previous pre-existing context. Reading the gap between the pre-existing framework and the new environment allows for the possibility to read an event. However, it is important to note here that there is never a return to a form of normality because there are no hierarchies between events. On that score, one event does not necessarily supersede the other because as Badiou writes truth processes generated by these events can still be unfinished (2003, 67). In practice, it means how we think about risk-taking. Badiou writes that “life is devoted to calculating security, and this obsession with safety is contrary to the Mallarmean’s hypothesis that thought begets a throw of the dice” because in such a world there is infinitely too much risk in a throw of the dice” (2003, 41). My reading of Badiou centers around risk-taking, political rupture, and the production of new subjectivities and violence. For Badiou, violence is necessary to sustain political event which is defined by the irruption of the “nonexistents” or the “rejects” on the political scene. However, I make a distinction between violence, forms of self-harm, and superstition. In Timbuktu (2014), the Islamic insurrection depicted by Sissako is not an event but a form of what Badiou calls “excessive destructionism” which is an-

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other form of excessive loyalty to the fascistic idea of purity that seeks to destroy the past for the sacrifice the present requires. The Jihadist is, consequently, an extreme destructive subject driven by an idea or a superstition based on a univocal terroristic truth that he has totally given himself to and follows all the way to the point of horror and into a black hole. The Jihadist refuses to deal with the void, the accidents that compose our human quotidian world, the shadows on the cave wall that constitute its complexities. The Jihadist is only after essence and the pure. Hence, through extravagance and absolutism, the terrorist, in fact, refuses to deal with complex issues. In this context, however, sitting on the sidelines is neither a better approach. Alain Badiou, through his notion of event, makes a case for loyalty and fidelity which means a refusal to settle for the quotidian routine of life. This refusal to settle does not mean an obsessive production of the new but also ways in which forms of genealogy can inform on the present. As a consequence, the insurgency in Timbuktu is not an event simply for the fact that it begins with the profanation of the mosque and the destruction of masks and others forms of cultural heritage and then the destruction of bodies through stoning. 4 Sissako’s Timbuktu is a reflection of energy versus despair and how through this interaction there is an opening up of new procedures for the truth. The notion of fidelity and loyalty, moreover, puts front and center issues of social relation and how catastrophes such as Islamic Jihadism is also a failure of the social relationship. These catastrophes are, therefore, necessary to analyze how groups of people confront or cope with traumatic events with the knowledge that the encounter with the truth itself can constitute a traumatic event. Sissako’s cinema represents a form of counter-narrative performative speech that infiltrates the cracks of these barrages of impossibilities to bring out new forms of mobilization and knowledge politics. This new knowledge opposes essentialist dominant programmed cultural patterns to bring marginalized subjectivities into a state of enunciation that regularly exposes the basis of the real in its inconsistent multiplicity and the irruption of truth, subjects, and new social systems. This emphasis on emerging rationalities is the basis of the camera-eye or cinema verité/ Kino-Pravda or Kino-Glaz, a term coined by Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov as a radical form of cinematic practice that breaks reality into frames, shots and petite montage, and editing to highlight notions of shared experiences. Vertov writes that the camera-eye is more perfect than the human eye for examining the chaos of visual phenomena and that it perceives and fixes its impressions differently from that of the human eye (2005, 91). This kind of cinematic reportage differs from this book’s usage of camera-eye to emphasize the knowledge of the cameraeye is not simply a mirror of reality, a provider of entertainment. The camera-eye is an instrument of egalitarian cinema infused with a transformative power embedded in a different model of organization of pro-

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ductive labor, rationality, and evaluation that contrast with the industrial logic and representational practices of image consumption seeped into neoliberal ideology. The camera-eye consists of building new stories beyond framing devices to invent a new grammar of cinema to emphasize how marginalized subjectivities negotiate actions and contingencies within existing geopolitical complexities. The camera-eye framing of bodies and spatial structures produces a regime of perception that reflect an indigenous perception of the world and values. These cultural processes also come packaged with the knowledge that there is also a different genealogy to film spectatorship embedded in a rich oral traditional culture where cinema is never a stand-alone text but another technique of mobilizing attention in a cultural ecology with a rich tradition of storytelling and bricolage. Glauber Rocha in his Cinema Novo’s manifesto and aesthetic of hunger discusses transforming the camera into a gun that shoots the truth twenty frames a second. Walter Benjamin (1940, 2003), moreover, developing his concept of historical materialism can be interpreted as a revolver which shoots multiple temporalities and the idea that the past never comes to a standstill but regularly blasted into the present and the future. From here, I predicate the notion of the camera-eye on Alain Badiou’s concept of “interpretive intervention.” A system of interpretation that relies on emerging condition of possibilities and the role of technologies and temporalities in new ways to think about difference, agency, and compels to decide a new way of being (2006, 181). Thus, ways in which interactive technologies allow for new forms of storytelling practices, the redefinition of the status of the filmmaker and his relationship with his audience are now considered political actors fighting for public space. From here, the key concepts are horizon and condition of possibilities that understand the camera, shots, and framing devices not as places of capture, boundaries, borders, enclosure but as evolving creative processes that are open-ended. At the core is the question of mutual recognition in context where assigned identities and processes of subjectification are being contested by the constant emergence of new forms of rationalities. These emerging types of rationalities are themselves constrained by contingency such as material and social determinism, however, the capacity to understand the formation of one’s identity and the ability to construct a strong network of solidarity and empathy open up conditions of possibilities that can be transformed into positive emancipatory practices. In this sense, Sissako’s cinema is poetic insofar as he reflects on genealogy and re-creation of the world with particular attention on allegory, metaphors, folktales, humor, irony, music, and the rhythm of the quotidian life. The goal of the camera-eye is finding new forms of egalitarian symbolization and spaces of new utopia outside of the ideology of the end of history, a clash of civilizations and the so-called zero alternatives to liberal democracies.

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This cinema, consequently, is not so much about spaces covered but connections made. Within this perspective, the linkages between Alain Badiou and Abderrahmane Sissako are achieved over the notion of space and mathematics. Alain Badiou is a mathematician and a philosopher. Admittedly, to resolve a third-degree equation, one needs to fit an imaginary number into the equation. That imaginary number, however, does not change the veracity of the outcome. In this sense, the camera-eye is the imaginary number that allows the audience to grasp events, to recognize how an event generates or fits into a particular equation and pattern. Sissako’s cinema emphasizes an individual’s interpretation rather than unified institutional thinking that foreground ordinary people not mythologized heroes. In this sense, it is an empathic cinema that cultivates human relations and the protection of the innocents and the vulnerable. Consequently, the semiotic essence of this filmmaking is the tree and the Palaver Tree as a franchise for self-expression and governance in African tradition. More, a temple where self-worth and meaning in life are constantly revitalized. The filmmaker functions like a sculptor to give meaning to shapes. As a sculptor, the filmmaker is not solely concerned with molding wood but also pays attention to roots and leaves. This cultural practice is neither exploitative nor acquisitive. Rather, this form of filmmaking is transformative and anticipatory of new emerging forms of rationalities. In the following pages, I will give evidences that Sissako’s cinema emphasizes territorial ontology and metaphysical authenticity tracing the genealogy and processes that transform spaces into places. The concept of camera-eye in this book, consequently, is a blend of human consciousness and the emancipatory power of social technologies. The combined effect of the camera-eye, is to generate creative practices and new functions regarding social consequences and transformations in forms of revolutionary changes in modes of perception and attention, opening up new imaginative spaces from the African archives. These forces coalesce into new creative institutions that capture Africa’s social diversity to help ordinary Africans’ quest for new rights, democratic processes and developmental policies based on necessities and actual needs that include human rights, civil rights, political rights, freedom of speech and association, freedom of political opposition but also socioeconomic rights. Abderrahmane Sissako tackles these issues frontally in Bamako (2006) and Timbuktu (2014). These new films usher new regimes of signification mean symbolic practices and utopia anchored in material realities and the expression of ordinary Africans as the subjects of their causes. They articulate new forms of history from below featuring networks of lives based on subjectivities and experiences of bodily impositions constituted through archives that are constantly recollected, reinterpreted and reimagined. This continuity of experiences is driven by invisible forces of agency slowly emerging into the light. Achille Mbembe calls these pro-

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cesses Sortir de la Grande Nuit (2010), which are new resources of mobilization based off new modes of perception and attention that form new practices associated with the revolutionary potential of emancipatory technologies and in this case the work of Abderrahmane Sissako. These new patterns of perception and attention, in what follows with the work of Sadr Al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi also known as Mulla Sadra and Sheikh Shahabuddin Yahya Sohrevardi and how ways to problematize truth and subjectivities are universal practices. Sadra and Sohrevardi are important to get into an exegesis of Sissako’s work and how the reality he creates through his films anticipate real events besides the veil of appearances. Consequently, how, even within popular cultural forms, some important truth can be revealed to continually reimagine the future and new forms of social investment. The possibilities of this revelation demonstrate how, more than a filmmaker, Sissako’s extraordinary lucidity can be described as shamanic, in the local language, a gifted “marabout” and his films turn into ritualistic ceremonies that consistently challenge and strips away assumptions. Sadra and Sohrevardi’s work is predicated on the notion that decrypting images is a resource intensive process that requires a strong research interest. Hence, excavating meaning from images means the ability to grasp the full spectrum of light and knowledge emanating from a particular image and how this process, as Gilles Deuleuze argues with his notion of image-movement and imagetimes, is never exhausted and image decryption, consequently, unfold over time and is always multilayered. As such, while the notion of marabout relates to the power to tackle invisible realities on the African continent, this cognitive economy of elucidation is not based either on magical realism or witchcraft/charlatanism. These ritual ceremonies are based on analytical work on the local anthropology, ability to read the zeitgeist and psychic processes and a highly competent command of African semiotic and symbolic universe. In so doing, the notion of marabout is predicated on the idea that there is always an anteriority to knowledge and in this case, time is lived not accumulated. Particularly, in places with oppressive structures and violent social construction where traditional markers such as class politics, gender, race, and sexualities are not recognized legitimate political categories but obedience is expected. The marabout, consequently, complicate rationalist, objective, and scientific regimes of truth to demonstrate that regimes of truth are themselves based on narration practices often preoccupied by stabilizing and ordering some ideology of knowledge, and create order out of chaos, and how reparative narratives can emanate out of mastery of chaos. In the following pages, I will take a time to unpack the notion of inner necessities, contingent encounters, tensions between forms and content, and how these pressures complicate representation that is not visualized on the screen. These cultural processes emanate from a culture in need of conversation about the biopolitical production of anxiety and precarity, and

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how issues being pushed aside continue to haunt society, transmuted or veiled. As an astute observer of the sensible, Sissako is able to figure out the robotic and the mechanical from the genuine and the sensible and how he observes Islam being taken over by radical Jihadists and turned into a ritualized robotic, dry, repetitive, and mechanical gestures. In Timbuktu, Sissako confronts these mechanical gestures with young Malians brilliant choreography and ballet dance mimicking soccer players without a ball or the soulful singing of Fatoumata Diawara, activities banned by the Jihadists. Within this Jihadist theocracy, Sissako demonstrates how biopower turns mechanical, militarized, and deadly to save its power. In so doing, Sissako’s films take its power from the life force derived from his spiritual initiation reflected in his ability to navigate the world of the sensible and the intelligible. This navigation entails the capacity to distinguish between ideas about the world and the world of ideas to go beyond conventional forms of comprehension which mean different ways to process causality and correlation and the knowledge that real art touches the lives of ordinary people deeply and helps them reconnect with themselves, otherwise, it achieves nothing. 5 In so doing, as Aristotle points out in his syllogism, moreover, truth is universal. In so doing, this work relies on these Muslim scholars for the ways they complicate a genealogy of visuality and knowledge politics. They arrived at this method via Plato and the “Allegory of the Cave” and the understanding that images come in two orders, one visible and the other invisible, and the idea of the body as a form of prison and, consequently, the limitation of the physical realm to engage the full spectrum of the truth. Sadra and Sohrevardi’s work examines the transformation of theological principles into metaphysics and ethics. They demonstrate that the human soul has the same ontological texture and materiality with the notion of ideas and divinity taking into account that human beings are made in the image of God. As such, knowledge is infused into humanity as something that is always already. The production of knowledge is constitutive of humanity. Hence, Sadra and Sohrevardi borrow their philosophical anthropology from Plato, the notion of imagination as a tool for rationality, science, and theology. As such, art doesn’t represent or reflect the world as though the world were something separate from art. Here, Sadra and Sohrevardi move beyond the false dichotomy of “essence vs. appearance” the “true and the copy,” the “concept/idea and its embodiment” first espoused by Plato. For them, art isn’t the creation, materialization or illustration of ideas or new concepts. Art is what arises when something visually interacts with the viewer to create an aesthetic affect. As such, there is no one image but the image is embedded in a complicated field of interpretation that cannot be restricted. In the context of the postcolony, work of thinkers, such as Jonathan Lear, is useful for the ways ordinary Africans deal with vulnerability and catastrophes through

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culture as the basis of the production of sense and meanings through the scope and limits of human possibilities (2006, 9–10). This scope and limits of human possibilities is complicate by what Lear calls the “blind spot,” which is the inability for any culture to conceive its own destruction and possibility of extension (2006, 83). The central question becomes how to handle that uncanny sense of vulnerability and menace? Lear, as with Sohrevardi and Sadra long before him, believe in the virtue of “imaginative excellence and radical adaptation” (2006, 117, 118). Commenting on the work of Jonathan Lear, writer Junot Díaz argues that all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What I’m trying to cultivate is not blind optimism but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. “What makes this hope radical,” Lear writes, “is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as “imaginative excellence.” Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible. Only radical hope could have imagined people like us into existence, and I believe that it will help us create a better, more loving future (Díaz, New Yorker, 11/21/2016). In so doing, Sadra, Sohrevardi, Lear, and Diaz understand the correlation between knowledge, ideas, resources of perception and attention, and, how in the cinematic context, this form of imagination and reception of images extend beyond textual approach to film studies by bringing out new ontology to the cinema. 6 This knowledge is relevant in a context where films are not considered stand-alone texts but part of larger regimes of signification embedded in a rich oral tradition. For Sadra and Sohrevardi, moreover, this form of knowledge begins with the idea there are the world and a reality that exist independently and beyond the reach and the grasp of ordinary humans. However, forms of transcendence can be achieved through human’s resources of perception and attention. This type of transcendence, which is the transformative power to change things, functions best like liquid water which means in three states, frozen, liquid, and gas. Perception and attention functions better in a state of liquidity insofar as these resources perform best when they take the shape of the recipients they are contained in which are the ideas carried by the divinities. As such, the space of transcendence is the realm of the divine. This form of knowledge politics emphasizes the universality of the enlightenment through these Muslim scholars and the prevailing notion of light as an instrument to fight ignorance and false idols. Mulla Sadra and Yahya Sohrevardi are thinkers of the light. Hence, this work relies on these scholars to go deeper into human beings’ relationships with images to dig deeper into our logics of perception and its ramification with how our mental functions make sense of the world and orga-

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nize basics forms of social relationships and power. Additionally, Richard Armstrong taking a Deleuzian’s perspective on the “crystal-image,” defines the crystal-images as the different refractions of light as the crystal is turned, and how the crystal-image can only be understood as the interplay between the actual and the virtual, and therefore, how cinematic images are always the location of the conjunction between the confluence of sets of ideas, metaphorical associations, multiple significations, and time (2012, 90). Most importantly, the notion that light is also a spectrum. On that score, the capacity to capture light’s full spectrum is also predicated on the subject’s level of enlightenment. Within this context, light and images are where spirits communicate with humans and tell them what is real and how the signification of the realities being communicated are multilayered and unfold over time. These processes emphasize modes of perception and attention and practices of free association with the political economy of objects, artifacts, fetishes and rituals that produce a language that reflects new states of minds. These new mental processes are predicated upon a political economy of visual capitalism and the colonization of social relationships bringing attention to how we think through images, capitalism, material practices as spaces of transfiguration and the politics of distinction and discernment. Notably, the manufacturing of things and objects and the production of subjectivities. At the time where there is a need for a deeper archive that goes beyond Western notions of anthropocentrism in a world that is becoming Anthropocene, meaning human activities are beginning to have a global impact on earth geology and ecosystems. These new forms of perception that I refer to as the camera-eye is an indigenous technique of production that works alongside Islamic philosophy regarding the revolutionary potential in modes of perception, attention, and possibilities that contribute to more useful, productive and qualitative participation regarding reception. Sadr Al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi was also known as Mulla Sadra and Sheikh Shahabuddin Yahya Sohrevardi write about different uses of the imaginative realm, “Alam Al-Mithal,” and the world of images, “Alam Al-Khayal,” and how religious practices are a form of fantastic imagination. This kind of original vision is necessary to dig deeper into how imagination and images mediate social relations and power. In the realm of the Alam Al-Mithal and Alam Al-Khayal, movie practices turn into a counter-initiation where truths about the world are revealed through images that transformed into the bringer of light or enlightenment. Most importantly, the allegorical function of images is infused by angels meaning that the world of imagination and images are sites where ordinary humans get into contact with divinities. From there, angels are the metaphor for the concept and the predicate and how they must always hold together because real images are in fact always reducible to divinities which in itself is a metaphor for time and how time is what reveals everything. As such, the interpretation

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of these images is the level where values and policies are imagined and designed. Consequently, cinema is a place which preserves and reveals the secret of pictures. The interpretation of images is also a civic practice which informs the necessity of the audience’s proper contemplative behaviors and imaginative practices to produce forms of active participatory agency that emphasize the sense and function of images as the expressions of the capacity for revolutionary social transformation. Within this context, there are no hierarchies in free association and the film belongs to the spectator because the filmmaker understands that the audience knows more than perhaps they are aware themselves. Hence, these transformations entail a capacity for discernment between images and idols, images and memory, particularly, in countries where the symbolic order is still heavily contaminated by colonial phantasmagoria and its legacies. Indeed, Sissako’s films straddle spaces where the colonial past is not dead. As a matter of fact, it is not even the past. Many people in these areas continue to have a conflicting view about colonization which explains the awkward transition into a modern democratic state and the necessity to cultivate a new form of imagination to build strong post-independence structures. Taken together, the role that imagination and images play against automatic thinking and the intellectual laziness that produce repetition, clichés, and stereotypes. These cultural processes commence with the imaginative capacity to conceive images that correlate beliefs and embodied forms. These imaginative capacities draw its power from the “Alam Al-Mithal” and the “Alam Al-Khayal” that to capture power through the light. And ways to think the social and material life of light, the flow of being, the sensible, the intelligible, the power of poetry and cinematic power to capture and create singularities that have progressive social functions in extending cognition and political consciousness. Image-making is essential for political change because it emphasizes the power of cinema to give perceptive forms to collective intuitions that are yet nondiscursive but real (Marks, 2016, 24–47; Henry Corbin, 1971). Stuart Hall describes these non-discursive practices with his notion of articulation. Articulation is the power to give expression to silence, make visible what has been previously made invisible and in essence, processes to make meaning, joining asymmetrical elements which equally reflect the linkages between disempowered economies into the global system (1980, 323–324). In aggregate, what Michel Foucault names as the “insurrection of subjugated knowledge (1980, 81) These notions of the imaginative realm and the world of images are predicated on the concept of the artist as a shaman and an organic public intellectual. In societies based on a strong oral tradition, the function of the storyteller is a pure function, and the storyteller has to earn the trust of the community in handling communal narratives. In this world of initiated souls, there are no secrecy but transparency where all the issues

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are put up for debates rather than be suppressed or swept under the carpet because light shines for everybody. Hence, the storyteller participates in a democratic process of knowledge that creates a community of equals where the natural order and hierarchies cannot be sustained because legitimacy and sovereignty are distributed equally. In this culture, the category of authorship is defined by the capacity to become a receptacle of knowledge and invisible forces that shape the community consciousness. Often, the storyteller might not even be entirely aware of how all the connections being made fit together, however, processes of reception are integrated within the production, the modalities and the consumption of the narratives. The images that pass through these productions are not imposed on the audience because the public retains their critical interpretative agency to decrypt what they are seeing and hearing. In this sense, the audience is always on top of reality because they are an essential part of the chain of events and signification that are recollected, reinterpreted and reimagined. These cultural processes have significant ramifications regarding reception activities which become democratic. There is a subtle critic of Plato and the “Allegory of the Cave” because here there is no need for a philosopher-king to impose his conception of truth on the uneducated masses. This model also applies to theocrats and demagogues attempting to enforce their ideologies on the masses because they will confront their resistance in a new context where meanings are continually deconstructed and restructured by the audience’s creative interpretative agency. Admittedly, this cinema differs from the commodified standards and lack of spontaneity that pertain to the industrial logic of image production, because it requires practices of exegesis which require an active spectator working as a detective in his quest to uncover signs as pieces of evidences. The spectator understands that he is a coproducer of images on the screen. This form of cinematic reception highlights the autonomy of the audience and his independence from conventional structures of meanings. Mulla Sadra and Sohrevardi’s notions of imagination and images bring a new rationality to visual spectatorship that defies the industrial logic and consumption of pictures. In this sense, the spectator retains considerable influence and information to give a validity to images when they help to recreate a context when the subject can consciously reenact, reimagine an event that has previously happened to form plausible stories about them. Deleuze and Guattari, moreover, in Mille-Plateaux (1980), bring the idea of the rhizome which is important here because the rhizome has no beginning and no end and no discernible direction. And for a continent, such as Africa and its diaspora, where there is no unity of time and space, the rhizome is an important intellectual tool to find the center of the action which Deleuze and Guattari define as the big spot to develop new political modalities.

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Mulla Sadra and Yahya Sohrevardi put ethics at the heart of communicative practices and these modes of creative practices move beyond symbolic practices to reinstate the responsibility of cultural industries as the keepers of zones of creative cultural exchanges and production of ideas, discourses, subjectivities, and values. In particular, cinema participates in modes of knowledge, media literacy and pedagogy, and an economy of signification and meaning making that offer endless possibilities to rescue the concept of a public sphere of imagination. These new spaces of imagination are the site to address political, economic, social and cultural rights, and reimagine forms of citizenships that hold out against coercive social pressures. Most importantly, the work of Mulla Sadra and Yahya Sohrevardi poses the relationship between multicultural liberal democracy and Islam. Can multisecular liberal society accommodate Islam in the public sphere? What do secular Muslims look like? To begin to answer these questions, the work of Muslim scholars, such as Mulla Sadra and Yahya Sohrevardi, and later in the paper, Tariq Ramadan, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Assem Al Diffraoui, work to organize Muslim scholarship in Europe. And deconstructing the notion of Muslim as a floating signifier for foreigners, theocratic, fanatical, terrorist, to demonstrate that there is no cultural specificity when it comes to the production of knowledge. Consequently, Sissako’s cinematic practices are universal rather than specifically Muslim. His cinema participates in the building of new creative institutions producing new forms of representation, knowledge, and discourses on full citizenship where ordinary Africans are informed about resources to become subjects of the law rather than objects of the law with a political process that produces responsible authorities. Taken together, these new creative institutions work to articulate new times and serve as mediated texts that embody symbolic geography, complex social practices, and relations relevant to the complicated work of decolonization and the postcolonial condition on the African continent. The goal is to challenge the authoritarian distinctions and stratifications between centers and margins and how marginalized subjectivities cope with the convulsions generated by existing global geopolitics. These new challenges are needed to reconsider and rebrand the African continent in direct, engaging, and transformative ways. These reconstructions include bringing African history and indigenous practices into contemporary imagination. The purpose is to engage in genealogy practices to emphasize its relevance to ordinary Africans’ present modern condition. This condition is caught up within a concatenation of times and moments that must be harnessed to imagine cultural forms and forms of culture necessary for liberatory practices. These emancipatory practices are the most important work of decolonization that Kenyan scholar Ngugi Wa Thiong’o identifies as the decolonization of the mind through the imaginative function of art and literature. These cultural resources become

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significant battlefields with the understanding that culture is a community bedrock and an important cultural resource to draw out knowledge, wisdom, norms and rules (1986). Likewise, for a continent that is resisting all forms of essentialism, the ongoing work of decolonization must open up vast networks of significations, meanings, values, and representation. Essential questions about aesthetic theodicy and the economy of salvation in secular postmodern, postcolonial African societies where attitudes and social practices are moving ahead of religious scriptures must be engaged and updated for the modern times. This failure gives ways to clash between the secularization of politics and the resistance against these secular processes from some important segments of these societies. Here, it is the notion of human perfection through material progress and liberation from necessities imposed by the natural order and the development of symbolic systems that often clash with dogmatic religious laws when the latter is transformed into dehumanizing theologizing. This critical genealogy is important to understand how Abderrahmane Sissako is a great African filmmaker and I analyze his cinema, through the camera-eye, not as an object nor an autonomous art but a practice of living experience that privileges an authorial perspective that foregrounds conditions of production and reception. Additionally, Diawara’s discussion on the eye is useful here as well. He quotes Leopold Sedar Senghor in that, “the eye, in western art, is the center of everything and replaces all other senses of the individual.” Senghor’s theory of identification requires us to mobilize our other senses; to “see” the object without our eyes; to feel it and to be born into it. Identification, in this instance, is to consider the object in front of us, like the trace of the ancestor, like a totem, like a life force that connects us to art (2010, 161). CAMERA-EYE, POETIC POSSIBILITIES, AND AFROTOPIA All the while, poetic possibilities explore these marginalized subjectivities to bring a complex and multilayered perspective to complicate the binary interplay between history and identity, power and helplessness, agency and victimization, resilience and resistance intensified by fractured neoliberal-driven globalization and issues of alterity and inequality that arise from underneath these processes. Accordingly, poetic possibilities is a meditation on the consequences of neoliberal capitalism on the idea of culture and democracy. The notion of Afrotopia examines neoliberal ideology’s power of interpellation. And how its new expression carries values and subject production that now organize rationalities, truth in contemporary African societies. And how artists such as Sissako are responding to these processes with the production of alternative forms of utopia, new forms of human capital, social relationship, and valuation

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provided by artists. In the process, opening up spaces for the production of symbolic egalitarian practices, particularly, accompanying a move from wage categories to a productive informal economy where forms of creative entrepreneurship are striving. The book describes how these processes are negotiated and subverted from a subaltern perspective through a continuous production of reinvention that Felwine Sarr calls “Afrotopia” (2016) which foregrounds an approach embedded in a strong sense of possibilities through epistemological ruptures and innovations. Hence, this concept of Afrotopia emphasizes ordinary Africans’ reconstruction of creative spaces to wean themselves out of a neoliberal capitalist order and apocalyptic millenarist religions to find their centers and reconnect with domestic resources and lights (2016, 33). Similarly, as with Felwine Sarr, poetic possibilities forcefully makes the case that Sissako is part of the solid core of a vast but underappreciated informal and underground network of Africa that constitutes the heart of the continent’s spirituality, ethics, and business activities. This is a continent that does not aim to catch up with the rest of the world but to find its resources and inspiration for its development. And so, a place with its temporality and own philosophy of development creates imaginative spaces and new geopolitics at the center of opening up spaces of possibilities for future policies at the interstices of ideologies of Afro-pessimism and euphoric Afro-renaissance. Cinema is relevant to Afrotopia because it represents a technology of representation that complicates practices of visibility and invisibility in the continent. Film practices open up its politics of perception and recognition and the role that creativity and marginal subjectivities play in alternative public spheres, notably, in places where freedom seems to be constantly clashing with practical implications on issues such as human rights, women rights, sexual rights, and freedom of speech. These rights are complicated by the rise of religious theocracies that value authority and obedience and where contravening laws usually result in death, and there are no spaces to negotiate for mercy, redemption, and second chances. The crux of the question becomes how to move things forward in a culture that both seems a-temporal and a-historical and dogmatic constantly confusing theology and legal rights. Sissako problematizes these struggles playing across the Muslim world in Timbuktu (2014). In the film, it is not even clear what constitutes an infraction of the law and who is the legal person to hand down the law. These legal wranglings present added complications and dilemmas for those who are not Muslims nor are from the proper class or correct gender. There is a dread that led Sissako to shoot Timbuktu, and it is palpable in Timbuktu. Sissako is on the record claiming that he made the movie because he was horrified when terrorist groups took over his native northern Mali and began imposing radical sharia laws which re-

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sulted in the stoning of women live on television. The stoning of women is a demonstration that when this kind of invasion takes place, it is the return of old archaism such as tribal and clan rule and the first superstructure to collapse is the most recent which is the state. These new forms of violence are reminiscent of the colonial violence that has led to the creation of these states or satrapies as Achille Mbembe calls them and continues to operate, albeit in an altered form, where internal colonization in black face came as a substitute to Western colonial power. That collapse of the state brings up a profound sense of horror is present in the film for the ways that Sissako is a master in transforming emotion into a form of action without falling into the traps of melodrama. He also shows the way out of the sense of dread with powerful scenes of the choreography of boys playing soccer without a ball; Fatoumata Diawara challenging the ban of singing with the powerful movie theme song showing the unstoppable power of art as the last refuge for subversion and freedom. This artistic power reveals an energetic world that is in constant formation and refusing to be calcified into cynicism, hypocrisy, and opportunism and these scenes make me proud to be an African. Most importantly, in the movie, the Imam, and the caliph wannabe are always quarreling because the caliph wannabe somehow convinced himself that he has a God-given authority to order everybody in sight and he is so above the rules that he can walk into the mosque with his shoes on and strapped like Rambo. A move to impose structures of theocracy over the Imam and essentially castrate his spiritual power through violence or the threat of violence. It is also important, consequently, to note that the caliph wannabe and warlord, in the movie, is an invader who took over power through guns and not the ballot box and perverting the teaching of Islam to install a theocracy not as a liberating institution but as a new form of enslavement. The caliph believes that a correct understanding of the Koran is Jihad. In fact, the warlord takes the people he is governing as prisoners of war and slaves and therefore deprived of rights, and that explains why the warlord consistently overruled the Imam in Timbuktu (2014) which is technically illegal. Again, the caliph does not behave exactly as the kind of person that will lead humanity into righteousness. At this juncture, Sissako brings into conflict temporal and un-temporal power and the necessity of check and balances between the two which are the basis to separate church or mosque and state, historical and messianic time. The rupture of balance between these distinct structures opens up the path for a secular dictatorship based on legal despotism or the sacralization of power and a theocracy which on both accounts strip ordinary people of their rights. Sissako has been criticized by movie critics in France for abandoning a film on modern slavery in Mauritania and going easy on the terrorists presenting them, as the worst, as confused hypocrites, rather than violent

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slave drivers. I will argue, one more time about the nature of Sissako’s hors-champ (off-camera) cinematic strategy to claim that issues of enslavement and regime of exception are explicitly addressed in Timbuktu. Sissako deploys a level of sophistication that demonstrates what happens when power refuses to seek proper forms of legitimacy. In filigree and this central question shoots through all of Sissako’s films which is what has Africa done with its independence? This new kind of theocracy in Timbuktu is a demonstration of a robust and powerful state that comes up as a response and a revenge statement from the imaginary created by colonization and the idea of the colonized as passive bodies. The problem is that these kinds of identity politics, ironically, create new victims that were supposed to be liberated. Sissako, in his very sophisticated way, demonstrates how this Jihadists’ invasion is actually an unmanageable adolescent performance of anger and a Rorschach’s test on the Jihadists and says a lot about them than the people they are victimizing and who did nothing wrong. As President Barack Obama stated in a speech in Ghana, ordinary Africans are exhausted with strong men, and they do not need strong men; they need strong institutions. This confusion between strong men and strong institutions creates complex contradictions and poses the problem of religion and legitimate representation into the public sphere, and how this space is now being occupied, in Africa, by radical religious sects such as the MUJAO, Al Morabitun, MNLA, Ansar Dine, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI), Al Shabab, Boko Haram, Islamic State (ISIS) or Daesh. 7 Resulting in a legal confusion over religious policies and some valid social grievances to impose an apocalyptic blood-soaked interpretation of Islam on the public, both in the public and private spheres, and driven by the return to a religious utopia that has never actually existed, making this holy war a product of the same modern processes the radical Islamists of the Boko Haram claim to be fighting against which, in itself, creates another major contradiction and that is the suicidal belief from the terrorist that the real utopia can only take place in heaven because they find themselves trapped in a labyrinthine system of a global neoliberal culture where there seems to be no escape. In aggregate, these processes are demonstrations that the decolonization of the continent is always an incomplete process in this sense that this decolonizing process always midwives a dominant class more interested in consolidating its interest in violence and predation even under the name of religion. By which, The Poetics of Radical Hope addresses the diversity of modes of expression and resistances that Abderrahmane Sissako puts forward, and how he presents the battle for screen-time that maps and regulates contemporary market ideologies fraught with competing hegemonies intensified by neoliberal-driven globalization. Precisely, how globalization produces uneven geographies culminating in dark areas where the figure of the Jihadist is commoditized as a marketing tool for terrorist organiza-

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tions such as Isis or Daesh, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI) and affiliates such as Boko Haram, Al Morabitun, Ansar Dine, and the Al Shabab. These processes foreground the role of representation and systems of dominance and the intersecting function of the motion picture industry and self-imaging to extoll human right practices. In the face of contemporary terror narratives that have managed to graft themselves upon the global media discourse to manufacture terror pornography and trauma structurally designed to cultivate a sense of perpetual insecurity to invite reactionary responses from modern liberal and secular democracies and quickening their collapses. Within this context, African filmmakers, such as Abderrahmane Sissako, are highlighting the importance of creativity and transformation rather than the belief in resilience and adaption. Imaginative spaces are the last refuge to describe the world that follows its aesthetic logics and agency outside of the interferences of a dying world. Therefore, refuses the reduction to life as a living thing among other living organisms, on that score, incapable of transforming the world he lives in. Sissako’s overall contribution is challenging the notion that battling against the forces of religious fundamentalism is solely a Western invention generated by the enlightenment of the eighteenth century by giving forms to narratives that challenge conformism. Hence, attacking conformity and mechanical repetition in the name of ecstatic beauty and catharsis is a human’s universal tendency and, in this case, how Sissako both takes on religious fundamentalism and the soullessness of hyper-modernity highlighting the linkages between pedagogy, freewill, citizenship, and democracy. This book considers these cultural processes as by-products of tactical and transformative interventions that haul the macro and the micro as means to reclaim self-ownership and ordinary people’s right to exist in their rights and their terms. These processes take the forms of the production of new spatial formations in places where traditional institutions no longer reflect the ways ordinary people do live. These productions begin with the construction of anti-essentialist heterogeneous democratic collectivities to posit what Hannah Arendt calls fresh start through acting, which for her is the quintessence of freedom. In that, Arendt defines freedom as the creative power to start something new, the capacity to process and mobilize resources to change conventional paradigm rather than responding to choices. 8 As such, for the African filmmaker, such as Abderrahmane Sissako, cinema becomes a technology of representation and an exercise of artistic sovereignty and freedom that mobilizes cultural resources to engage new forms of alterity and inequality produced by intensive global neoliberal processes. Motion pictures, within that context, are a dominant medium that carries a democratic function as a technology of representation that speaks to the intersections between selfmaking practices and embodied experiences drawn from real life. They incorporate processes of individuation and recognition that constitute

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resources to expand human rights practices beyond privatized spheres of power in Africa to reinstitute an African political tradition of the “Palaver Tree,” a participatory form of African traditional democracy based on communal egalitarian principles, rhetoric, and the art of persuasion. These processes highlight the continent’s social diversity and democratic capabilities of a continent where the African filmmaker takes the function to change conventional apparatus of perception as container and purveyor of imagination, ideas, and values that foreground shared humanity and rights. These practices of doxa pose the central question of liberatory forms of attention for positive outcomes. This building of soft power derived from the cinematic techniques of the ordinary represents larger social phenomena such as creative modes to keep open spaces to process a politics of self-transformation and perfectionism through the dialectic between the unattained and attainable self. The purpose is to emphasize the critical functions of cinema and the emergence of alternative forms of political infrastructures and pipes to tackle current dynamics to broaden and expand the horizons of African subjectivities and rights independently from conventional politics and essentialist institutions of power. In particular, how these processes are changing traditional geography and borders regarding village/city, nation-state, transnationalism, and globalization as structuring paradigms. In the present day, these new geographies are haunted by a battle for screen time that maps and regulates the contemporary global market of terrors and access to terrorist organizations such as Isis or Daesh, Al-Qaeda and affiliates, Al-Morabitun, Ansar Dine, Al Shabab, and the Boko Haram. These leading terrorist organization operate, respectively, in northern Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger challenging positivistic and teleological notions of history and highlighting a backward entry into cosmopolitan politics with positions that do not recognize individual rights, open frontiers, and universal laws, but only an Islamic sharia under a global caliphate as harbinger of religious separatism, confessional ghettos, and hygienic cleansing of the infidels. It calls for a new epistemological paradigm and new forms of political practices to tackle these new productions of territory and subjectivities through the building of new symbolic infrastructures to address these dynamic changes. In particular, what is at stake is the responsibility of the artist that is more urgent in the face of global terror which is not so much the product of a so-called clash of civilizations but clashes of ignorance, that Appadurai criticizes as the evacuation of history from cultures (2006, 115–16). Clash of civilization’s rhetoric is the physical expression of the absolutist belief in the necessity of violence to enforce religious dogma. A traumatic experience of transmission that signals anxieties about amassing symbolic capital and the belief that the ecstatic moments of the presence of divine power as the dominant force in the public sphere and the problematic that religion becomes a producer of illusion that prevents the real

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fight against alienation from taking place. In aggregate, cinema becomes a site of the creation of endless possibilities to rescue the concept of a public sphere of imagination. As they seek political, economic, social, and cultural rights to reimagine forms of citizenship that hold out from the belief that there is nothing else besides moments of the divine presence and the strong enforcement of religious dogma. The fight, consequently, is the public sphere and the notion of participative democracy. Hence, these practices of the ordinary invoke a technology of the self and the role that cinema plays in performing Africa’s ethical dilemma with the rigor and realism the continent deserves. Hence, I will develop the notion of the camera-eye as a practice of observable reality into its peeling layers, a window into the world and into the soul for a pure knowing subject un-encumbered by its own subjectivity and solipsism. The camera-eye represents a mode of inquiry where the apparatus of meaning is formed through descriptive philosophy and logics through processes of intuition and the formation of communal resources to transform ordinary Africans as the historical agents of the nation-state. The camera-eye is neither solely about aesthetic nor a fidelity to a sort of accurate perceptive reality. It is an entry into a discussion of ethics, therefore, a cinema that is less interested in reordering the viewer relationship to the peeling layers that constitute reality but to emphasize an ethical relationship between the film and the world being referred to in the movie. This new production of paradigm serves to legitimize social issues and an economy of production based on a new semiotic universe. This new world demands freedom of imagination through an eclectic, interdisciplinary approach, always recombining and reconfiguring established codes to reconnect a process of historicity within African history. And, within this process, reawaken a lifeless mechanic order from under the blanketed night of existing neocolonial geopolitics on the continent. As I say all of this, I rely on the films of Abderrahmane Sissako as the perfect cinematic exemplification of the camera-eye, and how his body of the film brings up a refreshing perspective from which to analyze multiple marginal subjectivities to challenge dominant modes of understanding. This cinematic practice tackles Africa and Africans through the constant epistemological tension between knowledge and acknowledgment that always confronts dogma that prevents the identification with a common humanity and the aspiration for a world of promise and possibilities where life keeps feeding on itself. This acknowledgment points to the need to invest in symbolic forms and universal values to resist radical essentialism and politics of exclusion through the creation of a cultural and epistemological context. Particularly, in times of crisis reflecting a twenty-first century struggle to get underway from the garbage of the last century crystallized through the remnant of the reductive and narrow binary of cold war ideologies, the so-called “clash of civilization,” the collapse of leftist thinking, and neoliberal rationalities dominated by

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primeval imperatives, and reduced to managing inequalities, and stuck into ennui, entropic consumerism, greed, self-deception, and the receding horizon of third world ideologies regarding Pan-Africanism and PanArabism. These new forms of rearrangement of conscious perception and selfawareness testify to a powerful economy of imaginative possibilities instrumental in resurrecting the past, what Achille Mbembe interprets as “the endless night” (2013). A raging metaphor for the hellish stasis resulting from the botched independence that swept Africa in the early 1960s entwined with the frozen immobility of that blinkered world generated by the legacies of colonization and its existing geopolitics on the continent. Indeed, Mbembe and Sissako are organic intellectuals who understand that, in many parts of the mainland, the independence struggle was recuperated mostly by new imperialist and colonialist projects rather than an indigenous home grown production. Knowing all of this, The Poetics of Radical Hope emphasize the homology between the power of imagination and political infrastructures and how the production of new senses and meanings has practical implications that bear upon static forces that seek to maintain the status quo. To evaluate this cultural condition, The Poetics of Radical Hope with the knowledge that politics are the practical applications of symbolic imagination and network of sociabilities through new filmic strategies that promote new political forms and information that change the outdated relationship with reality. As Abderrahmane Sissako demonstrates in his corpus of films, these new forms of conscious perception, self-awareness, and interactions encourage ordinary people to take responsibility for their own lives. Rather than being stuck in the recursive loops engineered by the nocturnal landscape of colonial violence and predation that Achille Mbembe calls “Necropolitics,” a blanket of nightmare where no one can transcend nor escape producing a state where notions of sovereignty are reduced to the designation of who shall live and who shall die (2003, 11–40). Again, this meditation on artistic sovereignty is about how cinema shines a light on a continent in transition, tackling personal, national, and global identity politics through the production of a theology of grace inspired by the poetry of T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding and Aime Cesaire’s Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal. Poems where beginnings and ends penetrate one another in cycles of meaning, and time intersects with eternity, and how the reconciliation and unification of sets of opposites are creative fertile ground to open possibilities bringing forces that transcend even human imagination. 9

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NOTES 1. In the following pages, I will discuss the relationship between the African filmmaker as a sculptor. Additionally, I will also discuss in greater detail, Sissako’s critique of the Jihadists shooting up masks in Timbuktu (2014) and how, for the first time, a known terrorist operating in Timbuktu was convicted at La Hague Tribunal for destroying world cultural heritage in Timbuktu. 2. Abderrahmane Sissako is listed as producer on many of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun such as Dry Season (2002), Abouna (2003), Daratt (2006), Grigris (2013), and Bassek ba Kobhio’s The Forrest (2003). 3. See Michel Onfray, “Fixer les Vertiges Vitalistes in Une Breve Encyclopedie du Monde,” Radio France Culture, accessed August 22, 2016. 4. Ahmad Al-Faqi al-Mahdi, one of the leaders of the Jihadist war machines who took over northern Mali pleaded guilty to these damages and apologized to the people of Mali on August 22, 2016, at La Hague Tribunal. 5. In his movie Bamako (2006), Sissako holds a trial on the International Monetary Fund, holding the fund accountable to economic mismanagement and greed on the African continent and responsible for the stagnant poverty and debt and lack of development. On October 13, 2016, the Monsanto Tribunal—an international civil society initiative to hold Monsanto accountable for human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and for ecocide—was holding Monsanto responsible for perceived evils of the global food system. It asserts that Monsanto is primarily responsible for “the displacement of millions of small farmers worldwide.” Eminent judges begin to hear testimonies from victims and deliver an advisory opinion following procedures of the International Court of Justice of La Hague. In Bamako, Sissako anticipates the notion global corporations will eventually have to answer for their brutal practices. In the realm of terror, in “De ‘Timbuktu’ au ‘Bataclan’ un scenario effroyable et similaire” by Phillipe Dagen, Le Monde (accessed October 10, 2016), Phillipe Dagen argues that the acts of terror which rocked France to the core in 2015 and 2016 were anticipated by Sissako’s Timbuktu (2014). The terrorist events that rocked Paris, France on November 13, 2015 targeted the stadium of France, where Germany and France were playing a friendly game of soccer with the French president François Hollande in attendance. And the music scene of the Bataclan, were the Eagles of Death Metal were playing, were targeted by terrorists leaving 120 deaths are eerily anticipated in Sissako’s Timbuktu (2014) where the terrorists in the movie hit the same targets. The effects of global inequities and revenge fantasies are themes that Sissako has tackled in his filmography. The terrorist attack on November 13 was only ten months after another terrorist attack that rocked France in January: the 2015 killing of the staff of the satirical newspaper called Charlie Hebdo. 6. There is a reference to Plato’s work in the Koran, particularly, Surat 18. 7. It is important to note that these processes are taking place after 9/11 and the increasing global militarization of the war on terror and how Timbuktu is a direct consequence of the existing geopolitics of the war on terror and the collapse of the Libyan state. 8. For Arendt, the word beginning is derived from the Greek word “Arche” which means origin and rule and Arendt locates there, the principle of humanity that grounds the right to have rights and therefore the notion that principles of freedom were created with the birth of humankind and not beforehand. As such, birth and freedom are synonymous. Consequently, the advent of humans is contemporary to ideas of freedom. It therefore makes sense that all people are created equal and endowed by their creators with some unalienable rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 9. This discussion is inspired by Sissako’s Life on Earth (1998).

TWO Camera-Eye, the Arte Wave, and Afro-Futurism

In African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (2010), Manthia Diawara defines the new African cinema wave in three trajectories, The Arte Wave, The Guild of the African Filmmakers, The Independent Spirit and the new pursuit of Pan-African cinema and the New Popular African Cinema. Diawara argues that Abderrahmane Sissako’s Life on Earth (1998) defines this Arte Wave for the ways in which Sissako crafted an original thought-provoking film that resulted in a new poetic language in African cinema (2010, 100). He writes that the Arte Wave shifts from African neorealist tradition to emphasize the symbolic and psychoanalytic interpretation of the relations within shots and between shots (2010, 110). Diawara’s observations on Sissako’s work is very perceptive. Watching Life on Earth as an homage to Aime Cesaire’s Cahier D’un Retour Au Pays Natal (1947) and then Bamako (2006), I was always struck how Sissako uses cinematic forms and poetry to challenge the audience's point of view regularly. I always imagine Cesaire’s poem to be like a volcanic eruption, but Sissako turns that poem into an intimate experience and a profound reflection on the nature of visual images, experience, self-perception, selfknowledge, and how these processes are very constitutive of competent citizenship. In Bamako, he does the same by filming the International Monetary Fund (IMF) being put on trial in a courtyard while at the same time ordinary life goes on and the point of view keeps shifting which then culminates with a cowboy fantasy. These movies culminate in the mapping of a cultural context where artifacts can be seen on their terms. Diawara then claims that the work of Jean-Marie Teno, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, and Balufu Bakupa Kanyinda are grouped in his second category, the independent spirit. This class combines politics and aesthetics as a way to find new expressive possibilities for their committed artwork. 35

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Diawara defines the new popular African cinema as an experimental film that indigenizes Western movie genre and the usage of African oral storytelling motifs that question African traditions, proverbs, and wisdom, as well as the everyday demands of modern life. Hence, these narrative devices are associated with what Diawara defines as “the uses of African ingredients to defamiliarize the recognized genre of the West, like the cowboy film, the love story, or the melodrama. To speak about popular cinema in the context of the New African Cinema Wave is, therefore, to look for narrative films that appeal to the emotions of spectators with new ways of doing old things, narrative films that deploy African ingredients and spices within old genres” (2010, 143). Diawara adds that this is about “a narrative choice, which, first of all, enables us to categorize the film in a particular genre of popular cinema: The Western, the melodrama, the action film or the musical” (2010, 143). The need to do away with outmoded paradigms and theories in African cinema is also recognized by other scholars such as Alexie Tcheuyap who writes that African filmmakers can no longer be easily pigeonholed. He claims “new analytical categories are needed to theorize a changing corpus that is no longer limited to social contestation, binary opposition, and essentialists cultural considerations.” Tcheuyap goes on to structure his book on genre such as comedy, dance, crime/detective, myth/tragedy, epic, sexuality, and witchcraft to show that entertainment considerations are also a significant factor in African cinema (2011, 1). Manthia Diawara fundamentally defined the Arte Wave as EssaiFilms shot by African filmmakers living in Europe in contrast to popular African cinema such as Nollywood shot on the continent (2010, 138). Within this context, Abderrahmane Sissako emerges as one of the most renowned filmmakers from the African continent. Taking into account, a cinema of limited resources almost inexistent on the global stage, apart from the world festival circuit where the work of Sissako has become emblematic of what Manthia Diawara defines as the new Arte Wave of African cinema. An indigenous aesthetic practice that unifies an emphasis on artistry and a hyper cultivation of high-quality craftsmanship, large screen beauty, and unique identity, technical knowledge, psychoanalytic relations between shots and a visionary cinematic sense (2010, 015, 100, 110). This Arte Wave is a testimony to the continent resourcefulness and inventiveness in a global context where Sissako’s body of work represents a palimpsest and the resilience of an indigenous subculture which has managed to resist the onslaught of colonialism and the soulless liquid globalization. His films become a locus of revelation for redemptive ideas buried and long concealed within African indigenous cultures. The present author developed this form of cultural resilience through the notion of the camera-eye. The concept of the camera-eye is aligned with what Vivian Sobchack calls “interrobjectivity.” Sobchack defines “interrobjectivity” as the viewer’s subjective realization of his objectivity, and

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therefore, how that recognition is formed by the point of view that the power of what the audience witnesses extends beyond the cinematic frame, and the idea that understanding this cinema is inseparable from its social context (2004, 59). The modest and overall question this work grapples with is how Sissako uses his global platform to represent ordinary Africans, not through a sense of injury and regressive masochism regarding resentments and excessive indignation as impotent forms of protest, but from a position of strength. And the creative ways he champions subaltern subjectivity and marginal aesthetic through the indigenization of the cinematic medium to pry open, and perhaps to anticipate the continent’s critical moments. At this juncture, art becomes a refuge that follows its aesthetic logics and agency outside of the interferences of a dying world. Art co-creates and stakes out a territory that reflects inclusive intersubjective communities with concrete; a physical and cultural designation that negotiates sociopolitical processes and where ordinary people find a sense of dignity and contribution outside of conventional institutional forms that now represent and signify nothing. In this sense, cinema becomes instrumental as a tool for organizational and democratic practices, and a public sphere of imagination that holds out against coercive social pressures and the formation of self-enclosed and self-referring sects that use the media only as an instrument to mobilize insiders and stigmatize the rest of the population as infidels, a fantasized construction of the other as an enemy where common sense does not apply. Indeed, terrorist organizations understand the hypnotic power of the media in sending men and women to murder sprees in a state of trance. The production of these images are equally embedded in a gesture of repetition and made to express a sense of imminent danger to inject perpetual fear. These artistic gestures reflect processes of individuation and new forms of individuality attuned to the global discourse of human rights and democracy to create the presence of the ordinary African as a subject of the law. These activities are predicated on the camera-eye which functions as an engine for changes in modes of perception, self-recognition, consciousness, and action, and within the framework of an emergent collective subject with the agency to reinforce existing rights and create demands for revolutionary possibilities within a fusional horizon of freedom, equality, and justice for all. On the front end, these cultural forms are becoming the principal protagonists in public life driving forward the idea that there is always an outside to the system. The world beyond immediate perception with the common purpose and knowledge that a cinematic narrative can never be closed because its discourses exceed the boundaries of the cinematic apparatus, in the same ways, its frames, and acoustic practices cannot be frozen as audiovisual images travel far beyond the evidence of the senses. Taken together, the notion that art follows its logic and laws

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outside of conventional norms, values, and conventions. Thus, Sissako’s work is part of a new form of creative resistance and intervention that appreciates Africa’s drive toward the democratization of the production of meanings dramatizing idealized forms of democracy from the grassroots turning the real into fiction, and to demonstrate the complementarity between art and reality to highlight forms of ordinary Africans’ heroism intertwined within the extraordinary and the sublime to create an epiphany experience of an African resurgence. And so, a cinema where material and physical realities are redeemed. Therefore, where the context of reception is an integral part of the aesthetic experience creating spaces for a politicized citizenry, and a radical proposition in disenchanted places where apparatuses of power are dishearteningly transforming the state into a fishbowl where the outside is shut out, and therefore no life can escape from it. Cinema, consequently, helps to lay out the groundwork to transform the state from the outside, and becomes instrumental as an important site to generate collective mobilization to build critical masses through the production of connectivity and common language, and accelerated forms tied to modernity and adventure, inventing new spaces, codes, and values that enshrine the collective as the fundamental principle of sovereignty in a modernized nation-state. Within this context, politics is re-enchanted through reason, imagination, and persuasion rather than hegemony, domination, and violence, and these processes are no longer top-down, but the chain of meanings are negotiated through the quotidian realities of life. Hence, Sissako’s body of films represents a cinematic essay that inscribes itself in the longue durée rather than mundane catastrophes because ordinary human beings are not only defined by sets of circumstances. This cinematic device serves to argue to what degrees these processes represent moments of continuity or discontinuity in African lives. On the back end, this perspective is predicated on experiences as resources of intelligibility to clarify the complexities of Africans existence and where cinema becomes a primeval vessel that allows ordinary Africans to reconnect and reunify with the plots of their lives long taken over by a long genealogy of colonial and neocolonial geopolitics vestiges and practices. Sissako’s cinema is an ontological pursuit embedded in historical realism through a poetic reflection on the political power of images, and processes through which time, psychology, history, politics, social practices, communal rituals, and emotions travel through these images to open up the key to knowledge to create spaces of freedom, and to rectify the geopolitics of knowledge that existed at the time of colonization. This cinematic practice and a new vision of the world express what Giorgio Agamben defines as “Le Contemporain” (2008). Mainly, how the light of the past can brighten the dark corners of the present which is a metaphor aimed to emphasize the nature of the creative process and the necessity

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of contextualization and re-contextualization as a methodology to reflect on light and darkness as creative processes to solve the riddles of the moment. The notion of light, within this context, stands for the search for grace and visionary imagination. Likewise, Sissako’s poetic is a form of aesthetic necessity and theoretical fiction reflecting on the nature of ontological security, freedom, catharsis, and purification where the filmmaker performs as a sculptor of the mask and how the mask, in African culture, represents talismanic templates where forms of purpose and redemption are encoded. This is a riff on the filmmaker, as Pygmalion, as a metaphor for an anthropology of technology emphasizing the artists with the skill sets to transform phenomenon into concepts, ideas, and images, therefore, a continuity between abstract ideas into material, palpable, practical knowledge, in sum, reuniting theoretical and convenient, subjective and objective experience. The mask is the original seminal aesthetic text and genealogical emblem where meanings are encoded; artistic practices are always interrogated to add depth and sense to the semiotic context. Within this regard, masks are not merely abstract symbols or arbitrary signifiers but media to access practical and spiritual knowledge. In the following pages, I will discuss the mask as the seminal semiotic text, the formal ontological beauty, and informational codification to get down to the blueprint of African reality and its peeling layers akin to the tree of life out of which the mask is descended from. In Sissako’s case a retrieval of African indigenous archives working on the dissection of colonial legacies to wrestle with the nature of true African needs and priorities. This recovery means a proper description and resistance to oppressive machines, therefore, a cultural process that enables attention to proper selfexamination and critical analysis of institutional forms to engage realities and the power to act. In this sense, the argument will be made that Sissako’s cinema participates in the construction of new metaphysics of participation through the articulation and institutionalization of symbols and new meanings that make sense to ordinary Africans. In practice, it means to reclaim social discourse and authority from the grassroots. It is important to note, also, that the opening scenes of Sissako’s Timbuktu feature Jihadists terrorists shooting up African masks. These scenes demonstrate that the Jihadists have the same contempt of African art as the colonial masters and how this hatred is based on modern Western rationalities and the ideas that these masks are the products of lesser evolved culture and a superstitious infantile mindset. More importantly, the Jihadists have a taste for aesthetic destruction that brings up a muchneeded reflection of how the logic of apocalypse mediates the violence of images. Hence, the destruction of masks is the antithesis of cultural processes that relate to a particular state of intellectual engagement and precarious mediation. Sissako’s achievements and the signification of his importance

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as a social phenomenon are based on the necessity to interrogate and evaluate the construction of this new physical and symbolic space across a comprehensive range of topics, including political economy, history, aesthetics, reception and audience structures, modernity and development, to grapple with these particular operational logics and cultural impact. Sissako’s corpus of films is slowly rewriting the rules under which African arthouse cinema operates and its consequential ramifications in Sissako’s investment in African political discourses through Bruno Latour’s notion of “re-assembling the social” and particularly the central question of who counts (2005, 152–64, 260). As with this concept of “re-assembling the social,” there is the idea that in some cultures there is something that never dies. Jacques Ranciere’s work can also be put into contribution here. His concept of the politics of aesthetic sensibility, the distribution of the sensible, self-examination, and cultural and political responsivity is necessary to redefine the collective organic subject. And how human masses are not simply a collection of people but, an aggregate of an organic body, and the central question becomes the necessary epistemological conditions of identity, self-definition, and a prism through which these organic processes endowed with perception construct the world around him. These new forms of knowledge and ways of seeing start with rethinking the artificial barrier between subject and object, culture and nature, politics and science, spectator and spectacle, and how these processes are mediated through art and values through the production of the performative critical representation of new utopia, and the creation of cognitive representations and the multiplication of agency, and the faceless forces that drive history forward. In Sissako’s work, I argue that it means the definition of a new horizon through visual and spiritual excitement taking advantage of the revolutionary promises of indigenous representational practices and emancipatory politics through networks of collective heterogeneous, non-hierarchical, inclusive and integrative intelligence, affect performativity, new rhetoric of sincerity and authenticity and embodied engagement through innovation, and the formation of new institutions that support liberationist politics and democratic values. Also, Sissako is perhaps the most talented of his generation and, even though, his filmography includes only four feature-length films. However, an in-depth survey of his film output demonstrates that his aesthetic choices and decisions are infused with the accumulation and synthesis of communal points of view that clarify and transmit propositional information about an authentic and original African humanist perspective. And an important cultural resource associated with an ownership of the past and the restoration of Africa into its natural trajectory of indigenous modernity. Precisely, how this humanist-centered approach participates in a journey of individual and communal self-discovery. Consequently, how the materiality of media matters in a new representational economy

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to confront the legacy of the colonial geopolitics of knowledge and power and to set up new modes of learning and exchanges emphasizing the role that communication technologies play in the structuration and organization of new epistemologies necessary for the formation of new emancipatory politics. These imaginative practices evidence the power of fiction in the work of reinvention. Hence, Sissako’s work emerges as a professional synergy highlighted by an organized critical and disciplined indigenization of cinematic forms and narratives coming down from the perspective of unrepresented marginal groups. This fiction serves to instigate this film production as an organic intellectual experience deriving its cultural power from the depth of indigenous socio-communal forms, performance and identity long suppressed by colonialism. This cultural suppression served the purpose of colonial and neocolonial apparatuses of subjugation where the continent was endlessly the blank white canvass for these processes to exercise their abject fantasies. To this extent, Sissako’s work is an access point to discuss the evolution of a strong aesthetics from a political practice of resistance that seizes communal forms and identity in processes of transformation to posit this cinematic production into an examination of an African gaze. This new gaze is responding and reflecting to a larger discourse on African renaissance also known as Afro-Futurism by free, sovereign, self-determined, and creative people creating their own mental and physical spaces as gestures to reverse a longstanding gaze at their communal forms and identity imposed by colonial and neocolonial forces. In Sissako’s filmography, precisely, it is the tension between African indigenous socio-communal structures and wisdom against the homogenizing and decadent forces of liquid modernity in Life on Earth (1998) and Heremakono (2002). A poetic reflection on spaces as mediated texts through symbolic geography, imagination and fantasy, and the imbrications of temporalities, places, and belonging, and modernity in a world that is becoming increasingly globalized. Both movies challenge conventional geography, particularly, the colonial ethnographic geography that naturalizes and traps ordinary Africans and animals into a native habitat that produces familiarity and domestication under the Western gaze. Sissako projects differences between global processes and life, producing new territories and subjectivities, and the need to build dynamic structures to keep up with these processes. A powerful reflection is on the role of representation and material condition in Bamako (2006) where Sissako tackles the effects of neoliberal rationalities, greed, and self-deception on the fabrics of African’s lives and modernity. The International Money Fund (IMF) and the World Bank become economic signifiers of the dispossession of people of color embedded in the short Western film Death in Timbuktu in Bamako (2006). Sissako reappropriates the conventions and the themes of the Western movie genre, such as law and order, to empha-

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size its subtext of race relations and a new critique of predation in a global context, while at the same time, playing on the relationship between subjectivity and its reflection on extra-cinematic subjectivity. Indeed, the spaghetti Western is a critique of the western and its mythic production of idealized characters such as the sheriff and the lone figure of justice. The spaghetti Western, instead, foregrounds characters who are sweaty, violent, and greedy to show the grit and the ugliness that were an integral part of the conquest of the American West. Within these tropes, Sissako compels the viewer into witnessing a society coming apart from under the weight of asymmetrical predatory relationships of power and how economic depletion translated into mental and emotional exhaustion. At the core, it is an intense criticism of the neoliberal credo that self-interest generates collective well-being. These practices have also been decried by economists such as Michael Hudson, in his book Killing the Host (2015) and how Western economies have been highly financialized in a predatory fashion sacrificing public interest for the enrichment of bankers, therefore, weaponizing the economy into class warfare between the haves and have-nots. In Timbuktu (2014), furthermore, Sissako addresses the global terror and apocalyptic, violent Jihad in Africa and African diasporas, and processes through which terror has shifted from the local to the global. In Timbuktu, Sissako leads a reflection on how film serves not only as a propaganda tool but also as a media literacy resource—regarding how to wage, present, represent, and counteract violent conflicts and the role that audiovisual strategies play in shaping and reshaping battlefields (Timbuktu 2014). The movie is also a reflection on issues of childhood, filiation, and wars. From this position of vulnerability, Sissako is undoubtedly the most complex of the African filmmaker. In this instance, the issues that Sissako frames extensively through his camera-eye do not have simple solutions because they represent fragmented and disparate realities straddling the limits of the gaze and its object. And the awareness of multiple mediations and a tenuous balance that stretches the complexity of narrative structures whose meaning is often not obvious to the non-initiated. This means the audience is accustomed to gaze at, as opposed to, gaze into African realities, therefore, sticking to the surface of things rather than investigating all the cultural layers. Inside this jigsaw puzzle, the unifying theme is a reflection on the irruption of ultra-violence upon African lives and issues related to security, primarily, African ontological security. Sissako’s contribution functions within an inter-disciplinary perspective inside a cultural milieu and moments that intersect battlefronts with what Jacques Ranciere calls “dissensus” to emphasize the continuity between collaborative aesthetic and political project to disrupt the social order (2010, 142).

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The original way Sissako’s work makes itself relevant to the fight for social change and justice is to go beyond political polemics to engage the perceptual and epistemological forms that underlie African social order, and the pulling up of diverse voices from the grassroots into a stage of enunciation. This operation creates a mental and physical space to recreate institutional forms that for now represent and signify nothing in African lives. A vacuum now exploited by the larger project of Afrofuturism which is a combination of eclectic theoretical and practical approaches to perception and knowledge that reconciles temporalities and politics through the definition of a new imaginary, paradigm, and trajectory of Pan-Africanism. Achille Mbembe defines these processes as Afropolitanism, which is a longstanding form of social and cultural polytheism of African societies composed of an aggregate of fragments, an aesthetic and particular poetic of the world defined by the awareness of the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice-versa, and how the interweaving of worlds and the problematic of self-explanation are quintessential practices of African’s notion of belonging in the world (2005, 28). In Sortir de la Grande Nuit (2010), Mbembe adds that this poetic sensibility of Afro-futurism is a practice that moves beyond the fetishization of the origins to embrace new mobile forms of the real through erasure, substitution, deletion, and recreation (222–25). In this way, Mbembe is joined by Falola and Essien (2013) in calling to replace Africa within a diasporic tradition, and how through this circulation between African and the diaspora new forms of radical epistemology have been created. In practical terms, this poetic practice of Afro-futurism follows Ranciere’s notion of dissensus as the fluidity between artists and their audiences in ways that reframe their shared experience within new modes of constructing common objects, and new possibilities of new subjective enunciation (2010, 142). All the while, through Ranciere’s notion of dissensus, Sissako’s body of work is a productive assemblage of ethical practices, original aesthetics and political knowledge, and a cultural model to grapple with the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and a genealogy of counter-hegemonic forms on the African continent. In its natural extension, Sissako’s imaginative practice is part of a democratic reform where politics is not reduced to representation, electoral politics, and power but the search for the common interest. In that sense, democracy is an activity, an experience, a system of deliberation but not a normative project. In this relationship between aesthetics and politics, it is not simply what is in Sissako’s texts but also what is around them. In the following pages, I will develop the notion of the camera-eye about Sissako’s work to think about African filmmaking aesthetical practices as gestures to engage with the continent’s metaphysical conception of knowledge and power practices. African cinema is a significant contribution to rebalancing the geopolitics of access to knowledge and power that have come into

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existence since the colonization of the continent. To respond to what it means to be an African within the competing ideologies of neoliberal globalization and Islamic terror, a geopolitical hierarchical structure where the former colonized is struggling to get into a position of enunciation and to be heard. This entails the definition of a new imaginative space to generate a newly decolonized anthropology of subaltern perspectives that synthesizes indigenous signs and objects for a new metaphysics of power aimed to re-enchant the struggle for a second decolonization on the continent. In aggregate, new ways to identify, map out and inhabit a new cartography of the possible, and the role that artists play in creating new contexts of possibilities, and imagining alternative sociocommunal modes of organization. Hence, Sissako’s originality is informed by the courage to attack complicated subjects, often, in tune with current events anticipated in his fictions which give his cinema an unusual power of shamanistic foreboding and resonance forcing the audience to recognize the likeness of something they recognize—good. Furthermore, Sissako’s relationship with the present is not incidental. It serves as a template to think about expanding senses of possibilities in Africa. In light of this expertise, Sissako’s work is important in ways that he tries to reconnect with an intellectual and African spiritual genealogy to articulate a reconciliation between indigenous transcendental forms and the simulacra and the overloaded “sensor-ship” of our global media circus. He is working in the backdrop of collapsing communal social structures built around fragmented identities, high level of solipsism, bloated and self-indulgent narcissism, economic slavery and material misery, and spiritual emptiness. Taken together, global media entertainment is not just an aesthetic problem but the reflection of a political and economic decadence. Sissako tackles with a forensic approach the universal mechanics of a late capitalist culture of the endless supply of desire and seduction, uncritical consumption, and the resulting cognitive defects and dehumanization that can seep through that global entertainment architecture. This world circus becomes a space where it becomes hard to connect and to care, and vulnerability is also a casualty of social structures that are increasingly inhumane. As such, Sissako’s work becomes a laboratory to analyze structures of power, mentalities, and behaviors, and how ordinary people attempt to face inhumane structures of power such as the ladies of Timbuktu (2014) braving the fundamentalist tyranny of the Jihadists; giving an intimate and inside perspective on embattled life under a regime of exception that Achille Mbembe calls “Necropolitics.” This state of exception defines the exercise of sovereignty as the arbitrary decision of who shall live and who shall die and under a pacifist ethos and function that never materialize and, consequently, a form of domination through an Orwellian impoverishment of language (2003, 11–40).

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The attention to these concerns is the raison d’être Abderrahmane Sissako is one of the contemporary and foremost African public intellectuals whose cinematic intervention is a significant contribution at this historical juncture offering an original subaltern perspective and other forms of consciousness. His technology of representation mobilizes audiovisual resources and performances as resources to assert a primary cause for priorities. Particularly, the dire necessity to bring up a subaltern perspective for the sake of new practices of deliberative and participatory democracy to rescue human rights in extreme situations where violence is the norm. And with the recognition that this subaltern perspective and work of recovery need to avoid the traps of culturalism and the burden to speak from a position of cultural authenticity to be useful. Second, to be sure, Sissako’s narratives are moving toward a compelling archive, charting an original path away from the long night that has cast a blanket shadow on the sun of the independence that has shined throughout Africa in the early 1960s, and captured in Joseph Kabasele’s anthem “Independence Cha Cha.” Sissako is well aware that imaginative spaces are sites to shape a shared culture where ordinary Africans can be reconnected to their inner integrity and the function of culture in building a democratic horizon where all citizens can agree upon, to form a democratic collective. It is the idea that democracy is based on ideal types where everyone has a stake, and the recognition that the rules are fair for all on behalf of equality, justice, and equal opportunity. Third, in all of this, Sissako understands that the global media landscape is the site where social values are being challenged and reshaped, and here through relationships of violence, domination, and terrorism. What grounds that complexity is the originality with which his body of work navigates a highly contested social and cultural context, and conjugates an in-depth meditation on regimes of presence, technology, and lived experiences of African marginalized subjectivities. This situation of marginality means to grapple with Western grids of interpretation regarding endless regurgitation of lazy and irresponsible thinking, and imagination contaminated by clichés, stereotypes, mythologies, and mystification that keeps passing as serious analysis and reflection about the African continent and the African diaspora. Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958) attributes radical evil to thoughtlessness, the banality of the mind, and superficiality that creates people such as Adolf Eichmann who presented himself as a cog in a wheel just following orders and making sure the trains run on time. To be clear, how the struggles of democratic forms contaminated by depoliticized neoliberal rationalities, greed, and self-deception, and dystopic consumption and its Janus face, global Islamic terror, which in tandem, have now complicated democratic nation-building in Africa and the discourse of citizenship of people of African descent. Particularly, in

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Western Europe and countries with a large population of Muslims from African descent, are experiencing racial paranoia giving rise to extreme right wing politics and the naturalization of discrimination against this community describing how this population is both discriminated in Europe and the first victims of the Jihadists. This bias explains the reality that France itself has to go through its process of auto-decolonization to reflect on its politics of assimilation, secularism, and human rights while African countries formerly colonized by the French, such as Mali, have to undergo a second decolonization with the recognition that independence does not mean self-determination. What Sissako aims for is to locate transcendent places within the simulacra of global popular culture. He describes the terrorist as a product of that global media culture and how their quotidian spaces and lives are impinged upon by global media artifacts, and while the Jihadists are pressing others to live the ascetic Islamic life, they are not robust enough to resist the darker forces of recreational addiction. As a result, their Jihad is not the product of an alternative modernity and the terrorist who affects the persona of the Mujahedeen is an alienated figure who profanes his body with poison and turns it into a killing machine on the basis that cannot be checked by any recognizable reality. Again, Sissako understands ordinary Africans’ ontological contradictions and psychological fragmentation being pulled apart between spiritual yearnings and the material conditions that define their realities and how these processes turn into wounded cultural narcissism, postmodern despair, and archaic revenge fantasies where the victims can equally turn up to be the victimizer. The mentality and action of the terrorist are the Rorschach test of our time. This test reveals more about the Jihadists than the people they are victimizing. The Jihadist, consequently, is an excellent validator of a mind colonized by neoliberalism and narcissism that lack empathy and therefore cannot relate because there is no space for the other which translates into his nihilism and lack of communal values. To be clear, the terrorist is also incapable of self-definition because he lives in the present. Within this context, the medium is the message. Terrorist organizations, such as Daesh, are not teaching but provide a template where feelings can be shared, and actions put into motion. These revenge fantasies, therefore, describe that the most powerful organizing factor is consumption, not religion. And consumption has become the most dominant human experience and not religion, and this is where French scholar, Olivier Roy, talks about the “Islamicization of radicalism rather than radical Islam turning prophetic Neil Postman’s assertion of amusing ourselves to death.” In aggregate, these processes describe the burden of trying to speak from a position of cultural authenticity when that authenticity is also a fiction. By this time, Sissako’s filmography is a creative space, and it is hard to be indifferent to this cinematic production because it reflects upon the

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notion of forms and how the institutional forms ordinary Africans are living under are turning into empty shells signifying and representing nothing. Particularly, because, in these African countries, power and wealth are captured by a small and unrepresentative elite. This symbolic emptiness is a reminder that a system that does not create difference except for global terror is in dire need of redemptive ideas and new forms of political representation and electoral politics. For these reasons, Sissako’s narratives are forthcoming with explanatory power taking marginal subjectivities in all their complexities and seriousness, including forms of imagination they rely upon as responses to the contemporary banality of evil. Sissako’s work has a sense of foreboding that can only be responded to by the promotion of ethics and the moral right. A humanity that understands his values needs compassion and empathy against the greed and self-deception that lay beneath neoliberal spectacles and the mythical and idealized global caliphate as an Islamic utopia that has never existed. In the present time, the idea of the caliphate stands as an apocalyptic revenge fantasy that exploits ordinary Muslims’ genuine desire for an authentic religious experience where every utterance from the caliph is received like bolts from heaven, and a vision of the caliphate as an Islamic utopia, as a rarefied sphere, reserved for the elected few, and standing way above the ghastly pit where mere mortals stew in. In this sense, Sissako’s work is a meditation on the organization of imaginative space under globalization, and attempts to rethink politics in radical ways outside of conventional institutions, putting emphasis on social relationships from the perspectives of the margins. This is a recognition that real democracy is the capacity to create the conditions and mechanisms for an alternative to emerge. Political systems that do not allow for the possibilities of differences or pluralisms are by definition tyrannical. “Sensor-ship” is the deprivation of the senses and the resources to think critically. As a result, this is a cinema that places itself in a logic of contribution to shining new light on new conditions of thinking, poetic meditation to inject new knowledge into the global cultural bloodstream, and in the process, exposing the damage of the excesses of neoliberal rationalities tangled up with Islamic terror as its dark shadow. As such, Sissako’s films travel through multiple temporalities as a means to escape the arrogance of the present, and to think outside of the tyranny of the present, to work our way back into more progressive realities, which also reflects African realities where many countries were structured as transnational spaces of imagination, encounter, and exchanges—well put and felicitous. Therefore, reality is always a nexus of facts, events, and possibilities that can always be reconfigured with critical thinking and imaginative practices to resist the cold homogenization of corporate globalization turning ordinary people into consumer subjects and docile bodies.

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Sissako’s work is equally a reflection on the role and possibilities of cinema. What counts as a cinematic contribution in the range of complex realities, such as liquid globalization, where finances and commodities flow freely worldwide, yet where identities and migration policies are instrumentalized by a global technocratic bureaucratized matrix to stigmatize and criminalize the poor, and folks deemed to have the wrong color or religion. Consequently, how economics and politics are used to hegemonize Western corporate dominated culture at the expense of others. [It is] therefore, a cinematic inquiry into race, sexuality, religion, and terrorism. While Sissako’s body of work is anchored in Africa, he depicts a cultural milieu whose ramifications are tied up to a pluralistic landscape. Sissako pays particular attention to how bloated consumption of commodities and information are transforming social relations into alienation, and how terror becomes emblematic of a mimetic and anti-cathartic spiral embedded in a disenchanted society of spectacle and a fascist expression of political rage and impotence. The crux of the question becomes how do minorities get out from under the solipsistic iron cage of late capitalist neoliberal rationalities and disciplinary societies? The answers begin with the recognition that the ways we relate to objects and commodities create the world around us and how we relate to one another. Material productions are part of creative processes tied into ways of being and ways of seeing. Hence, new forms of attention are required to break the logjams of mindless and nihilistic consumption by taking art as a refuge for artistic integrity to produce forms of expression that are not easily co-opted into ideological apparatuses, and art becomes a space for people to build new horizons for a better world they think they deserve. Cinema, in this sense, functions as a mode of inquiry that can capture emergent rationalities by decrypting, deconstructing, and reconstructing alternative realities based on the knowledge of African cultural genealogy and the conditions to build new cultural epistemologies in a world where conformity is regularly shaken. Cinema becomes a site of productive power with the recognition that power is not reduced to the state, governments, or other forms of institutionalized monopoly on force but also involves social relations and the multiplicity of resources and sources of legitimacy. In this sense, Manthia Diawara (2010, 150), quoting Leopold Sedar Senghor, identifies the African filmmaker as the sculptor of masks which, in Africa, is reserved to people initiated in sacred knowledge and capable of codifying this knowledge in cultural artifacts and derive their power and legitimacy from their knowledge. The analogy between the filmmaker and the sculptor is the perfect marriage of technical skills, aesthetic insights, and sacred knowledge passed down from generations. These cultural processes reflect the power of cinema to shape a collective of ordinary anonymous people into forms of representation that reflect voices, bodies, shapes, and desires into totemic forces. Scholar Gillian Rose states that,

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“these totemic forces become groups of statements which structure the way a thing is thought and the way we act by that which shapes how the world is understood and how things are done in it” (2007, 142). Hence, cinematic discourses produce subjects and how the meanings created by these discourses are circulated and negotiated through various media(s) and Rose argues that these social productions are always embedded in notions of power and knowledge, and cultural significance. Admittedly, cinematic productions, such as Sissako’s, are inherently intertextual, and the audience may or may not recognize the source material being presented to them, but the cultural relevance of these films are aligned within the constant negotiation between conservative politics regarding ethics, and moral integrity with climactic moments of changes regarding progressive politics. As such, Sissako’s corpus of work is turning into an anthropological authority into the intricacies of African lives he brings on the screen. His specificity lies in the original ways these features of complexity engage with a part of the global culture that has forged a unique concept of cinematic representation mediated through the own unique condition of their history of racialization and objectification practices. Sissako synthesizes these particular forms of subjectivities, insights and media practices through an imaginative space that I theorize with the key concept of the camera-eye or as Jean-Pierre Bekolo puts it, in Les Saignantes (2005), “Mevungu.” The camera-eye is a stylistic and poetic naturalism that differs from the social realism that has dominated African cinema thus far because of its emphasis on formal aesthetic control, freedom, and dignity. The camera-eye is a cinematic attitude that goes beyond the mechanical knowledge of knowing how to work a camera or cinematic production values. As with the camera-eye, cinematic realism is not merely about how to capture a form; it is not just a forensic practice, but an intellectual and spiritual journey that aims to answer profound ontological questions. The camera-eye is the integration between perception, idea, and the soul that kicks into a filmmaking experience where motion pictures are more than the distillation of montage, mise-en-scène, recording images and sound. In effect, cinema is neither a reflection nor a mirror of reality but a space where fiction and reality are constantly intertwined. This cinematic universe, consequently, is a meditation on knowledge and time and how real knowledge is not captive to the notion of time. As a result, knowledge and time are never out of joint. This recognition that knowledge always fits the time is an antidote to the arrogance of the present and the realization that contemporaneity is not innate but constructed through collective action. Therefore, time is a subjective construct that is not the diktat of institutions and official narratives, which in themselves are embedded and produced by relationships of power and the recognition that power takes many forms. As a result, the conditions of political

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subjectivities exceed institutions of power. Hence, the knowledge that what is true today was true yesterday and will be true tomorrow, which highlights the importance of a broad framework to capture unity beneath the discontinuity and chaos of the quotidian realities of life and how subjectivity is constructed historically rather than through events. In this sense, knowledge is not chronological, and this understanding can be seen as a critique of modernity. A modernity that only believes in material, physical, and mechanical manifestation of reality in a way that only objects and a phenomenon that can be scientifically validated are considered to exist, missing the continuity and the coherence tying up all events together. Sissako’s body of films, within this framework, seeks to reconnect to a primordial ontology and it is often associated with poets, such as Aime Cesaire and his Cahier D’un Retour Au Pays Natal, which is a metaphor for an essence of the power of the African’s primordial soul that has survived through the Middle Passage and anti-black genocidal politics. Through the work on Cesaire in Life on Earth (2000) and A Screaming Man (2010), the emphasis is to transform words into images and the search for archetypal figures that are connected to this notion of primordial ontology that motivated the making of these films. This reliance on Cesaire describes the knowledge that real art also speaks for the dead. Poetry evokes the notion of transmission of knowledge and social memory in oral-based culture and generational bonding as a manifestation for inner integrity and authenticity. Furthermore, in Heremakono (2002), Sissako also plays with the tropes of electricity as an homage to non-Western forms of enlightenment. Here, electricity is a metaphor for eternal illumination in line with the Islamic philosophy of Sheikh Shahabuddin Yahya Sohrevardi and his notion of light’s thoughts which is a methodology of knowledge that allies intuition with reasoning and relies on light entities to create a continuum of reality based on the experience that luminosity flows eternally. It begins with the notion of God as the infinite light, and everything that exists is produced and flows from that light. In that sense, knowledge is not reduced to knowledge of facts but the experience of being part of a larger cosmic reality that is illuminated in the soul of humanity. Sohrevardi is important as one of the founders of the notion of the imaginative realm and the idea that there is an economy of images distinct from the world of imagination and it is the work of imagination to reconnect the soul to the original images as the reflection of the light created by God. Admittedly, light rules over things and nonthings and it is the life-force that midwives nonexistence into existence. Sohrevardi’s Islamic philosophy counters the Orientalist perspective that subaltern cultures are too wedded into rituals and magical thinking that kept them away from developing political rationalities to engage the world in cold and pragmatic ways. Sohrevardi’s illuminative thoughts have influenced Western thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and his notion of Dasein, which is the idea of

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being in time and the concept that the idea of being precedes existence, therefore, humans have knowledge that is derived from the trace of God rather than experience created by quotidian lives. These processes, in an aggregate, come back to the primary interrogation on audiovisual production and the nature of appropriate investment and the relationship with modernity, iconography, objects, and idolatry, particularly, in a world that entered modernity through slavery and pacotille. Indeed, on the outset of the colonial contact, African authorities did believe that Europe was bringing enchanted objects and the blessings of the world to them and failed to adequately appreciate the exchange values of commodities between the two entities. They imbued magical power into a fool’s gold and turned these fake objects into a form of golden calf worship, and Africa is still struggling to recover from those initial economic imbalances as Sissako demonstrates in Bamako (2006). These processes explain how money is a system of relations and how western genocidal and predatory capitalism, first, begins by overwhelming African symbolic systems. Furthermore, the translation of his second feature-length film, Heremakono, in English is “Waiting for Happiness,” happiness that can only occur when the initial ambiguity between the profane and the sacred is cleared up. As a result, the necessity of a metaphysical vision embedded in Sissako’s narratives and the movie experience turning into an exegesis because the filmmaker is not merely filming bodies, he is equally photographing souls highlighting the relationship between individuality, technology, history and massification. Through this exegesis, cinema progresses as space of initiation where abstract knowledge is disciplined and materialized as wisdom. (punctuation matters). Admittedly, there are some unique aspects to the notion of off-screen space and reverse shots in this cinema that allow forms of distinction between fictions constructed by institutions of power and organic everyday life experiences of cultural subversion. As a result, how forms of intertextuality in the films are not bounded by the frames but porous to lived experiences and vice versa. This kind of reality can be seen in Sissako’s Bamako (2006) where he regularly confronts the realities produced by the negative ramifications of supranational financial entities, such as the World Bank and the International Money Fund, on the fabric of African societies, and real experiences of lived democracy and resistance challenging the judicial and ethical underpinning of the continent, economic subjugation. And so, there is a symbiotic relationship between internal and external processes, a form of modernity where aesthetic strategies and choices are imbricated in the larger social world with a perspective that, in addition to being intellectual, is equally mystical in finding resources and the power to resist a long history of oppression, and step into places of enunciation and emancipatory politics.

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These processes highlight the question of visibility and how visibility is produced and values created based on the knowledge that there is always an outside, therefore, spaces of transgression built into systems of power. Hence, the objects being created and the discourses being produced in these fictions have functions that go beyond mere entertainment. These African cinematic narratives represent a cultural economy embedded into a logic of social contribution. Again, Manthia Diawara writes that the filmmaker in African cinema is akin to a sculptor who infuses its object with life-force (2010, 150). Diawara’s metaphor is predicated on the knowledge that sculpting is a sacred task in Africa. Sculptural objects, on the continent, are a codification of esoteric knowledge and archival sources of indigenous knowledge and practices. They are imbued with talismanic power. In Africa, therefore, cinema is a space for souls to connect and shots become the epistemological ingredients and building blocks to shape social consciousness. In the case of Abderrahmane Sissako, his body of films demonstrate that questions of identity and subjectivities are more enigmatic than they appear. He uses this postulate to engage issues of uncertainty where identities are no longer transmitted in automated and mechanistic fashion from the stability and security offered by tradition and other forms of communal social structures. This knowledge allows Sissako to dig deep into notions such as the theory of relative frustration also known as Tocqueville’s paradox, where a revolution that ushered new freedom and social improvements also experienced a significant level of frustration. As structures of opportunity improve, competition becomes fiercer, and the feeling of frustration equally grows exponentially. Beneath these explorations of African identities and subjectivities, Sissako’s narratives have anticipated, with a heightened premonition, nightmares perpetrated by dark souls in the name of building a global caliphate, and highlighting the contradiction of a culture that raises expectations of freedom and unlimited happiness without offering to all the capacity to fulfill them. Here, Sissako conflates the notions of reality and simulacra into one, foregrounding the knowledge that a circus without bread leads to terror and violence, and a political system where power is impersonal and diffuse cannot contain the violent opposition. The question of identity and subjectivities, however, are not merely abstract once one begin to understand that humans are equally liable to experience amnesia emphasized by the Heideggerian’s concept of “forgetting of being,” or the “abandonment of being(s).” Here, Heidegger takes to task lived experiences that are failing to question their presuppositions and only surrender to the convergences of routines, intuition, seduction, and suggestion of manipulative authority figures and therefore fail to achieve an authentic existence. Terrorism, in Sissako’s films, can be seen as this attempt to get to a transcendent place when the conditions of knowledge and subjectivities are not questioned, and the religious im-

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pulse becomes exploited by structures with fascistic overtones because they demand obedience and blind followership instead of critical thinking. As such, an accomplished act of transcendence cannot be achieved at the expense of the other and a religion that does not recognize forms of alterity and therefore amputated from its universalistic aspect is not a religion but a cult. As with Heidegger, these notions of forgetfulness or abandonment function with concrete, practical outcomes and that means the making of a fertile ground for sowing the seed of extremist ideologies on contemporary societies. These seeds nurture a form of typical nihilism and apocalyptic passion and its subsequent horrors such as the macabre carnival imposed on the globe by millenarian and apocalyptic groups such as AlQaeda and its affiliates or the Islamic States in the Levant also known as Daesh. The figure of the terrorist becomes emblematic of a modern viral humanity which has lost his intelligence and individuality into a backward theological utilitarian and predatory rationalization and revenge fantasies, a by-product of seductive neoliberal rationalities which have broadcast upward mobility, freedom, and happiness to all but fail to deliver. On this topic, the Comaroffs write about the contradiction of neoliberal capitalism that “produces desire and expectations on a global scale yet to decrease the certainty of work or the security of persons; to magnify class differences but to undercut class consciousness” (2000, 298). In aggregate, it shows a subjectivity that does not know doubt, has a morbid need for order and blind obedience, and actions that are engaged as a way to compensate for the grueling work of self-knowledge and empathy. In response to these processes, art, and in this particular case, independent cinema, is developing aesthetic strategies and experiences with a quintessential task to restore the proper historical contexts to ignite a much-needed process of disentangling, that will assign appropriate meanings to these essential concepts of identity and subjectivities. These new cultural resources allow human beings to find resources for proper self-revelation and reconciliation. Within this context, Sissako’s cinema reflects the importance of an independent cinema relying on international film circuits to make inroads into a global media regime dominated by Hollywood blockbusters and global communication rituals running on an overload of stimuli and an all-out assault on the senses. Sissako’s cinema turns into a form of slow cinema as an antidote to stimuli overload and intellectual incontinence that prevents new thinking, new ways of being and new possibilities. This cinema, furthermore, helps to break barriers of alienation and capitalistic seduction. Sissako’s complexity reflects a continent which for too long has been simplified, particularly, for Western political and economic expediencies, presenting images of Africa as a place that is inert and lacking in true depth. Sissako’s body of work attempts to provide a genealogy of a new

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visual culture on a continent to explain recent political upheavals to complex processes of sense and non-sense making, embedded in multiple temporalities, trajectories, and rationalities entangled in local and global forces that cannot be described either in linear terms nor repetitive ones. His movies have a pyramidal fractal structure with random bits that intersects in very creative ways to open up broad patterns of meanings embedded to give a long and overdue nuanced description of the contemporary ontological status of postcolonial African subjectivities and the complexities of the quotidian realities of the African postcolony. Sissako’s latest film, Timbuktu (2014) withstood global scrutiny while it was programmed in all major film festivals earning many awards, notably seven Caesars at the French Motion Pictures Academy. In addition, Timbuktu is among a few African films to receive a global distribution deal. Today, in this world regime of media practices, this accumulation of audiovisual capital opens up a possibility to evaluate African imaginative practices at a historical juncture where the twenty-first century is struggling to get underway, weighted down by the trashes of the twentieth century on the African continent, particularly, the leftover of the cold war ideologies and the homogenizing creativity-killing forces of neoliberal global capitalism, now vigorously contested by apocalyptic Jihadists and partisans of the global caliphate rising from the ashes of the weakening of leftists’ ideologies, and third world ideologies such as Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism to stage a macabre global carnival of death. Sissako’s artistic practice exerts a tremendous influence beyond cinema to comprise a humanistic approach that is mapped into an interdisciplinary methodology with tentacles deep into political science, socioeconomic policies, culture, religiosity, bodies, gender, legal studies, ethics, and globalization with immediate material implications. And concrete proposals such as tackling global inequality and democratic reform, which also comes packaged with controversies, polemics, and many heated misunderstandings. The goal is to argue that art, such as Sissako’s body of work, brings a much-needed legitimacy to African imaginative practices for too long captive of the Western iconography of the continent that Manthia Diawara defines as “primitivist images of their tradition that are comforting to the West” (2010, 127). This form of “primitivism” is the idea that Africa has trouble entering into modernity, but the reality is that the continent’s political and sociological landscapes cannot be reduced to media practices. Sissako’s body of work brings up a regime of visibility and selfrepresentation that can serve as a foundation on which to examine the subversion against others regimes of visibility being produced about Africa in the colonial and neocolonial archives such as Hollywood movies, magazines such as National Geographic, popular science accounts, institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And the partisans of the self-declared global caliphate, cultural

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processes that conflate colonial construction and commodification of African identity with backwardness, paganism, and passivity. Sissako’s films go on to demonstrate that time is not only an objective fact but also a socio-cultural construction. So, these regimes of multiplicity of time are an important tool to historicize official and counter-narratives about Africa and how, in the opposite direction, time gets transformed into the creation of values and forms of legitimacy by artists such as Abderrahmane Sissako. In effect, Sissako’s cinema articulates a new cultural genealogy into a subjective resource that tackles quintessential ontological questions in a so-called globalized post-historical, secular and post-modern world. As with this cinema, imaginative practices turn out to be objective resources, that comprise material implications for African lives because they serve to mobilize for democracy and emancipatory egalitarian politics against legacies of segregation and discriminatory practices within global creative cultures, to emphasize indigenous grassroots bottom-up creative decisions. By clearing that high cultural bar, this cultural achievement is attributable to Sissako’s added level of cinematic ability, breaking boundaries to establish new spaces and agency to bring an aesthetic of marginality and alternative modes of cinematic practices into the mainstream. Sissako's cultural achievement is neither exotic alterity nor geopolitical abstraction but communicates ordinary Africans’ ontological practices, refracted through a statement of beliefs, appropriate behaviors, civilized faith, and moral actions. The crux of these narratives is tackling the interactions between modern African subjectivities and individualism, and the tension between tradition and modernity in the age of global neoliberal rationalities. In this age, media, technological, cultural and financial flows move in all directions encouraging ordinary people to imagine dreams they could not experience before or to act out revenge fantasies on scales that are unprecedented. Sissako’s body of work foregrounds questions of energy, means, and finalities, but also the central issue of affects between this transition to modernity and the role that ontological security plays in the contemporary world, and whether or not the competition between the model of Western neoliberal democracy or the caliphate are the proper vessels to answer these ontological security questions. We learn early in his films that matters of security are necessary to mobilize democratic resources. Most illuminating, these motion pictures speak for ordinary African experiences with globalization. And while they are anchored in African realities, more broadly, Sissako’s allegorical realities and smooth cinematic surfaces address universal themes put into a filmic language such as the role of language, subjectivity, emotion, and the sacred in a globalized postmodern world. Through his unique film composition and carefully arranged shots, Sissako’s imagery vibrates the quintessential place

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of the human in a world dominated by neoliberal rationalities and seeks to reconcile human beings’ inner selves with the present. Today, Sissako’s narratives react against anxieties which for some harbor global fantasies revenge in the name of Jihad, however, unknowingly protesting against themselves and their Western privilege heritage. Sissako’s work addresses the multiplication of these revenge fantasies and frames attention to the unevenness of globalization, the rise of inequality, the impact of identities, and terrorism as one of the outcomes to reflect on these processes and wrestles with the notion of politics and the pathetic. In these films, consequently, the filmmaker seeks to find the right balance between identity and resources and how cinema is not only subjective resources but imaginative practices that hold objective realities which are to connect history with ordinary people’s life experience and mentalities. But even as public space cannot be reduced to media, the formation of new public spaces, in Africa, constitute new sites of legitimacy processes through performance or intellectual and artistic contribution mapped onto ordinary citizen’s counter-hegemonic activities. And in a globalized world that Zygmunt Bauman (2000) defines as “liquid,” the strategy of the strainer in a liquid society does not work because the needs for order and stability have to be matched with emerging rationalities, even those challenging hegemonic neoliberal thoughts and practices. In global information societies, the powerful are the ones that can afford to travel and be disengaged from local obligations. Arjun Appadurai (1996, 135) writes that states have become spaces of flows that he calls “scapes,” and how the solidity of the nation-state is always undermined by these flows. The rise of “scapes” announces the end of collective progress because these new modes of the territorial organization create a social division between those who are mobile and those who cannot afford to move. As Bauman writes, “capital can travel fast and travel light, and its lightness and mobility have turned into the paramount source of uncertainty for all the rest. This has become the present-day basis of domination and the principal factor of social divisions” (2000, 121). These social divisions are compounded by deregularization and privatization to the point that individuals are left to determine what they consider to be the proper pursuit of happiness and Bauman writes that society is no longer the site of salvation because social safety nets and the welfare system are also disappearing (2000, 30). Within these flows, liquid modernity is an ideology that values security and predictability, a process of secularization at the heart of the modernist project that values speed over territoriality and choice over stability. Today, the choice is predicated on consumer practices rather than virtues inherited by tradition or other institutional work, producing alienated forms of subjectivities that fail to grasp the contradiction that the performative identities generated by these processes are not based on

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ontological security, but thrive on insecurity in the name of choice and freedom. Sissako’s films are “futurist past” where temporalities are always jumbled to argue that time is the malady but also the remedy, and more specifically, there are aspects of initiation and therapeutics within these narratives. Within this defiance of chronological narratives, the ability to read the subtexts is the most rewarding experience engaging Sissako’s work. These symbolic processes are putting into focus in a continent coming of age predicated on the notion of Africa rising, including, the reinvention of progressive, transformative practices to change their limited circumstances. Sissako’s cinema places African imaginative practices into a logic of contribution peppered with bootstrap determination and pride, the purpose of which purpose is to bring attention to the continuity between fiction and life, and how the African filmmaker serves as a social liaison with the community, producing narratives that intersect with its historical and social contexts. In aggregate, how this corpus of films wrestles with the practical and theoretical knowledge to inspire strategies to interrogate and mediate African future. Filmmaking grows into an imagined space of resistance and critical engagement with the goal to nurture a democratic community. This logic of contribution is the antithesis of the Jihadists’ use of media to stage global scenes of terror, stereotypical criminality, defensiveness, and revenge fantasies that are ultimately counterproductive. Sissako demonstrates that the African filmmaker has the resource and the capability to present a different idea of the continent, producing new forms of interpretation and renewal of African culture within a social, cultural, economic, and religious context which is constantly evolving. Accordingly, Africa rising looks up to the power to reclaim self-representation and imaginative practices to emphasize the notion that the odds facing the African continent are not insurmountable. Rather, Africa, as a continent, is the last frontier for development and the future of humanity and the necessity to recapture the energy of the African independence which for some has now dwindled into apocalyptic homicidal rage foreclosing questions of lives, creativity, and the future. Over the course of an analysis of Sissako’s body of films, the idea of recovering African agency, ideals, and rationalities with a radical critique of neoliberal rationalities and global anti-black politics that continue to colonize desire and creativity will be prominently emphasized. African imaginative practices aim to re-enchant progressive ideals and politics with the knowledge that Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, and leftist ideologies are now being recuperated by reactionary forces such as Islamic Jihad and market fundamentalist forces coupled with far right extremist frightened tribalists in places such as Europe. Sissako’s work exemplifies the subaltern taking over their cultural treasure and using that alternative system of thought to develop alternative utopia outside of neoliberal rationalities

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and a notion of deregulated free market utopia where history has no meaning and consumerism is paramount, and religion is used to process legitimate social tension. These methods, for ordinary Africans, call for a new clarification regarding their existence. Thus, Sissako’s work transcends the binary north-south structure on his quest to find an authentic self-identity using consciousness as a weapon of cultural liberation. From here, this cinema is symptomatic of imaginative practices that demonstrate that progress in civilization begins by overcoming practices that appear to be fatalistic and irreversible to contemplate the production of new ways of being and utopia. Sissako’s cinema is mediated by a logic of contribution that enshrines fictions as an important tool for cultural liberation expressed through a constant negotiation between social experiences and faculties of innovation. So, this work will analyze this interaction within Manthia Diawara’s notion of African popular cinema as the creation of the future of film language in Africa and the making of a new African popular culture (2010, 145). African popular cinema represents the future of the cinematic experience on the continent, first, because it expresses a vital shift from the artist to the artisan. Indeed, the filmmakers that Diawara has selected in African Films: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics share in common a “primary concern to develop their cinematic language, creating a voice definitely not there to fulfill Western expectations, projections and stereotypes.” (2010, 015). In African Film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics (2010), Manthia Diawara defines the new African cinema wave in three trajectories, The Arte Wave, The Guild of the African Filmmakers, The Independent Spirit and the new pursuit of Pan-African cinema and the New Popular African Cinema. Diawara argues that Abderrahmane Sissako’s Life on Earth (1998) defines this Arte Wave for the ways in which Sissako crafted an original thought-provoking film that resulted in a new poetic language in African cinema (100). He writes that the Arte Wave shifts from African neo-realist tradition to emphasize the symbolic and psychoanalytic interpretation of the relations within shots and between shots (110). Diawara’s observations on Sissako’s work is very perceptive. Watching Life on Earth as an homage to Aime Cesaire’s Cahier D’un Retour Au Pays Natal (1956) and then Bamako (2006), I was always struck how Sissako uses cinematic forms and poetry to continually challenge the audience’s point of view. I always imagine Cesaire’s poem to be like a volcanic eruption, but Sissako turns that poem into an intimate experience and a profound reflection on the nature of visual images, experience, self-perception, and self-knowledge, and how these processes are very constitutive of competent citizenship. In Bamako, he does the same by filming the International Monetary Fund (IMF) being put on trial in a courtyard while at the same time ordinary life goes on and the point of view keeps shifting. The movie then culminates with a cowboy fantasy where Sissako makes the point

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that there is no capitalism without racism and western movie without racism as well. In this disruptive gesture, Sissako subverts what Sada Niang defines as the overwhelming popularity of B-movies on African urban popular culture as a colonial strategy of power and knowledge, and Sissako is on board claiming to be a fan of the Italian spaghetti Western, particularly, the Trinita movie series (2014, 47). One has to be reminded that capitalism celebrated in the West fueled the conquest of the West, which in turn led to the genocide of Native Americans, and the legacy of that genocidal capitalist politics is now in play in the African continent. Bamako, therefore, questions conventional notions of progress and the reconciliation of humankind with nature to become important topics of meditation. These movies culminate in the mapping of a cultural context where artifacts can be seen on their terms. Through Cesaire, consequently, Sissako foregrounds the knowledge that filmmaking gives a voice to those who are not being heard because there are social forms that are not being seen. This is a testimony of Sissako’s imaginative practice and creative cartography structuring African forms and subjectivities that adequately reproduces its spatio-temporal consciousness, blazing a creative new path between African indigenous symbolic shapes and the calls of modernity. Now, Sissako’s cinema functions as a cultural expertise that helps to mediate social change on the continent with cameras that offer critiques but also visions of imagination and infinite possibilities for a young continent. This form of creativity, of course, challenges the notion of Africa as a “permanent elsewhere” or heterotopia as Michel Foucault puts it with the purpose to expose a philosophy that Souleymane Bachir Diagne calls “Ubuntu ethos” which modus operandi is the motto that “a person is a person through other persons.” In Ubuntu’s speak, interconnectedness and shared destiny make cooperation paramount. A person is a person through other persons is a conception of being-togetherness based on practices of collaboration, a universal strict ethical standard taking into account mutual human vulnerability, generosity, and creativity, including situations where human actions are directed toward the benefit of all and vice versa. In this sense, there are some universal applications to the Ubuntu ethic in the sense that freedom and prosperity for all is a notion that is equally shared which is closed to the neoliberal ethos of prosperity, and peace, cooperation, and competition, a powerful framework for community building. And so, “Ubuntu” is how to organize communal relations that foreground faith in the notion of society. The concept of the “Ubuntu” is necessary to combat predominant neoliberal ideologies which divide the world between winners and losers. Ubuntu puts an emphasis on the logic of contribution that keeps the future open because this concept has within itself the capacity for perpetual renewal and selfcritique.

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This ideal of renewal and self-critique, in Sissako’s body of films, operates within a logic of contribution and demonstrates a capacity for intervention in a world in tension with terror where notions of legitimacy are distorted, frequent infringements on private and public life resulting in a chilling effect on the construction of alternative discourses. This is a logic of contribution confronting slickly produced propaganda against Islamic Jihadists such as the MUJAO, Al Morabitun, Ansar Dine, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI), Boko Haram, Islamic State (ISIS) or Daesh. It is important to note that the name Islamic State itself is to give the impression that if you fight Isis, you are indeed fighting against Islam which is an amalgam that needs to be resisted. The logic of contribution intersects with a constant debate on the role of imaginative practices and anti-modern forms of rationalities steeped into medieval practices, and so, analyzing rupture and continuity within modernity practices in Africa and how small histories negotiate its spaces into larger historical forces. Islamist Jihad is filling the vacuum left by waning PanArabism and the weakening of leftist ideologies using media as a site to perform revenge fantasies and generational revenge that are attractive to a Western youth grappling with disempowerment and hopelessness. These narratives explain how Daesh turns out to become the largest global international consortium and crime syndicate. It follows that Sissako’s Timbuktu (2014) spells out the difference between the logic of contribution and logic of performance where revenge fantasies are enacted in reality to appeal to a misguided and impressionable youth. Furthermore, the logic of participation creates a space to consider what is modern and what is not, what is political and what is not, and the role that religion and culture play in these processes since religion, in Africa, participated from the beginning to the institutionalization and bureaucratization of the nation-state in Africa, and so how the crisis of the nation-state in the continent also reflects religious crisis. It begins with the knowledge that religious forces in the nation-state are not necessarily anti-democratic but much more how Islamic crisis on the continent is symptomatic of the nation-state struggles, and these struggles call for new imaginative practices to tackle processes that appear to be fatalistic and irreversible. These efforts focus on the notion of constantly reinventing of the concept of community in African societies. From now on, Sissako’s films add values for the ways they grapple and synthesize issues that are larger than his films, and the ways he unpacks dysfunctions in African societies with care, while tapping into a zeitgeist of ordinary people understanding the necessity of creativity and reinvention in a world that is getting smaller but where issues are getting better. The crux of the problem is undoubtedly not the need for more information, but the production of more meaning and a new imaginary where all political power has agreed on neoliberal consensus and are now reduced to managing global inequality as Sissako decries in Bamako

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(2006). In Bamako, Sissako argues that mass poverty on the continent is a product of colonial legacies and contemporary economic policies derived from that system which further the de-structuration of African societies, creating a vacuum that is exploited by reactionary forces. Thus, Sissako’s cinema calls for a collective work, a reinvention to midwife progressive new utopia, new ways of seeing and news ways of being. Sissako’s narrative strategies are designed to cultivate interaction and dispersal of responsibilities with its public, with the understanding that fiction is a living organism that benefits from the input of the community. As in Bamako, where they serve as the guardian of indigenous knowledge and possibility of counter-orientalism or second decolonization where old binaries based on race, religion, class, gender, and sex are reified. It’s hard, accordingly, to overstate the importance of Abderrahmane Sissako in African cinema. The interest of studying Sissako’s films is primarily the originality and the importance in the ways he maps out and reflects on African identity and the place of the African continent within globalization way before these issues got hijacked by nationalist extremists in the West and Islamic fundamentalists and the neurosis of victimization in Africa. These processes evoke what happens when intellectual laziness, dogmatic self-righteousness, and lack of empathy drive ideology and politics. In defiance of this saturated and polarized global discourse on terror, driven by homicidal, apocalyptic, and sacrificial Islamist Jihadists staging shock and awe acts of brutality to distribute a culture of fear and submission worldwide, Sissako has managed to break through these Manichean dynamics with the compelling Timbuktu. The movie brings out marginal voices coming out of the African continent providing different pictures that emphasize African cultural diversity and brings up the contradiction against dominant discourses and representation about the continent. Indeed, as Fetih Benslama writes in L’ideal et la Cruaute (2015), that the profile of the terrorist is an individual in a state of juvenile crisis that is regularly expressed through violent identity perturbation. That ideal can be fulfilled through the seduction of evil where the terrorist is conditioned to believe himself as the chosen one with the duty to clean society and relieve the infidels from the misery of their making. As such, his suicide is transformed as a form of self-sacrifice and a transcendental act that opens to the Jihadist, the gates of heaven. In this sense, it is not surprising that there are takers for this kind of well-paid martyrdom and why close to ninety nationalities are traveling to Iraq and Syria to swell the rank of Daesh, turning it into the biggest criminal international consortium ever created. From here, the rhetorical technology of Jihad is a liturgy where mass-killing and suicide are sacralized and the dehumanization of the other is normalized. In this case, Jihad rhetorical practices are the legitimation of an Islamist administrative state-sanctioned cult of savagery and authoritarianism where the sacralization of revenge fanta-

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sies is instrumentalized through the Koran but is, in fact, a kind of instrumental rationality where everything is permitted, and that explains how Daesh turns into a playground for psychopaths. The case is made that fundamentalism is religion without knowledge close to Arendt’s notion of “banality of evil.” Because the Fundamentalist's administrative bureaucracy is turning ordinary people into brainless automatons, while creating a culture of paranoia with the knowledge that terror is always the fear of the next attack, demonstrating that fear is always a quintessential political question. In a perverse way, a person who is willing to die for his beliefs, however misguided they are, are still perceived and can manage to pose as a hero because there is some undercurrent of masculinity and bravery that many find appealing. The danger is the belief that the terrorist is a “crazy” person without understanding the ruthlessness and mastery of modern propaganda techniques demonstrated by the upper echelon at Daesh. There is a form of anti-modern rationality that underpins this savagery, and it is produced by the ISIS’s manifesto “The Management of Savagery/Chaos,” written by Abu Bakr Naji foregrounding ISIS’s sophisticated marketing strategy, laying the groundwork for its advocacy model where young Muslims are targeted and objectified in the name of Islam, exploiting the sacrificial dimension of Muslim liturgy. These dynamics and expectations are produced through mantras such as: “Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy, and idealism, and their readiness for self-sacrifice, while fools preach ‘moderation’ (wasatiyyah), security and avoidance of risk.” “Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralized power by pushing it to abandon the psychological media war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.” Ditto for France, the United Kingdom, and other Western allies. Hit soft targets. “Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the Crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.” 1

These kinds of appeals are designed to turn the young Muslim into a Mujahidin, a holy warrior. Daesh's communication department produces seductive narratives around battles, adventure, technology, action, violence, responsibility toward the prophet, and sexual fantasies to counteract neoliberal consumerist propaganda where young people are devoid of responsibility, turned into passive and docile consumers rather than being empowered through virile faith and the magical transformation into holy warriors. Ideologues such as Abu Bakr Naji, are astute in their sophisticated understanding that current global neoliberal consumerist culture is lacking in mystique. And that war begins with symbolic victory and how anxieties about idealized forms of masculinity in global corpo-

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rate and consumerist culture is a goldmine for youths that often feel disoriented and disempowered in a culture where the rise of the far-right means the culmination of rejection. In Timbuktu, Sissako subtly shows the complexities within that propaganda and how the Jihadists are still struggling with their motivations and internal conflicts and how that binary between good and evil is quite complicated. Notwithstanding, Sissako accurately depicts how there is a calculated intention from the terrorists to hit soft targets with an understanding of the currency of popular culture and its symbolic values, and the place that art plays in civilization, and how the implementation of a caliphate also occurs in the symbolic arena, and the erasure of the infidel’s culture. The media also become a site of struggle over the manipulation of media narratives and agenda setting. The management of savagery equally demonstrates adrift Western ethnic youths living under emasculated parents and how these symbolic orphans, agonized under pressing drives to prove their masculinity, and how the upper echelon of the terror industry, such as Daesh, are sophisticated enough to manipulate and direct these struggles of social development into human missiles. Over the course of Sissako’s corpus of films, there are demonstrations that the denial of African cultural diversity is by definition also a form of fundamentalism foregrounding the important debate about the place of history in culture. The location of history into culture for Sissako is the power of the movie to testify, supported by the Brechtian’s idea that when events are recorded and seen, they cannot be denied. Cinema, then, functions as a device that prevents the erasure of memory or willful ignorance, and Sissako is on record claiming that one of the impetus of making Timbuktu was to testify on behalf of the stoning of women during the invasion of Jihadists in northern Mali, the country of his father. The stoning of women, more than a barbaric act, signals an anthropological rupture between contemporary attitudes and social practices, and religion, insofar as of the interpretation of religious scriptures by the Jihadists, is failing to update them for modern times. Also, stoning emphasizes the naked relationship between human libido and religious libido, and the desire for power and notions of ideal community. It is the idea that this desire for the caliphate is also a mundane exercise of male virility and control over women’s sexuality. Sissako efficiently displays that sexual politics in Timbuktu (2014) to demonstrate that sexuality is only a metaphor for a will to power that consistently straddles between desire and boredom, and is only concerned about its own reproduction and continuance, without regard for individuals and complex situations created by everyday life. It is also an irony here that people who claim to love God so much can be so cruel toward their fellow human beings. What kind of divinity can be so hateful to condone stoning women just for singing? As such, writer Kamel Daoud started a

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polemic with his denunciation of Arab-Muslim culture as being pathological toward women, a culture where the body of a woman belongs to the community but not to herself, and the sexual misery of Arab-Muslim men. Additionally, writer Tahar Ben Jelloun in Islam Explained (2002) communicates the return of the repressed in Arabic culture and how the ghost that haunts Arabic culture is sexual repression, which has a direct link to political repression. Sissako’s Timbuktu anticipates these elements of oppression with the character of Saitama who is married to Kidane and have one daughter, Toya, but has to consistently stand up to rebel leader AbdelKrim, who is always stalking Saitama when Kidane is not home. These repeated stalkings led Saitama to commit suicide by cops with her husband Kidane so that she can avoid the grim fate of losing her husband and turned into a captive of AbdelKrim. Accusations of rape, molestation, and sexual harassments have become news with Arab refugees in Europe. European women have accused Arab-Muslim men of violating them, be it in Germany, Sweden, or Finland. Again, this attitude does not only apply to Muslims as Christian fundamentalists seek to control women’s bodies through restrictions on abortions, sex education, birth control, and repression against same-sex relationships, and marriages. As with that stoning, Sissako aims to emphasize how sexual repression, conformity, and violence go hand in hand. The stoning demonstrates localities as structures of feeling and affects, and how imagination practices include reflection on material and social structures to tackle anti-modern forms of rationality steeped in medieval practices. Here, the terrorists have the look of the colonizer who objectifies girls and women as the object of desire to be conquered and used as bargain chips. It is reminiscent of slavery and the fool’s gold, how the slaves were exchanged for “pacotille” shining objects that were of little values but then imbued with talismanic power. This slave-driver’s mentality is evident in the mindset of terrorists, who pretend to be the quintessential men of God, in the ways they treat the African bodies as tools to obtain AK-47s, pickup trucks, and communication technologies for propaganda purposes, and to show that being close to God has huge advantages, particularly, in what Achille Mbembe calls “Necropolitics” where power is reduced to decide who shall live and who shall die (2003, 11–40). In this case, terrorists are not savage but barbarians. The savage lives outside of civilization while the barbarian is a product of it. Currently, this symbolic practice works to lay to rest symbolic colonial legacies. These legacies were shaped by centuries of a combination of capitalism, the formation of the Western modern-states, extractive imperialism and the aspect within where Africa and Africans were depicted in such a way to justify white supremacy and the Western “civilizing mission of the continent. Indeed, colonial discourses were predicated of the fetishization of blackness with a fundamental strategy of separation and

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systematization, and how the insidious persistence of these colonial paradigms still need to be challenged because the parallel between colonization and Western imposition of its manufactured images on the continent had lasting effects. Achille Mbembe argues that lasting effects can be viewed in African local governments that are nothing more than satrapies. Indeed, when the sun of the independence swept the African continent in the 1960s, the Grand Kalle from the mythical band, African Jazz, immortalized that moment with the song “Independence Cha Cha,” which became the anthem of a free Africa. That optimism was short-lived, and soon darkness replaced the sun of freedom. This is where filmmakers, such as Abderrahmane Sissako, become the custodians of an immense archive of human rights documentation for a continent still struggling with colonial legacies. Much has been written about how European’s imperialistic enterprise has de-structured former colonies and given rise to authoritarian regimes, which betray an incapacity to bury the cadaver of colonization properly. The path is for ordinary Africans to overcome dehumanization practices created by colonialism and its legacies on the African continent which, at regular intervals, have resulted in a feeling of humiliation that has made the bed of violent Jihadist movements. These movements are embedded in an ideology of the return to a pristine precolonial past, a logic of authenticity that in itself displays a form of chauvinism that can be characterized as a form of idolatry. This kind of savage and misguided response, however, evokes the necessity to link terror and territory and how the waning of Pan-Arabism and leftist ideology are creating a vacuum for the caliphate which is against the enlightenment and individual sovereignty, including artistic independence. In Timbuktu and Bamako, Sissako evokes how social realities are also embedded and influenced by symbolic practices, in this case, the Western, and how Jihadists and banksters are running the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and are themselves characters out of the Western central casting. Also, how real social events taking place in Africa are informed by the perpetrators’ cinephilia, even if, as in the case of the Jihadists, they go a long way to deny it. Sissako is so smart to highlight how small histories are themselves imbricated in the larger forces of history. And so, how the contemporary global ideological competition between partisans of the caliphate and Western secularist, and neoliberal play in the realm of the symbolic and how both ideologies comprise their separate fundamentalist views about the continent. There is also an irony that Sissako seeks to communicate in Timbuktu which is the knowledge that most Islamic Jihad is a Western creation driven by the legacies of Western imperialism, the invasion of Iraq, and the lynching of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, where the state subsequently collapsed, a vacuum exploited by Jihadists to create their caliphate. While they claim

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to be soldiers of God, Timbuktu demonstrates that most of these Jihadists nurture more in common with terrorist groups such as the Baader-Meinhoff (Germany), Red Brigades (Italy), Action Directe in France, and the IRA in the United Kingdom. Consequently, it is necessary for ordinary Africans to recapture the means of self-representation for progressive-emancipatory politics. This practice of self-representation must take place outside of the illusory frame of the so-called clash of civilization. This is a leftover relic of cold war mentality and us versus them mentality that is very reductive and limited to explain the plight of educated non-Westerners confronting the world, where their frustrated sense of hope and entitlement is coming to a head, with the anxiety of being made superfluous in a world they come to believe does not need them. Indeed, social disqualification, frustration, identity troubles, hypersensitivity, and mental problems can be exploited by terrorist to recruit confused young men. These processes are not the product of the clash of civilization. Civilization does not clash because there are invariants in a civilization that emphasize peace and self-realization and the tools to become a fully-fledged human being and not simply through a monetary thing. NOTE 1. In 2004, a PDF of a book entitled Management of Savagery, published under the pseudonym Abu Bakr Naji, was posted online and circulated among Sunni Jihadist circles. In 2006, the book was translated into English by William McCants, now the director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. The document is also available on Wikipedia.

II

Aesthetic and Film Analysis

THREE Sissako’s Cinema Communal Aesthetic Practices

Abderrahmane Sissako’s life straddles the country of Mauritania and Mali which were both part of the ancient Malian Empire. He was born in the small town of Kiffa, Mauritania, in 1961. He then spent his childhood in Mali. In 1983, he earned a scholarship to study cinema in Russia at the famous VGIK, the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. Many African filmmakers before him, including Ousmane Sembene and Souleymane Cisse, followed the same route beforehand. At the VGIK, Sissako learned the craft of cinematic montage from the legacy of masters, such as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov. From Moscow, he finished his first two short films: Le Jeu/The Game (1988) about a boy who is role-playing soldier while his father, a real soldier is captured by the enemies fighting and is killed. Then, Octobre/ October (1991), a movie about an African’s love affair with Russian women, highlighted original stories that have yet to be presented in mainstream media. These two shorts constituted powerful cinematic open statements to the point that October was introduced at the 1993 session of “Un Certain Regard” Cannes Film Festival de Cannes. Then followed a string of short films on the fables of French storyteller, La Fontaine, such as “Le Chameau et Les bâtons flottants” in 1995. Then another string of short film series Africa Dreamings, “Sabriya—le Carré de l’échiquier,” in which two men evolve in a café, lost in a sand universe, and Rostov-Luanda (1998). Rostov-Luanda is about Sissako’s quest to reconnect with an Angolan friend and former schoolmate in Russia named Alfonso Baribanga. First and foremost, a great filmmaker is recognizable through the cultivation of a unique craft, poetics style, and filmic signature that sets him 69

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apart from his colleagues. Sissako is so into his filmic signature that he repeatedly claims in interviews to not be particularly a cinephile and argues that he learned cinema watching the Trinita movie series. When pushed, he claims some influences regarding Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Visconti, Fassbinder, Bergman, and Cassavetes (Appiah, 2003, 38). Sissako has developed a unique style in African cinema, a craft he learned in Russia, a country that has practically invented cinematic montage with the work of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov. Admittedly, Sissako’s body of films display a sophisticated high visual literacy that gives a unique beauty to the landscape, human bodies, and faces. It is a highly stylized but not idealized cinema and in films such as Bamako (2006), Sissako demonstrates that he can also do strip-down documentary cinema verité like Jean Rouch. In Bamako, he focuses on group psychology and small intimate stories and observational tableaux that reveal indigenous practices of sociality with a sense of immediacy and intimacy that give the impression that these activities are not even mediated. Indeed, these vignettes and set-pieces, incorporating disparate elements, such as, following a character rather than narrative continuity to emphasize a cinema driven by empathy and compassion. Taken together, Sissako’s films presents fractured narratives that reflect how ordinary life unfolds through apparent incoherent experiences where notions of chances and hazard are constantly questioned and left open-ended to keep the conversation going. Sissako’s cinema is a journey where the scenery is as important as the characters, and this sense of composition demonstrates an affinity for natural spaces and an ontology of connectivity. The notion of connectivity is of the foremost importance in Sissako’s work because of his demonstration that humans are made of social relationships and more significantly, a system of relationships that precedes his existence. Spaces in Sissako’s films, therefore, functions as an operating system. There is a geographic logic that is reflected through his character’s inner and outer lives. As with this topological approach, is the power to differentiate myths from facts with an emphasis on the collective social construction of values. This geographic logic also clears the distinction between confusion of spaces and the birth of a new world. It follows from Sissako’s corpus of films, a serious commitment to aesthetics and eager for a demanding audience to emancipate African cinema from a long tradition of social realist cinema, dominated early on by Ousmane Sembene, known as the father of African cinema. For Sissako, cinema is more than realism. Just recording quotidian spaces and lives does not make art, otherwise films could be done out of surveillance camera. Cinema is a mixture of realism which is an expression of reason, but also requires a dimension of the intuition and the spiritual to infuse a form of magic into the movie and transform this form of artistic expression into something that is more than meets the eye. Thus, Sissako’s storytelling practice shapes multiple focuses of references, fractured

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timelines and realities, and a poetic visual style to demarcate himself from the linearity and ideology of social realist African cinema. Indeed, for Sissako, filmmaking is an experience of initiation, and people who are not trained do not see what they should. In African culture, there are the forces of light but also the forces of darkness and those who can only see during the day or with the help of the light are missing half of the reality. That is what happens to the Jihadists, in Timbuktu, when they shoot up masks and African culture. This author understands that “the avowed rationale” for shooting the masks has to do with a particular reading of Islam, as against “idolatry.” To the Jihadists, masks represent allegiance to other divinities, not Allah. This knowledge should be kept in mind. The Jihadists, however, have no legitimacy to decide the sacred function of an artifact but the people who produced that artifact have the authority. And so, masks in African culture represent codifying structures and informational activity. By destroying masks, the terrorists demonstrate, not only their historical cluelessness, but also amputate themselves from all the knowledge codified in these structures. It means that the gods and the spirits of Africa no longer speak to them. Even though they destroy the masks, the genealogy and the social pacts built around this genealogy still stand. By shooting up the masks, consequently, the terrorists immediately place themselves outside of that society and history, and contribute to the idea that monotheistic deities, such as God and Allah, are by nature jealous Gods. Also, the notion that individual worshippers of these deities must live in their own closed off societies, prohibiting interreligious dialogue, and the concept of multicultural societies also adding to the impression that monotheistic societies have a tendency toward totalitarianism, while polytheistic societies tend to be more democratic. These destructions also exemplify the terrorist as a person who gets his information from contemporary media and the ideology of the “homme nouveau” which means the “new man.” Hence, the terrorist is a person who lends himself to contemporary media manipulation. On that account, filmmaking, for Sissako, aims to open up new dimensions to understanding African culture by reminding the viewers the constant tension between knowledge and the activity of seeing, and how the relation between what we know and what we see is always a process that is hardly settled. Sissako’s films express a distinctive formal maturity and intellectual coherence. His cinema inspires un-thought possibilities to contemplate African film studies as a set of epistemological ruptures that function with a unity of thought and action condensed around this notion of emerging rationalities. These processes are facilitated by the recomposition of the global media landscape that has allowed the subaltern and marginalized subjectivities to step up into a position of enunciation and legitimize their presence, and offer a landscape of imagination the audience can get into.

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This corpus of films is formed through an original poetic visual style, a multiplicity of meta-filmic narratives and a choreography which is at times cacophonic and where the demarcation between autobiography and fiction, fiction and documentary, is never clear. Sissako’s cinema, embedded in a unique, sensuous rhythm, deconstructs social realism that has dominated African cinema. This deconstruction of African neorealist film comes packaged for the creative ways Sissako keeps reaffirming his connection to the African heartland to show that if cinema is the product of the city, cinematic knowledge knows no borders. Hence, the village landscape is a space that Sissako compels himself to set his narratives, be it Sokolo, Nouadhibou, or in Oualata (Mauritania) standing for Timbuktu in Mali. This new “village” poetic knowledge informs Sissako’s visual choices and how his use of close-ups, long take and shot composition, and palette come packaged with psychological motivations and empathy to the point that Sissako was accused by critiques to go easy on the terrorists in Timbuktu. Sissako, more than capturing African bodies, shapes, and skin in their beauty that are enhanced by Sissako’s camera glow is an emphatic filmmaker. The stillness of his frame frees up spaces to admire the beauty of his characters and the landscape and how they complicate mental and physical representations that were predominant in African cinema before him. In Sissako’s cinema, stillness does not mean the absence of camera movement. It is a cinema that is all about nuance and more than subjectivity and empathy. His struggling characters are treated with sympathy and kindness rather than condescendence, and they demonstrate a complex conception of the self, a capacity for introspection, and a different but productive methodology to provide information that complicates the didactic practices that dominated the social realist era of African filmmaking and allows Sissako to tackle ethical and moral questions without being moralistic. Hence, stillness is an age-old tradition in African cinema. Idrissa Ouedraogo and even Souleymane Cisse also use stillness. Sissako’s deployment of stillness differs from theirs because of the ways that Sissako uses stillness to humanize spaces inscribing time into spaces as forms of psychological time that brings up into perspective the relationship between space and memory, and the contemporary. Sissako brings up a perspective and intensity to the frames that are formalized through a combination of montages and hyper-controlled colors and chromes that, in an aggregate, are self-conscious about his slow cinema and his ability to master unconventional temporal articulations in his narratives. This unconventional temporality is a meta-reflection on notion of community and shared time at a moment when Jonathan Crary writes that the accelerated tempo of apparent changes deletes any sense of an extended time frame that is shared collectively, and how billions of dollars are spent every year researching how to eliminate the useless time of reflection and contemplation. This is the form of contemporary progress—the relentless

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capture and control of time and experience (2014, 40–41, 88). Cinema becomes the tool that allows for processes of intersubjectivity from which emanate a spectator that begins to reflect on time and the creation of values as a communal practice. Sissako’s capacity for poetry and meditation captures multiple perspectives, foregrounding individual interpretations rather than unified institutional thinking. Hence, for Sissako, precise attention to details is how oneself interacts and opens himself to the world. In doing so, he engages the hidden mythical content hiding behind the material routines of the daily life to execute larger cultural diagnoses. Moreover, Sissako’s emphasis on moments of redemption and redemptive practices that have nothing to do with nostalgia but imagination, such as, the young boys playing soccer without a ball in Timbuktu, Aissa Maiga singing while crying at the end of Bamako and the memorable and singular scene of the griot, Zegue Bamba, in the same film. The richness of these scenes and its aesthetic power bring the power of art in revamping the banalization of human relationships through cinematic poetry, and in this case, the importance to consider the relationship between poetry, cinema, and literature with power, the legal culture, and its binding processes. And how art forms inform the legal processes in Bamako. This idea serves to decenter the knowing subject from the locus of rationalities, experiences, and choices to emphasize relationships, affects, and emotions. Appropriate behaviors and the politics of emotion are always policed under oppressive authorities to dictate how ordinary people must feel, and there is a proper enforcement between display of public and private emotions. As such, emotions, such as anger and indignation, are not considered proper emotions under these circumstances. Proper citizenship must be stoic even if ordinary people have no input into the system. The young soccer players, Aissa Maiga (Mele) and Zegue Bamba, introduce emotion and indignation into the public sphere to disrupt the state’s management of conflictualities, emphasizing masculine traits of individual responsibility over feminine values of acceptance, sensitivity, empathy, reciprocity, and care. These scenes, on the contrary, demonstrate how far cinema and these characters go for the inclusiveness of all and the power of care politics. The stillness allows the audience to absorb the images and the information contained in them. It also allows them the space to think about what they are watching. For instance, movies, such as Life on Earth and Heremakono is shot in a way that there seems to be nothing happening. Sissako, however, is a proponent of “community filmmaking.” Cinema is essentially about communal relationship. For somebody who claimed to have watched spaghetti Westerns as film school, the idea of community and cinema makes sense, since the Western is also a reflection of communal life that began in the American West at the time of the pioneers and manifest destiny. In cinema as a communal practice, this cinema is not

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about heroes and mythologizing influential people, but to change social hierarchies that foreground communal equality, and the protection of the innocent and the most vulnerable. In this sense, the spectator is seldom in a state of confusion as to whether he or she is watching a film or a slice of real life recorded on the camera. Often, Sissako’s narratives constantly shift in space, time, and points of view, and the fourth wall breaks repetitively, and where Sissako himself, or an actor standing in for him, plays the go between the audience and the internal jargons produced by his films. This intersubjective relationship is also a device for the heroes of Sissako’s films because they demonstrate how the hero goes from an exilic presence to become the spokesperson for his community. Thus, even in the internal dynamic of Sissako’s films, with the exception of Bamako, which is an ensemble cast, Sissako’s hero is a character with a foot inside and outside of the community. Sissako’s hero uses his experience and knowledge built in exile to hold the community together, knowing that the status quo is no longer an option. These production values serve to disrupt and challenge in-built disposition and routinized forms of cinematic reception and clichés about African cinema. To bring a complexity to direct perception, Sissako continuously shifts points of view, a device he consistently relied upon to critique notions of passive spectatorship embedded in the idea that the movie experience functions on the irrational—suspended disbelief. Sissako asks the viewer to rethink that idea of “suspended disbelief” for the ways in which he borrows from African traditional storytelling practices. That oral tradition, which is by nature, is interactional and where the transfer between the storyteller and his audience is constant because this form of art does not absorb the audience, but treats them as a coproducer. This is a way to create a continuity between cinema and real life. It has to do, moreover, with how Sissako films bodies, particularly, his close-ups where the spectator is put in a constant position of empathy which has led some critics to argue, for example, in Timbuktu, that Sissako was humanizing terrorists which is much more complex than that in reality. Next, in formulating this challenge, Sissako’s approach to cinema is to provide narratives and a poetic where the audience is being challenged to confront a priori knowledge. Sissako does so by bringing up narratives with multiple references for identifications to emphasize the cognitive basis of the emotional processes that motivate the spectator’s identification or distanciation from the characters. By calling on this constant psychological evaluation, Sissako’s films draw attention to ways in which pre-constituted imagery and projection play in a manner in which the audience relates to characters is not different from the ways we relate to others in real life. These processes bring attention to the notion of selfreflexivity and introspection in the reception operations. Sissako’s strategy is in line with Jameson who writes that narratives are socially symbol-

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ic acts that require processes of trans-coding to understand the structures of reality that traverse this seamless web of stories (1981, 40). This seamless web of stories in his first feature film, Life on Earth (1998) is summarized by Aime Cesaire’s quote that, “life is not a spectacle and a screaming man is not a dancing bear.” As in life and the movies, individual consciousness plays a role and maps out the relationship between individual subjectivities and the group. In this way, Sissako’s cinematic practice is both an intellectual and a visceral experience that consistently challenges how expectations, and the reception of Africa, are constantly created, recreated, and circulated worldwide to open up gaps regarding how realities of Africa are manufactured and contested. They draw attention to the necessity of introspection in the process of the acquisition of information. Sissako’s work tackles the uneven geography of globalization, established hierarchies, and marginalized subjectivities. His stated ambition is to open up spaces of imagination to unmask hegemonic discourse and frame creative ways to continuously reinvent an African identity within practices of everyday life that takes into account issues of gender, race, ethnicities, sex, religion, and social problems with an aesthetic and artistic sensibility. Getting these issues right is important for a continent which has acceded to the independence but is still struggling with nation-building, freedom, and democracy to show the important notion that to move forward, Africa has to be liberated from the past. These uneven geographies demonstrate the emergence of new forms of power in places where the production of territory and subjectivities are both complex and incomplete and offer possibilities for ordinary people to assert their presence. Sissako’s movies possess a coherence and continuity that add a rich contribution to the contemporary place of Africa in the world. These films hold the merit that he begins from the bottom-up of African societies, taking ordinary Africans from the local ghettos and reinscribes ordinary people into the continuous formation of the modern state in Africa, and challenges neoliberalism and racial politics that have so far informed the construction of the modern state in Africa. This is important in a place where an internal elite is still controlling the apparatuses of power in a continent that is scheduled to hit the one billion mark in 2050 and double by the end of the century. This issue is very urgent in a continent where colonial legacies have left in place an extractive economy that ought to be diversified. Likewise, Sissako’s films demonstrate how African filmmakers create objects and values that are part of a horizontal chain of meanings that foreground equality and the desire to build a democratic future. The role of symbolic practices is an important issue in development. As such, the African filmmaker is an artisan whose exhaustive readings of contemporary African lives is an important contribution to issues of development.

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Sissako has a unique style through personal poetic essays that tackle the urgent issues of identity, displacement, and the lasting legacy of colonialisms. Sissako is a humanist filmmaker that demonstrates that the world might be getting smaller, thanks to globalization and technologies, but the issues of ordinary people, especially Africans, are getting bigger. Thus, Sissako’s work is a helpful contribution to the meditation of the place of Africa in the postcolony, in globalization, in the world. And so, Sissako’s work complicates Achille Mbembe’s essay, “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,” where he engages with Braudel’s notion of temporal pluralities, a concept of time which was inspired by Henri Bergson and his theory of the subjectivity of time. Thus, the necessity to see time as a form a dialectic where the past and the present are constantly entangled. And so, it is about the articulation of time and the dialectic between the instant, the now, and the longue durée. Onward, Mbembe writes that “temporalities of long and very long duration, slowly evolving and less slowly evolving situations, rapid and virtually instantaneous deviations, the quickest being the easiest to detect” and “the exceptional character of World Time.” In Braudel’s thinking, world time has control over certain spaces, while others completely escape it. Mbembe relativizes Braudel’s thesis by maintaining that (1) temporalities overlap and interact with each other; they are not completely segregated. And (2) there is no place entirely separate from “world history,” but there are modalities, or categories in which it is manipulated to fit with local variables (2001, 22–23). Sissako, as a big fan of Western films, opens up spaces at the edge of the world. This cinematic framing comes packaged with the fundamental understanding that people do not need more information; they need more meanings. His movies are sets of explainable principles that challenge the notion of cosmopolitanism. Sissako’s filmography shows African characters struggling between seemingly incompatible cultures and the problematics of returning home, where reality is habitually distorted and the subjectivity a fragmented painting that is both changing and staying the same simultaneously, and where there is no such thing as a rupture in time but some continuity. Sissako’s movies pose the complicated relationship between self-image and cinematic images, and the central question of perspectives and how that notion of perspective in Sissako’s work is tied with having the right lenses and the right frame to read the world. Sissako’s world is a space where first and third world mingles and attention to details becomes central to hold a proper analysis and recognize the truth. For Sissako, knowledge is something to be sought, not something that comes to you, and this knowledge is revealed through social interactions between humans, and humans and nature. Alienation comes from not being able to connect with the other and the capacity to open up spaces to develop meaningful interactions. Space is central to Sissako’s

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work, and space is where all the polarization and the struggles in his films are articulated and negotiated. For Sissako’s characters finding ways out of alienation is to recreate notions of physical as well as emotional spaces, since knowledge is action and the capacity to shape oneself and the environment. Finding one’s place, for this reason, is an interaction between subjectivity and a territory, and finding a way, in the sense that life always finds a way. A discussion on Sissako’s aesthetic will not be complete without addressing the camera-eye and how this is a gaze that neither eats nor absorbs his audience, but they are expected to fill in the blanks in a certain aspect of the narrative. There is no reception in distraction because the apparatuses of perception are embedded in these interactions. Is this not the case for every act of spectatorship because of classical cinema, for instance, foregrounds the fourth wall that is breached in very few films? The cameraeye, however, signals to the idea of coproduction and how the spectator is also involved in the making of the movie that he is watching. The camera-eye is predicated on the notion that in African oral tradition, storytelling is a collaborative practice and nobody is bigger than the culture. In conventional auteurism, the film director controls all the aspects of the filmmaking practice and the movie is supposed to reflect his vision. In the camera-eye, however, the hors-champ or off-screen is as important as what it is shown on the screen. It is known that even in classical auteurism, off-screen space is central (Hitchcock, Welles), genres such as suspense and horror are all predicated on it. With Sissako, however, the hors-champs serves to display how complex processes of structuration work inside and outside of the screen, and how enjoyment of that cinema is the result of a complicated negotiating process between the audience and the films. Within this context, Sissako’s poetic and representational practices are embedded in his mastery over light, geometric lines, and a nature of space that is always open to meaning. As such, scholar Anjali Prabhu argues that Sissako’s materialization is into a collaborative, and the interactive project is his original signature. She writes that this cinema “requires of the spectator an interactivity and emotive and intellectual engagement that transports and transposes questions of Africa into his or her very own subjectivity (2014, 12). Consequently, how life seeps into the camera and onto the spectator in African cinema. Hence, in his movie Timbuktu (2014), some critics have accused Sissako of not showing everything that happened during the Jihadists occupation of northern Mali. That critique failed to consider ways in which Africans tell stories and how many oral narratives are designed as hypertext where everybody involved in the process thinks horizontally, and hierarchies are abolished. In this storytelling practice, there is no place for solipsism, and even though Sissako’s narratives show a sophisticated sense of refinement and control, they can also be seen as collaborative processes. As such, there is a certain level of homework and preparation

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that needs to come from the audience. These kinds of narratives put an emphasis on the context rather than facile opinions and taking sides. The goal is to turn the story into immersive participative practices and what is important about Sissako’s cinema is that it allows the audience to bring something of themselves into the experience, resulting in a creative and meaningful interaction between the film and the viewer, rather than a mere one-way assault on the senses. As such, cinema is a technology embedded in social, economic, and the production of the quotidian life.

FOUR Life on Earth (1998) Meditation on Belonging in a Globalized World

Sissako’s Life on Earth (1998) is a command of the Franco-German media conglomerate Arte. On the eve of the millennium, Arte passed a command to seven filmmakers from the four major continents to explore their own perception and experience about the new millennium. 1 Life on Earth is not, however, a peek into a form of hipster globalization. The film is a poetic meditation on the figure of the exiled. At first, the movie appears as a meditation on dispossession and the struggle to belong, and the effects of a nascent twenty-first century commencing in a context of “liquid global society.” In a liquid society, as Zygmunt Bauman writes, ties between ordinary people are not very strong. They are lonely and disoriented and their family ties are put under severe stress. In this regard, however, Sissako plants himself within the genealogy of anti-colonialist thinkers, paying homage to the towering figure of Aime Cesaire. Cesaire’s poetic productivity is an archive of history and memory. This memorial practice, however, is not about remembering but an active intellectual process where ones finds his own place in a genealogy based on transmission. Life on Earth is equally a meditation on the trace, the hidden images beneath the surface of a history of films and storytelling practices and a dissertation on practices of representation and the interactions between visibility and invisibility practices. The movie equally critiques contemporary addiction to speed and intensified consumption to emphasize a communal form of entertainment Toni Cade Bambara calls “authenticate.” To authenticate is to resist easy fantasies of escape from postmodern times, but find new creative activities to reoccupy time and space where nothing is lost. As such, the villag79

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ers of Sokolo, where Life on Earth takes place, can reconnect with the mother earth in ways that they do not need to compromise. This begins by decolonizing African images and its history of phantasmagoria and commodity fetishism which have produced a false relationship with memory, which is in fact a set of events and stories orchestrated by the colonizers and their subsequent satrapies, which in turn has resulted in a false sense of time and space in the continent. This colonial symbolic order evokes the knowledge that colonization and its legacies in Africa were also the product of symbolic conquests. This symbolic imposition has practical material realities and consequences. For a start, the ways this fake symbolic order seeps unconsciously in the mental patrimony of the continent, which created a big paradox in the sense that now African countries are independent and seek to build ideal societies of their own; they still have to contend with a symbolic order heavily contaminated by colonial legacies that French scholar, Michel Leiris, describes as Afrique Fantome or Phantom Africa, to describe a continent, where to develop an objective history, is a complex enterprise for the mixtures of temporality and the cacophony of voices coming out of that continent ranging from slavery to neoliberal capitalism. To combat this heightened sense of alienation and dislocation, Sissako invokes his own phantasmagoria in the name of Aime Cesaire and Cahier D’un Retour au Pays Natal or Notebook of a Return to My Native Land which is in fact the figure of the former slave coming back home and the figure of what Achille Mbembe calls “The Revenant,” which is the survivor of neoliberal capitalist genocidal practices and lived to testify. With this figure of the “revenant,” Sissako and Mbembe are calling for a reflection on spaces of transfiguration and possibilities of transformation. It is important, therefore, to note that Sissako emphasizes earth and not a notion of world, planet, or globalization. Globalization is the product of neoliberal capitalist processes while replacing life on earth is to recast human beings as one of the planet’s many inhabitants. This recognition places human beings within the realm of necessities rather than the superfluous created by capitalist neoliberal excessive consumption and extractive practices that are turning the earth unsustainable. The movie begins on the eve of the millennium in a shopping mall called Super Monoprix in France, where there are no rebate, meaning that the world is not about to end. The opening montage of Life on Earth in the mall is a montage of self-situation that seeks to bring into attention the power of capitalism and commodity fetishism, to interrogate the genealogy of predatory capitalism and intimate African lives. From the opening shots, the movie entails to tackle the dominant material structures that have divided the world into so-called winners and losers. The theme of commodity fetishism and extreme worldview is also perceptible at the beginning of Timbuktu where the film links Jihad to commodity fetishism and global consumption.

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To understand this capitalist genealogy entails the knowledge of the seduction of commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is tied to the history of capitalism and its genocidal practices which began with the history of slavery. The slave trade was predicated on the African chiefs receiving commodities in exchange for the slaves. Even, in contemporary Africa, the quest for commodities have given ways to predatory practices such as human sacrifices and satanic rituals, denounced in films such as Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes (2005). Scholars such as Achille Mbembe (2013) and Joseph Tonda have equally condemned the survival of these practices where the African elites continue to sacrifice ordinary Africans for Western commodities in order to gain a standard of living comparable to the affluent West. Hence, by opening the movie at a mall, Sissako engages the notion of consumption and excess, false abundance, and the seduction and manipulation of desire. A critique that can be seen at the beginning of Timbuktu shows the Jihadists engaging in business transactions to demonstrate how inserted they are in global circuits of consumption. Sissako, moreover, leaves the mall with a teddy bear, a nod that hunter-gatherer societies were less wasteful. Additionally, how the modern cosmopolitan African lives in a universe devoid of nature, a world of artificiality where the accumulation of fetishized commodities have replaced his contact with his true nature and the world around him. Life on Earth intends to be a powerful reflection on the colonization and commodification of images through corporate advertising, public relations, and propaganda, and the possibilities of the African filmmakers to decolonize these images. Scholars, such as Ben Singer, have noted the correlation between early film spectatorship and the rise of commodity consumption and the development of shopping malls that can be seen in movies such as D. W. Griffith’s Lonely Villa (1909), where a suburban family gone shopping has to race back home to confront thugs who have sequestered their relatives and are asking for a ransom. Moreover, Charlie Chaplin’s silent films were mostly set in turn-of-the-century cities with shopping malls, chaotic crowds, and mass transportation. Ben Singer calls this “hyper-stimulus,” how early cinema had to compete for attention within the irruption of the newly industrial society and elaborated mass entertainment and advertising industries (1995, 73). Life on Earth, moreover, was shot on the eve of the new millennium where many were predicting Y2K, where all the computers will crash, chaos and doomsday will prevail. The movie, however, signals from the first shot that Life on Earth is about a story that is far from finished. The movie becomes a reflection of the aesthetic expression, world events such as the end of twentieth century, Y2K, and capital organization of the masses in a state of distraction, with the scenes of Sokolo’s villagers sitting outside and listening to the radio and constantly adjusting their seats to get some shade from the moving sun in order to demonstrate the many ways marginalized Africans are still connected to global-

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ization, and how the radio continues to be an important medium of communication in a world gone digital. The flows of information coming through the radio also pose the crisis of indigenous storytelling practices and how to tell genuine stories in a world gone global. Scenes like these, moreover, play like small vignettes, short films within the film, Sissako plays with the power of cinema to understand different spaces and times and ways to resist neoliberal ideology that has not done any good for the continent. The main character, Dramane from France, visits his father’s village Sokolo. This is very important because while Aime Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land is the poem that inspired the movie, Aime Cesaire as a poet plays the role of the “Jinn,” in Arabian and Muslim mythology as they are spirits that can take both human and animal forms and can inspire ordinary people for good or bad. Return to My Native Land is the inspiration for the movie and the letter to the father demonstrates that if Cesaire was referring to the land as the motherland and the land of the ancestors, Dramane’s father is more than father, as we will later see in Bamako, he is also the guide, the Sheppard, the one who knows the way, the Oumma. Hence, in Muslim knowledge, the Oumma is not only the community of the prophet, it is also all the people who are related to a guide. 2 Life on Earth takes place on the eve of the twenty-first century and nothing seems to have changed in Sokolo. While the rest of the so-called advanced world worries about Y2K, the Millennium bug, natives in Sokolo go about their lives as usual. Communication technology breakdown reflects the film’s fragmented structure and in this rice farming village, the crops are threatened by insects and birds. This is juxtaposed with Western commodity fetishes worship, extractive imperialism and greed that prefigured Bamako (2006) for the ways ordinary Africans are exploited both by white hats and black hats, local and foreigners in power are the same because African leaders are just enforcing economic policies derived from the Washington consensus. The movie is punctuated by Aime Cesaire and the necessity for a second decolonization. This connection with Cesaire shows how this cinema takes from literature to add to its own poetics to reinvent the future with a new imaginary. Life on Earth links up meta filmic narratives as homages to the silent film era with set-pieces and observational tableaux. These cinematic forms shoot through all Sissako’s films driven by inner necessities and strategic contingent encounters. In so doing, these vignettes bring to the forth the notion of praxis versus functional activities. Functional activities are authorized activities ordinary people are subjected to for their own survival. Dramane’s praxis and encounters, however, always represent moments of possibilities and subjectification. This praxis begins with Dramane biking around the village on his bicycle. That small observational tableaux bleeds into an unplanned meeting with Nana, a local girl also biking to the post office to make a call and he is suddenly smitten

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with her. The character of Nana was not planned and she just happened to cruise in front of Sissako’s camera during a shoot. 3 As a matter of fact, Life on Earth was not even scripted and the movie came together in the editing room. Hence, in this day in a life story, the encounter with Nana feeds into the commentary on our desire to connect in a hyper-technological world where machines can connect easily but human connections are becoming rare. The irony is a world that is totally wired but solitude seems to be increasing. Life on Earth is stripped down and efficient in a way that it disrupts the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and follows Sissako’s decision to tackle reality rather than irresponsibly latching into escapism. The movie films rural lives and poverty in a way that is not romanticized. The movie is a critique of the neoliberal mythology of growth and trickle down voodoo economy. Life on Earth criticizes from its first shot of the Parisian malls, and this critique becomes full-fledged in Bamako (2006), where Sissako compares the prevailing neoliberal mythology with the Cowboy movie genre to highlight the fact that, as with the movies, neoliberal mythologies are based on fictions as in the movies. It is a fiction where exploitative labor practices, plundering, and parasitic extractive economies driven by theft of resources are conveniently swept under the carpet to present a figure of glitz. Dramane’s activity culminates when he befriends the town photographer and this framing between the camera and the photograph turns into an ongoing reflection on the gaze and Africans reversing that colonial gaze imposed on the continent. As with the photographer, Sissako clearly relates to the set-pieces and vignettes of the silent era. The film turns into an anti-National Geographic and Sissako is clear about his ambition to appropriate the medium of cinema differently and constantly breaks the boundaries between fiction, documentary, and the fourth wall. Here, we have Africans taking control over how they want to be shot and the kind of stories they want to tell. This cultural practice challenges the one-way street that straightjackets the African image as exotic. Life on Earth, in this instance, is a return to the real. Life on Earth challenges expected standards and stereotypical clichés that have become routine in third world documentaries. There are no disquieting images of poverty, disease, and starving children. It compiles a picture of a way of life that is detached from the material abundance and technological sophistication of the West. In terms of poetics, Life on Earth establishes Sissako’s geometry of symbolic interactions with a compilation of establishing shots that set up horizontal lines with a depth of field, which allows Sissako to manipulate the background and the foreground and where characters and objects for the most part move from left to right, and, as in the Western, from east to west. These shots look eerily impressionistic and naturalistic but that perception easily forgets Sissako’s highly stylized camera work. Most

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importantly, these scenes emphasize notions of rituals and choreography and how well-integrated societies have a certain kind of rhythm. As such, if Sokolo appears as an isolated outpost on the edge of globalization, it is a place that defines itself spatially and relationally with the rest of the world. Sokolo becomes a precise criticism of technological determinism and planned obsolescence. In Sokolo, Sissako demonstrates the still relevance of radio and the global circulation of magazines and commodity fetishes exemplified with glossy images cut from foreign magazines: including an image of a happy Prince Charles, Princess Diana, and baby Prince William frozen in time years after Diana’s divorce and death. As with Manuel Castells, Africa at the end of the millennium is not “the black hole of informational capitalism” but the recognition that modernity is neither linear nor teleological (1998, 162). For all these moments of disarticulation, Walter Benjamin provides appropriate explanations in, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” (1936), where he poses the question of the original and the aura through the historical processes art goes through over time in the age of mechanical reproducibility, and how this art continues to participate in the formulation of revolutionary demands toward political reality. Within this context, brokenness and disruption are at the heart of modernity since the experience of modernity is also a subjective experience that is full of shock and delays without losing its power (1936, 1968, 214–18). Clément Rosset, moreover, in The Real and Its Double, raises similar questions about artistic duplication; to argue for the necessity of the double if reality is to be captured because as Rosset argues “the western mind builds its lived reality out of the constant tension between that which in fact happens and the absent possibilities which the events of the present continually cancel out” (1984, 46–47). As with Rosset, the question of the origin is always overwhelmed by its double because the reality that we perceive is always a duplication of the human mind’s innate ability to discard what it finds unpleasant and replace it with a more consumable reality. Hence, the real and its double is about the brain’s ability for visualization and the multiplicity of perception. In so doing, it is not simply about what the object describes but the multiple forms of signification that can be derived from the object. Indeed, for much of their early history, the movies appeared to be an engine to speed up the collective social pulse. As much as cars, telegraphs, telephones, photography, or department stores, they represented a technology of change. Cinema didn't merely chronicle the transformations of early twentieth century urban consciousness; like jazz, it embodied them. Kinetic cutting in cinema through its techniques of dissolves, cutting and montage mirrored the rhythms—at once alienating and exhilarating—of modern life. Life on Earth is also a strong critique of that technology-and-testosterone-driven culture of Western money markets which are incredibly destructive. The movie criticizes industrial mass

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production, mechanical reproduction, and the fear of humanity turning into robots, and the difficulty of art to become meaningful within that context. Life on Earth is equally the idea that technology is also a signifier of power and war. Those gadgets are signifiers of soft and hard power, indexing cultural power as well as military might and Africa is not a player in that area, and how violence and theft of resources are organizing lives. Aime Cesaire comes in handy here because the native land Dramane is returning to is a place that does not fetishize technologies and resources. They do not live in the neoliberal times, resultantly, they are closer to a way of life that seeks radical truth, such as how much can we know about the earth, about other people. It is interesting that the movie is titled “Life on Earth” and not life in the world or globalization. The world precedes globalization. Globalization is a human process while the earth, the planet, is a natural process, akin to the mother Gaia. Thus, Life on Earth is a reflection on determinants and motivation and how Africans have their own determinants in terms of history, culture, and development. The crux of the question is about what we value and how what we value can help fulfill life and a subtle critique of capitalism that produces human beings as an object and a criticism that comes in clear focus in Bamako (2006). Mobility is also a powerful determinant for Africans. Sissako moves back and forth between many understandings of mobility and commodity fetishes to elaborate on Sokolo’s phantasmagoric context. There is a character commenting on Japanese SUVs in a magazine, and tells the photographer about the doors in Abidjan that open by themselves. These examples comment on the notion of globalization and means of mobility. In the film, Sissako uses bicycles which are also a comment on forms of resisting globalization, and is a process where Hardt and Negri claim is dominated by machines who are now organizing our brain activities (2000, 23). Meanwhile, radios in the background are telling tales of millennium celebrations in New York, Paris, and Tokyo and claiming that “Not all countries have the same time, but those that do are celebrating the millennium.” With this quote, Life on Earth disserts on the notion of decal age (delay) between images and sound that demonstrate unevenness of global flows and exchanges. That decal age is expressed with the dusty sign “telephone a priority for everyone” while most people cannot make phone calls. The motif of the telephone becomes emblematic on a reflection on disembodied voices, same as the motif of the radio in the same film. The presence of these visible and invisible forces challenge the audience and the way this audience relates to these forces and, furthermore, calls for a radical reevaluation of the methodology of what we know and how we know it. It

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begins with a challenge of binary knowledge black/white, east/west, north/south, urban/village, and so on. In more prosaic terms, the telephone and the radio highlight the mechanics controlling the distribution of flows under globalization which are still in firm control of Western countries. For instance, the character Nana cannot reach a nearby town on the phone. Dramane attempts to make a phone call to Paris, but it is misdirected to London. The flows in Life on Earth are positioned as unidirectional but that is just an appearance because ordinary Africans can still get their information but on delayed terms. These delays are a commentary on David Harvey’s notion of “time-space compression” and the idea that globalization does not necessarily means global political integration (1990, 123). That decal age is handled with complexity in Sissako’s poetics. The notion that “nothing happens” in Sokolo is an illusion. Daily activities of the villager’s movement of the village crisscross. Throughout the film, if a bicycle or other vehicle passes from the right to the left of the frame, a canoe, a donkey cart, or another bicycle will cross from the left to the right. The visual back and forth of the film performs multiple times on a small scale, what Sissako does on a large scale with the form of the film. The initial opening in the French supermarket fades into the large tree as the semiotic example of the palaver tree and how the palaver tree is the democratic institution where villagers meet to run the polis and where competent citizenship is predicated on oratory skills, the ability to defend one’s position and the necessity of a well-informed community and electorate. Now, ordinary people in the village are reduced to listening to the radio, adjusting themselves to the shade while waiting for the apocalypse in a state of somnolence. The radio, substituting itself to the palaver tree, becomes a signifier of a time where the real and the represented are confused, there is no longer a sense of references, and history stops to make any senses and this is what Jean Baudrillard calls the media nullification of history into “deceleration, indifference and stupefaction” (1994, 4). “These scenes signal Sissako’s ambition to complicate notions of teleology and progress by balancing the hypermodernity of the mall in France with a so-called premodern temporality of the village of Sokolo which seems frozen in time. It is within these spatial and temporal differences that African history can begin to make sense. Thus, the old man reading the letter from Sissako in Paris turns out to be his father. The film opens with communication pointed toward Sokolo, the rest of the film is an outward response to this initial letter from the outside. The man dictating the letter to his brother in Paris does on a small scale what the entire form is doing: taking the news of Sokolo to the outside. At the very end of the film, Nana, with a determined set to her face, pedals off on her bike, apparently to the neighboring town she has been trying to call. If she cannot get through on the phone, she will go there in

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person. This resolve to take herself there is what Sissako has done with the film: he has brought the village, like a letter, into the global discussions of the millennium, where its existence in time can no longer be ignored. Life on Earth is a reflection on gender politics and notion of time. The notion of the end of time is also time couched in male’s anxieties. The relationship between masculinity and conception of time is perceptible in military and religious narratives that come packaged with the notion of control. The end of time, therefore, is perceived as man’s inability to exert control. The character of Nana is a way for Sissako to dismantle the paranoid male narratives that underwrite these tales of the end of time and how in Timbuktu (2014) this male paranoia takes up religious overtones with Islamic Jihad becoming a violent reaction against globalization insecurities and the rise of women’s rights. And the rapid social changes taking place, where the market comes to replace traditional ways of doing business through free contracts rather than traditional forms of allegiances and loyalties. The dignified exchanges between Dramane and Nana underscore the resources of dignity and humility inherent in African values, and how cinema as the camera-eye can become both a sanctuary and an emancipatory tool to reconcile the community with itself. Life on Earth is a movie that reflects and privileges organic metabolic interactions. The movie is a lecture and a critique against our predominant Promethean modernity and excessive consumption. These excessive productive practices driven by an at all costs mentality which, in many cases, creates the alienation it is meant to combat. The movie concludes with Aime Cesaire’s notion that life is not a spectacle and a screaming man is not a dancing bear. In context with the work of Mulla Sadra and Sheikh Shahabuddin Yahya Sohrevardi, Sissako’s aesthetic is a re-expressive practice that can be said to participate in what Levi Strauss calls the “science of the concrete,” mental strategies that capture “the sensible world in sensible terms,” relying on imaginative practices to bring into existence invisible and immaterial forces into being (1962, 16). Thus, a cinema that deals with signs rather than concepts and is constantly suspended between magic and science. In doing so, this cinema shows a great receptivity to signs and symbols. Forms of knowledge that already exist are only available for the initiated that have mastered the “Alam al-Mithal,” the world of the imaginary and the world of images, “Alam al-Khayal,” In the following pages, I will give evidences how the cinema of Sissako conjures new beings into existence through the tropes of the “revenant/nomad,” the “vampire,” the “phantom,” and “the Zombie/living dead.” The argument will be made that in Life on Earth and Heremakono, the main characters, Dramane and Abdallah, who are stand-in for Sissako, play the role of the nomad and the revenant. The nomad and the

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revenant represent anthropological figures and a cyclical concept of time based on the notion of the eternal return. The revenant and the nomad are cyclical figures that constantly reconnect with their genealogies. In Sissako’s case, these returns back home, in Life on Earth and Heremakono, are closely related to the biographical tropes of Sissako to make claims that “revenant/Nomad” is essentially a figure of culture. He is the bringer of culture through multiple travel through which he practices the knowledge of geography and astronomy and the capacity to dismantle biographical baggage to create a more authentic and true self. The nomad is, by essence, a traveler and not a tourist. The traveler engages with places and people he visits. He takes time to make connection. The nomad synthesizes other cultures to enrich his own which by now has come to be sedentary. Through the figure of the nomad/revenant is the question of national unity, E Pluribus Unum, how to form a community with people from different background. As with Sanjay Subramanyam’s notion of connected history, the nomad reconnects histories that were artificially disconnected maybe due to ideology, intellectual laziness, or the nations hegemonic desire to shore up national historiographies based on established facts that are dubious in order to police borders and immigration. In the following pages, this work will demonstrate how the character of Dramane in Life on Earth and Abdallah in Heremakono perform as these agents of historical reconnection (Subramanyam, 2004 and 2001, 83). The figure of the “Vampire,” can be seen in Bamako and how the film becomes a form of exorcism whose high point is the incantations of Zegue Bamba condemning the vampiric functions of neoliberal genocidal practices and anti-black politics. Zegue Bamba’s poetry is important to consider the relationship between poetry, cinema, and literature’s relationship with the legal culture and its binding processes, therefore, how art forms inform the legal processes. This idea serves to de-center the knowing subject from the locus of rationalities, experiences, and choices to emphasize relationships, affects, and emotions. Zegue Bamba, moreover, is the missing image for a movie that was not scripted but his towering image is the one that reveals the profound sense of Bamako. That deep sense is the performance of an ancient spiritual carnival where possibilities of healing metamorphosis were real and testifying to the fact that images have an ontology and a regime of signification of their own that is predicated on the mastery of anterior knowledge. At first, Zegue Bamba’s incantations might be perceived as a form of aesthetic of suffering, however, his chants epitomize a form of independent agency and self-produced identities, embedded in the knowledge that when the forces of the spirit are not defeated, unjust laws will be vanquished in a matter of time. Hence, these chants are the vocalization of African sacred texts where vocal technique and control over rhythm deepen the meaning of the text. And it is important to note that Zegue Bamba does not sing in the local Bambara, but Senoufo and his words remain untranslated in the film and

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the whole courtyard stops to listen to him. Bamba’s song brings into the picture notions of acoustic images and signatures and the unicity of power of beauty and spirituality. The notion of vampire, additionally, is not about specific people but how capitalism contains structural logics that are vampiric for the ways in which they are sucking the blood of Africa dry through exploitation of labor and resources. At the same times, there is no malediction in these processes as long as folks like Zegue Bamba do exist. The case will be made that many of the Jihadists in Timbuktu are phantomatic creatures searching to reconnect with what psychoanalyst, Fethi Benslama (2016), calls an “invisible organ,” which they feel amputated from. Benslama reflects on a big literary tradition that focuses and engages notions of the body and the uncanny drive by the failure of refinding a lost object or organ, in this case, a performative simulacrum based on the disarticulation of the body. Within this phallic economy, the terrorist is that thing that is in excess, giving him a power and pervasive presence that is not limited to the confines of any body. The terrorist exemplifies the notion of “plus-de-corps” in the double sense, “both the surplus of the body, a bodily excess, and the no-more-body, the end of the corporeal” (Dolar, 2006, 71). This obsessional drive and lack creates an intentional and self-deluded approach to reality and their refusal to deal with the time they live in other than death. The phantom is not a prophetic creature but, as with the vampire, the phantom is a creature who neither died well nor were properly buried and engages in unstable performances of self-righteousness. These haunting figures have no autonomy of the will but propel forward by an unconscious sense of narcissistic injury or loss. As such, they are ghostly creatures trapped in a world of unproductive and wasteful revenge fantasies, therefore, not fully-formed subjects. However, in Bamako and Timbuktu, more directly, Sissako tackles the psychic consequences of global inequality and stigmatization in ways that are prophetic and disturbing with the non-stop display of macabre acts, be it in Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Munich, Paris, Saint-Etienne du Rouvray, and unfortunately more to come. Particularly, how the vampire structures of modern capitalism have created exploited and wounded souls engaging in revengeful blood-soaked fantasies against networked cosmopolitan and universalists elites who feel at home everywhere on the planet and live on the back and sweat of third world people. This violent return of the religious through the figure of the terrorists is the return of the disincarnated, disembodied, and deracinated people representing the faces of the incendiary appeal of victimhood in neoliberal regimes where the 1 percent rule, and greed is a sacred value. There is even an indirect critique of Karl Marx and his notion of religion as the opium of the masses. The terrorist is the anti-thesis of the idea that religion makes life tolerable for the poor. As in Timbuktu, the Jihadist is the first oppressor of the poor,

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even in the opening shot of the film, he is made to claim, looking straight into the camera, that his goal is to fight injustice. The phantom, however, is not part of the Habermasian’s notion of communicative action because he is not engaged in rationality and rational choice paradigm but in the logic of passion, belief, and divine justice. In aggregate, the phantom has power only as he is given that power. He is the result of the projection of others, therefore, if he is strongly opposed, the phantom evaporates. The Jihadist is the product of a profane time and therefore a dead end. He is the product of alienation and illusion, and a bringer of death and destruction rather than a prophetic messianic time that leads to the promised land. The figure of the “Zombies, living dead, or melancholia” are the subjects in Bamako committing suicide, dying in the desert, or the fishermen being brutally killed in Timbuktu. These figures of melancholia are experiencing a sense of loss. They might not even have been aware precisely what is being lost, but these kinds of figures demonstrate the inconsistencies of subjectivities. Achille Mbembe argues in “Necropolitics,” that the black bodies through processes of domination and discipline no longer belong to themselves. The argument could be made that these bodies were in fact dead already. NOTES 1. The filmmakers included are Hal Hartley (United States); Laurent Cantet (France); Miguel Albaladejo (Spain); Ildiko Enyedi (Hungary); Tsai-Ming Lian (ChinaTaipei); Alain Berliner (Belgium). 2. Conversation between professors Jacqueline Chabbi and Ghaleb Bencheikh, Question d’Islam, Radio France Culture, October 9, 2016. 3. The unplanned encounter between Sissako (Dramane) and Nana can be further investigated as to why ordinary people accept to be filmed. Agnieska Piotrowska in Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary films, New York, Routledge (2014), does not exclude love, unconscious need for recognition/lure of a momentary escape from the Dominant system (90). Piotrowska comes from a perspective when these kinds of encounters end up in betrayal and one side feels exploited but we can also acknowledge practical decision, and in this case, how cinematic performance itself can be subversive, particularly, in a culture where women are oftentimes restricted to the private sphere and made to wear veils in public and always accompanied by a male relative of the husband.

FIVE Heremakono (2002) On African Imaginative Landscapes, Frontiers, and Journeys

Following Life on Earth, Heremakono (2002) shows the tropes familiar in Sissako’s aesthetic, mainly, journey as narrative device to reflect on territorial ontology and metaphysical authenticity. As with his previous film, Life on Earth, what becomes clear is that this journey is not about spaces covered but the capacity to make connection. Heremakono turns into reflection meditation on symbolic geography, subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, urban spaces and travel, and political-economy. The movie features families and modes of cooperation, dreams, utopia and dystopias come into being. Urban spaces, even in remote places in Africa, are constructed through heterogeneity and mixture and are connected through global processes. It gets important to notice how the filmmaker turns out to be a historian and anthropologist detailing a human condition entangled in local ritual, and beliefs and values circulated by globalization that come into focus on the question of identity and possibilities, and how the question of space is tied up to ethics and morality in a “liquid” world where few traditional practices and institutions help to anchor identity, and everything is sold and even identity can be bought rather than inherited. The movie is also a poetic reflection on identity and displacement, and here Sissako, instead of Aime Cesaire, relies on Paul Niger’s poetry, particularly, “Little Bird” to think through these issues. Heremakono is a filmic answer to the literature’s notion of bildungsroman, coming of age novels when young boys learn how to become men. In Heremakono, that process takes place through local folktales peppered with humor, derision, and irreverence, where the boy learns a new language to confront 91

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life’s absurdities. The movie is also a deep reflection on the notion of exile but Sissako argues that exile actually happens before departure, therefore, a reflection on the nature of internal exile which he exemplifies by the main character who does not speak the local language, does not wear local clothes, and is not even sure whether he is leaving to go in exile or if he is coming back from exile. Heremakono is an acknowledgment that the condition of exile is becoming a predominant condition in this modern twenty-first century world and Sissako disserts on the personal and political acts of crossing borders, particularly the constant negotiation between cultural belonging and cultural assimilation and the physical cost of crossing the border that includes death. In aggregate, Heremakono continues on Sissako’s quest to integrate African subjective modernity and spatio-temporal consciousness into an authentic homegrown experience. Sissako, here, is interested in the notion of spaces and places and the interaction between the historical, the relational, and identity, putting an emphasis on the horizon and condition of possibilities rather than boundaries, borders, and frontiers. Heremakono tells the story of seventeen-year-old Abdallah’s visit to his mother in Nouadhibou to say goodbye to her on his way to Europe. Sissako followed the same route from Mali to Mauritania to Russia. As with the main character, Abdallah, Sissako told scholar, Kwame Anthony Appiah, that when he showed up to his mother’s town, he did not speak the language and was lonely and disoriented (2003, 35). The movie, consequently, says a lot about Sissako’s own childhood, and is a powerful reflection on issues of alienation and displacement that is prescient to the contemporary immigration crisis, and the real question is not these interesting characters but how symbolic geography is represented in contemporary globalization, particularly, in spaces that are originally structured as transnational, such as the former great empire of Mali represented in the film that is now being broken up into artificial nation-states, in this case Mali and Mauritania, by the French colonial power, and how the new African elites failed to redraw these boundaries and that failure can be identify as the first big mistake of the African decolonized era. The emphasis, consequently, is less on geography but rather on how ideology permeates ways of beings and ways of seeing, the role of context and situational relationship, individual and communal relationships. This is what Sanjay Subramanyam calls the corrective power of connected histories and how objects and subjects that were artificially separated, carved out, are now being reconnected through Abdallah’s nomadic figure (2004). Heremakono is a movie where many scenes are not translated and there are many gaps in the film that Sissako does not fill in. Relationships among characters are left unexplained and the cinematography remains grounded and focuses on the network of relationships and the bodies it captures in motion through the sand dunes. This network of relation-

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ships is complicated by the main character, Abdallah, who does not understand the local language, Hassaniya, and has to require the aid of the local electrician, Maata, and his apprentice, Kahtra. The motif of electricity and the radio are tropes that Sissako uses, as in Life on Earth, to discuss modernity in Africa through kinetic energy, entrepreneurial inventiveness and commerce. Maata’s use of the radio that he buries at the beginning of the film brings up connection between the disembodied voices heard on the radio and the notion of invisible forces he understands intuitively, or maybe the sirens of the West he no longer wished to deal with. Kathra, whose entanglement with electric wires and fear of electrocution, participates in this struggle to master, not only Western technologies, but invisible forces as well. The motif of electric wires, moreover, is a metaphor for the filmmaker playing the role of the electrician to reconnect continental and inter-continental relations that were obfuscated by national historiographies in order to consolidate their borders and build their myths of national identity. In this sense, Kathra is the figure of the “Karamoko” which in the language of Dioula in west Africa means “master.” The Karamoko puts an emphasis on the notion of transmission, except here transmission processes go both ways because children are thought to know something that the adults do not. Hence, when the light fails to come, the adult often turn to the Karamoko for explanation. In this case, there is a two way symbolic relationships happening between Maata and Kathra. There is also an atemporality to light and the difficulty to symbolize light, and how the cinema of Sissako is also about what people do not say, and the search to put into forms, mechanics and processes, that appear ethereal, shapeless, or un-representable, which in itself manifests into a meditation on new possibilities, particularly, Kathra and Abdallah as long as they stay connected to electricity as a source of life force, a life force that remains un-contaminated by the corruptive forces of modernity, which is the preservation of a world which has pre-existed modernity and which is an ancestral world which is still present in the kora and the songs that Abdallah’s mother sings. The kora is the object that shows that the umbilical cord between her and her son will never be cut. Music participates in a long history of communication rituals that are connected to longstanding activities such as hunting, farming, and fishing. Here, the kora and the textiles displayed in the film are, for Sissako, ways in which these objects enable forms of counter-representation, while at the same time, controlling how images of Africa are now travelling. These objects also come packaged with issues of singularity and the multiplicity of frontiers and borders and how language, musical instruments, forms of hunting, farming, and fishing are cultural practices that signify singularity and how these cultural singularities signify cultural specificities and practices that structure the symbolic geographical space to become rituals that nourish and enrich encounter and exchanges.

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Therefore, these forms of cultural heterogeneity are the objects that make proper cultural interactions and exchanges possible and conflicts impossible because civilization does not fight each other, but are all embedded in universal values, which is the enhancement of life. These cultural interactions defy notions of the clash of civilization unless, as Edward Said claims in Orientalism, culture becomes manipulated to serve hegemonic purposes (1978). Thus, Abdallah also interacts with a local girl, Nana, in a choreographic dance of seduction and she also teaches him the local language. There is also a mother teaching her daughter traditional songs and a Chinese expatriate, Tchu, singing songs in the local karaoke bar. These people continually cross paths, their gazes fixed on distant horizons while waiting for a hypothetical happiness, perhaps, taking for granted the rich cultural milieu they live in. The movie is a set of vignettes and a collection of incidents that demonstrate a community functioning with disparate identities and a horizon of expectations. The emphasis here is the demonstration that community, above all, functions on the capacity to relate and empathize. Sissako aims to challenge the convention of classic cinema, but the central idea here is the meaning of community and the notion of identity and exotism, and the plight of people inhabiting one place and living in an imaginary elsewhere as Sissako claims (Balseiro, 2007, 447). The quintessential scenes in Heremakono are inside the home of Abdallah’s mother and the contrast between watching television and Abdallah, in his room, peering into a low square window. The television’s scene is how screens have now replaced the campfire where children gathered to grow up under the guidance and wisdom of the elders. In contrast, through the low square window, Abdallah captures the lives of the small town and where the contrast in colors and beauty capture the pulse of modernity in that place. The scene with the television is a motif for the incessant encroachment of the West, what Sissako describes as “the intrusion of a false civilization in a place of authentic living” (2006, 198). The metaphor of the window is very important here, consequently, because Sissako, as he often does, does not claim his genealogy as a filmmaker from watching other filmmakers. As with the filmmakers from the French New Wave or the American New Wave, as a catch phrase to name Hollywood cinematic renaissance sparked by Coppola, Scorsese, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg as the first American generation of filmmakers who have graduated from film school, or a Quentin Tarantino’s video clerk film encyclopedia, Sissako’s film genealogy is the African archive and choreography that he captures with a sense of intimacy and immediacy that links up the notion of the camera-eye with the magic of the everyday life. Admittedly, Sissako’s cinema is looking to find the communal’s rhythm through movement of bodies and gestures. This social choreography is reflective of the social order. This symbolic gesture is

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predicated on the necessity to capture the magic provided by the everyday life. To register this symbolic practice is the ability to understand the intricate details of the relationship between the signifier and the signified and the idea that not all signs are signifiers. There are some gestures that signify nothing but the knowledge here is to capture the ones that do not have automatic and mechanical referents but are self-infused. This is the definition of rituals which are aggregation of signs that are not repetitive but are singularly charged and crafted, therefore, the importance of ritualized lives which precisely are the necessity of symbolic resources for a well-functioning society. As such, Heremakono is the idea that a proper society cannot function without a form of cohesive communal structures through rituals and reciprocal social obligation. The window scenes, moreover, is a reflection on contemporary regimes of speed. In Heremakono, Sissako proposes a reflection on the concept of “immobile” traveling, the most important question is, whether or not, travelling even has a meaning today where technology has rendered the world smaller, trampling the notion of subjective time that was part of the travelling experience. Moreover, in a world where the landscape and the architectures are becoming similar, the question is what is it there new to see? The answer is that a community cannot exist in a state of speed. Speed is the death of the community and the advent of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “Liquid society”: which is the liquefaction of social relationship and the death of the real. Thus, a society that cannot integrate rituals, that can no longer face the other is a dying society. Heremakono is a contrast between the beautifully shot desert and the ocean. This contrast shows the place that the ocean and the desert play in the local symbolic economy. They are both sources of life and death. Sissako, moreover, does make the distinction between light, electricity, and the sun. Light and electricity connect ordinary people while the sun brings harsh weather. Hence, not all cultures have the same kind of reverence for the sun and they get to appreciate the Janus-face of the sun as people of the desert. These cinematic shots, furthermore, demonstrate that spaces are also texts that are mapped into history, memory, desire, and imagination to become places. Spaces and places equally emphasize notions of in-betweeness and furthers Naficy’s notion of transition in cinema, multiplicity, and negotiated identities (Naficy, 2001, 14–15). These multiple negotiations are windows into the forces that have shaped the unique perspective of an original African filmmaker. This notion of in-betweness is an illusion when it comes to the character of Abdallah. He is not so much in-between that he learns to co-exist. What Heremakono produces is what Brian Larkin calls parallel modernities, and the legacy of the colonial sublime. Larkin argues that the colonial experience was also an enterprise of seduction based on technologies and Western soft power that is now reappropriated by the former colonized. This kind of parallel modernities translates into an aesthetic of fascination which is a

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visceral form of reception that resists previous norms and conventions, particularly, classical notions of the ideal that suppresses other forms of particularity and subjectivity. It means engaging the other without deracinating oneself. It is a kind of cosmopolitan ethics that is embedded in the real world as opposed to fantasized constructions embedded under bourgeois ethos of cosmopolitanism which is a depoliticized and consumerist activities far removed from its extractive practices and consequences. In this, Sissako is joined by a long list of African scholars such as Achille Mbembe, Edouard Glissant, Toyin Falola, Manthia Diawara, and Tariq Ramadan, and how these scholars complicate notions of idealized spaces in the Western academia to challenge these notions of idealized spaces and tourism. These scholars perform a form of connected histories which reconnect historical processes that were artificially separated in terms of connections, flows, movements, transfers, influences, and continuities. Moreover, to challenge notions of the postcolonial and the role that nonWestern countries play in nascent modernity in Europe and not vice versa. The goal, consequently, is to fight against compartmentalization for a multifaceted history to provide an alternative narrative to discourses of modernization that focuses on hybridity rather than exaggerated notions of otherness and cultural differences to capture objects and subjects that are consistently overlooked or render invisible. In these instances, spaces are used to further intercultural communication and expose processes of hegemony and politics in a Western travel industry that sweeps these issues under the carpet to present travel as a resource for empowerment, therapy, and pleasure, oftentimes, practices denied to the indigenous locals, marked as non-whites. Their work, as with Sissako’s, serves to challenge conventional geography and borders, reducing distances among villages and cities, nationstates, and transnationalism, and globalization, processes that are both complex, unformed, and incomplete, but opening up opportunities to comment on social changes through popular culture and larger trends in mass culture. Particularly, how cinematic productions are asserting its presence calling for a new epistemological paradigm, and new forms of political practices and structures to tackle these current dynamics in terms of new productions of territory and subjectivities. What is important here is to pay attention to the routine, repetition, and breaks that constitute lived experiences in capitalist societies and how these embodied lived experiences participate in a project of self-making and the roles that unexpected moves and thoughts can reshape contemporary lives. For this epistemic community, subjectivity is multi-constituted, embedded in a rhizome that is multi-relational. Multiculturalism, diversity, metissage, or “creolization,” accordingly, transform into a creative power, enriching exchange practices where the sense of self is never lost but the African body and the African culture is constantly retheorized to

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adapt to evolving social, economic, cultural, and religious contexts. It is an approach to cosmopolitanism that is aware of the legacies of capitalism, the formation of the modern Western states and its genocidal politics. Taken together, those scholars are criticizing globalization as a bourgeois ethos where capitalism and fetishized goods circulate freely under the guise of free trade but human beings cannot. Thus, it is a global network of communication turning the world as Tom Friedman writes “flat” (2005). This globalization which follows from modernization and Westernization theories has now created a vacuous global consumerist society that is resisted, particularly how big steps in Western civilization also came packaged with acts of barbarity such as slavery and extractive imperialism. This bourgeois ethos has to be linked up with this kind of globalization, where the global subject is living between airports and hotels. Americans and Canadians who make up 5.2 percent of the world population constitute 42.5 percent of all airline passengers while Africans—12 percent of the world population—constitute only 2.2 percent (Simon, 1996, 26). It is important here to take a moment to discuss the homology between cosmopolitanism and air travel. For a start, it is important to shatter the clichés that Westerners are the only ones to travel for leisure, creative, or scientific inquiry, while Africans, perpetually victims of mismanaged economies, travel out of hunger or survival. There is also the opposite proposition where tourists from developed countries come to enjoy Africa as the natives cannot. Hence, how the notion of travel tends to privilege white bodies, and bell hooks suggests that this experience of travel depends upon the eradication of the history of the racial other while utilizing cultural difference as a resource for pleasure (1992, 23). Clearly, the notions of fatalism and afro-pessimism need to be pushed back. It involves how we value African activities and the power of action and execution in relation to the recontextualization of African practices within a logic of contribution. Second, what Simon brings up here is the difference between hypernomads and infra-nomads and how the dividing lines are accessed to capital and the growing inequality on the global scale. The infra-nomads do not even have to leave the continent as most migration usually occurs within the continent as exemplified in Heremakono where the Peugeot 504, carrying Abdallah to Nouadhibou, gets stuck in the sand dunes of Mauritania. One way to read the Peugeot 504 being stuck in the sand is, first, the worldwide unequal distribution of the capacity to move. Second, the idea of the immobile engine, the initial engine and animating spirit that propels other engines like the sun. The sun, as the ultimate figure of lighting, serves to make the difference between nomads and nomadic predators. The nomads in Heremakono are not asking for compassion, and they are not economic and cultural occupiers.

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One note must also be made about the educated of non-Western societies entrapped in the same sense of entitlement and hope but stuck in limited circumstances that expose his feelings of weakness, inferiority, and envy, and is forced to redefine the notion of sovereignty if not engaged in paranoid revenge fantasies. It reinforces the idea that nomadism was initially linked to the quintessential idea of freedom and how that privilege is now being curtailed by globalization processes. The movie takes place in Nouadhibou, a small town attached to a peninsula on the Mauritanian coast, and shows the effects of globalization on local African cities. Nouadhibou is a great cemetery for ships, but as a paradox, a place where many Africans dream of escaping from the continent. Heremakono is an important text to reflect on the semiotic function of space and travel. One gets to witness the transformation of African coastal cities into new Goree Islands and when the body of the character of Mickael washes on shore, there is a reminiscence of many enslaved Africans who did not make it during the Atlantic slave trade, and contemporary dual fantasized constructions and anxieties about immigration. Mickael is also a stand in for Europe as an obsessional offer exemplified by the Eiffel Tower, an empty receptacle, and ultimate embodiment of an escapist capitalist dreamscape and the media cult of images, and the psychic tyranny that the imagination of elsewhere imposes on impressionable minds. Mickael’s death is a condemnation of the illusion of a world without borders and the erasure of knowledge and rituals and his death helps Sissako’s points that nations exist also as forms of encounter where notions of singularity exists, therefore, nations are not only homogenous entities but they also nourish themselves through encounter and exchanges when the other is known as an equal interlocutor and the logic of contribution is balanced so that no one suffers but gets enriched in the process. When these processes of encounter and exchanges are not properly ritualized and fantasy takes over, deception and death can ensue. Most importantly, how in a globalized and increasingly secular world, places, object, museums, statues, and monuments become sacralized and turned into new spaces of worship. Hence, Mickael’s death can be interpreted as an indictment of how proper notions of travel, encounter and exchanges, have been supplanted by the mirages created by advertising institutions and how lack of education is a recipe for illusory happiness. As Christopher Lash, in quoting Susan Sontag, writes, Mickael is also the victim of the crippling dependence of the culture on images to validate its realities, on images of the self to infuse individuals with a sense of selfhood, and the uncertainty about what is real in a culture of reproduction, mediation, and images (1979, 47–48, 241). Mickael’s death, additionally, addresses biopolitical regimes of immigration and how seas and oceans now constitute fortresses to protect

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Europe. Immigrants that are allowed to travel are the ones that can demonstrate capital and financial resources. The rest are left to die as Moussa Toure demonstrates in La Pirogue (2014). In turn, the West is the number one purveyor of weapons in Africa. They receive capital in exchange of death. These mechanics heighten the knowledge as the right actions when faced with brutality of nature and existing geopolitics. This line of thinking can be related to Achille Mbembe’s depictions of Africans as the “Revenants of modernity,” a theme I will associate with the character of Khatra and Abdallah. Mbembe argues that his notion of “revenant” is to constantly interrogate the genealogy of this modernist formation, the place of technology and finance, and the industrialized and mass-scaled genocidal practices at the core of these processes. Within these processes, the Africans, who entered that capitalist ideology since the beginning of slavery, were not meant to survive, and also the fact that they did transform them into a new class of mutants. Now, Heremakono deals with changing cultural expectations, trying to level the epistemological field to discuss ordinary Africans’ aspirational desires and the real cultural imperatives driving these processes. This infrastructure brings together notions of intertextuality and how discourses produce subjects and how these productions are also embedded in issues of knowledge, power, and influence. It means ordinary people have greater capacity to reflect on their own position in society and that conventional routes to upward mobility are no longer restricted to government bureaucrats and nepotism. This kind of cultural capital accumulation is not industrial but artisanal, meaning that communitarian ideals and interpersonal relationships still matter and social prestige comes from a long stage of apprenticeship, initiation, rites of passage, and growing autonomy of experiences. I understand these arguments as an aesthetic of life that both allies the rational, esoteric, and the poetic to create an inventive culture with its own proper contingencies, temporalities, and vision that creates an almost parallel universe where fiction and reality are constantly blended into each other to provide its own catharsis. Kathra and Abdallah are a phantasmagoria that resists erasure. They constitute the regeneration of the cycle of life and say something specific about African culture—that the disruptive presence actually allows for the possibility of progress. This knowledge digs into the knowledge of nomadic versus sedentary culture and how the figure of the nomads is the bringer of culture. Abdallah is the figure of the nomads, who through his travel, has learned something about geography and other culture. Abdallah and Dramane from Life on Earth are basically the same character. Through their contacts with other cultures they know how to enrich their own, because they understand better the lived material contradictions of the lives back home. These processes are predicated on the possibilities to dismantle biographical baggage in order to successfully negotiate internal tensions and turmoil in order to achieve authentic and true

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self. In final instance, Heremakono, through its biographical tropes, shows that cinema is not just something Sissako does; cinema is a life story and we are better for it.

SIX Bamako (2006) Africa, Cowboys, and Postcolonial Economic Blues

Bamako exemplifies the concept of the palaver tree in African societies and how these processes are reminiscent of the Greek theater and drama, where these spaces became an important site for the construction of citizen discourse and participatory democracy. Bamako was shot in the house of Sissako’s father and where Abderrahmane grew up. In the movie, Sissako reintroduces a legal practice where Achille Mbembe claims that the judicial order was suspended by neoliberal imperialism to produce states where violence and states of exception are deemed to operate in the name of “civilization” (2003, 24). As with Bamako, then, Sissako engages institutional practices that most people thought were set in stone. Bamako embodies the plights of ordinary Africans under economic policies designed in Washington to emphasize the consequences of these policies in tactile ways and not simply regarding theory and abstraction. By mapping out these consequences, Sissako complicates Abdul Maliq Simone’s notion of “worlding.” He writes that “worlding” are processes of global economy to create African cities in a state of being everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and how this state of perpetual disorientation makes it impossible for ordinary Africans to function inside their cities (2001, 17–18). What Simone argues is how these forces of disorientation foreclose the work for ordinary Africans to imagine their nation. The movie shows the struggle of ordinary Africans to right the wrongs of the global economy through an ad hoc international tribunal set up in the confines of a courtyard to try the World Bank and the International Money Fund. 101

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Bamako is Sissako’s most overtly political and confrontational film and in ways which cinema turns into a tool to speak truth to power while taking marginalized Africans from the cultural and economic ghetto into the global central stage to highlight the necessity for Africans to shape their communication and demonstrate their skills and competence. Resultantly, global economic issues are now framed as a public debate and not necessarily confined to the realm of expertise and the global elite. By positioning the subaltern into a position of enunciation, Bamako calls for a new regime of representation and challenges an African democracy which has been reduced to electoral politics. Bamako is an assault on the policies of debt servitude which have relegated the continent to the bottom rung of the global economy, forcing the local governments to slash funding for health care, education, infrastructures, and culture, and in the process, destroy the quality of life and opportunity for ordinary Africans. Bamako is an attempt by Sissako to give Africans their day in court. The movie takes place in an intimate setting where Sissako plays with the connection between court and courtyard in a part documentary, part fiction. Sissako makes clear the influence of the Western not only with the small cowboy film, but another central trope is the spatial contrast between east and west in the Western. Precisely, how free people move west to escape the robber barons who have bought American democracy in the eastern part of the country. The east-west tropes demonstrate the hypocrisy of these self-appointed saviors of the African economy and how there is nothing neither noble nor heroic about them. Indeed, the Western power used the IMF and the World Bank to control and dominate their economy. The role that language and symbol plays in decolonization and to counter the rhetoric developed by the IMF and the World Bank, Africans have to invent a new language for development. Because the IMF and the World Bank are not simply about finances, the corruption they bring into Africa seeps into the fabric of society to the point that in Bamako growing distrust within the community regarding breakdown in family values and the lack of faith put on people, expressed words to show that the currency of language itself is being devalued. In Bamako, consequently, Sissako takes a sociological and anthropological approach to discussing how social catastrophes are often the result of family decay, and failures in social relationships, and what happens where market values enter and corrupt family units. This is where Schumpeter’s ideology of creative destruction and Max Weber’s Protestant ethics of capitalism comes to a clash. This struggle highlights global financial superstructures driven by unlimited technological innovations, which are creating devastating social catastrophes. Ordinarily, family practices are important sites to analyze social approbation, notions of beliefs and promises, and intimate responses to these points of tension, ritualization of conflicts, mediation, and transmission through the crisis. Non-objectified knowledge,

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values, and production of the common, choices and responsibilities are often overlooked in academic scholarship because they tend not to be easy to track monetized transactions organized by the market system and values. Hence, these family dynamics are essential to understanding formation of non-official power and immaterial public order to emphasize how ordinary people use their social resources and influence to produce alternative forms of knowledge production, norms, and social organization that engages in radical politics and universalist practices to counter highly essentialist and normative states of exception. In Bamako, however, these processes cannot take place when neoliberal values have infected family practices and prevented the emergence of alternative modes of living and production. Hence, amidst the exploitation of global finance, Sissako shines a light on the consequence of this trickle-down economics on real people. In this court/courtyard, Bamako tells the story of a couple called Chaka, an educated, middle-class African struggling to find a job and his wife, Mele, an aspiring singer with a baby who needs constant care because he is sick. From here, Bamako addresses a community struggling with the resources of its language and how the corrupting forces of perverse economic policies are destroying everything in its wake. Moreover, by foregrounding ideas and rhetoric, Sissako aims to confront the local propaganda and local dictatorships that exploit the continent’s economic woes to install and legitimize authoritarian practices. Bamako, moreover, exemplifies Sissako’s mastery of fragmented narratives that coalesce to give stature to ordinary people and their mundane lives caught in the interstices between the global and the local, the public and the private, the irony and the tragic. These interactions bring out Nietzsche’s notion of aesthetic theodicy and the mundane tragedies and how these quotidian routines are the stuff that makes up art. As with these practices of the everyday life, Sissako uses fragmentary narratives to present complicated lives and the rationale why those ordinary people must be empowered to be front and center when it comes to economic policies that affect their lives. As with Sissako’s style and taste for nontraditional narratives, the movie proceeds with a collection of loosely connected observational tableaux. One with a detective investigating the disappearance or theft of a gun. The others, practices of the quotidian realities of life, among others, children playing and crying, the celebration of a marriage and women working on clothes, a gunshot and a suicide, and footage of a baby bathing. And the movie is prescient about the contemporary immigration crisis, showing the footage of a woman dead in the Sahara Desert in her attempt to join Europe through Morocco and Spain. The whole thing is embedded into a cacophony of sound that shows the importance of acoustic practices for Sissako. The lead character, Mele, is a cabaret singer. Sissako continuously used African musician stars in his films such as

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Salif Keita (Life on Earth), Oumou Sangare (Heremakono), Aissa Maiga (Bamako), and Fatoumata Diawara (Timbuktu). And the fact that African women singers dominate Sissako’s musical choice demonstrates his ability to deal with the lady’s voices, and the question of nudity and sexuality in a closed society where alterity is threatening. Hence, the irruption of these voices into the public sphere are akin to the seminal story of Scheherazade in the Arabian tales of One Thousand and One Nights. Sissako is very familiar with this, and the notion that violence stops when society learns how to listen to women, and not only the figure of the sacred matriarch, but all women. Sissako is on record claiming that his decision to film Timbuktu came about due to witnessing Malian women being stoned on television by the Jihadists. Additionally, Sissako uses sound in his films to highlight tensions between forms and contents, and complicated representations that are not enacted into visual forms. In so doing, Mele serves as the object that ties in public and private spheres in the film and the relationship between economic and emotional depletion featured in the sad song she sings while crying at the same time. Sissako shows music as a powerful tool for egalitarian symbolization and a machine of affect that infuses power into marginalized subjectivities and brings its newfound potency into the mainstream and the battle of subjectivities. This new regime of aesthetic individuation and distinction turns primary signifiers of marginalized subjectivities as actors of history rather than spectators. There is also attention paid to the local vernacular with a character claiming to the court that “the goat has its ideas, the chicken likewise.” The most important part of this choreography is the witness who claims that “at least, they will know that we are aware.” Global financial structures such as the World Bank and the IMF as well as Wall Street are perceived to be untouchables and institutions that cannot be reformed in our global economy. There are no doubts that these institutions are unconcerned by the show trial Sissako puts on in Bamako. The acknowledgment, however, that “at least they know that we know,” notwithstanding, is testifying to the reality that there is no pre-reflexive attitude here. Quite to the contrary, that mantra, “at least they know that we are aware,” raises the question of ethics and morality in this neoliberal world. The “At least they know that we are aware,” consequently, is not a statement of resignation but demonstrates that an economy of reparation, salvation, and dignity is still possible. The mantra, “at least they know that we are aware” also relates to the plasticity and flexibility of the brain. Ways to bounce back from trauma that is passed on through generations but is now made aware, consequently, begins the process of healing. In the realm of pedagogy, the idea that knowledge requires notions of alterity and ethics is therefore a gesture that is always open to the formation of new meanings within the understanding of objective and subjective reality, and Margaret Thatcher’s notion that there are no alternatives to

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neoliberalism. This brings up neoliberalism and the formatting of the brain. And that is the definition of the African and the human subject as a whole to what Achille Mbembe calls “Niggerization” of humanity which is how people, communities, and countries are being made redundant and superfluous by African’s statist technologies of power and globalized neoliberal racialized processes of exploitation. The awareness being claimed in Bamako, consequently, is the knowledge that this condition is neither natural nor permanent because the African subject is already modern simply because he was always at the center of modern capitalism. It makes the difference between the citizen and the consumer through the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse on unsustainability from the margins. This knowledge is a critique of the theory of development which assumes a form of linearity from barbarity to modernity. As with Sissako, there is no teleology of progress, and the forces that push people into action are related to injustices and the intolerable rather than greed. Hence, these Malians might be hegemonized by transnational financial structures, but they are neither dominated nor subjugated by these discourses on development. Thus, it is where Bamako turns out these people into subjects of history and the law. For centuries, this kind of voice was never heard, therefore, the quote “at least they know that we are aware,” demonstrates counter-hegemonic forms of participation and how witnessing and awareness are necessary political activities signaling productive forms of embodiment and capacities for the epistemological rupture that can neither be decontextualized nor ignored. Bamako, therefore, turns into a kind of useful and practical work of cinematic technology of pedagogy with the mantra “At least they know that we are aware,” emphasizing the relationship between knowledge, production, and social recognition. This awareness emphasizes the role of the African knowing subject, facing and anticipating techno-liberalism, which is the alliance between techno scientific research and increasingly sophisticated tools through artificial intelligence for data mining, capitalism, and the “uberization of the economy.” These processes generate the multiplication of geolocalized forms of precarious labor with no benefit, reducing labor practices to an administration of things. The whole embedded within triumphant neoliberal policies opening up a clash between the Schumpeterian’s notion of creative destruction and Weber’s idea of the Protestant ethic of capitalism. Bamako translates this clash as the undermining of traditional communal relations and the cultural resources, networks, and ties that preserve the community, and shifts cultural capital alongside economic capital, and the division between losers and winners. Sissako demonstrates how responses to this system require a new wisdom of life through a technology of the self in a world where institutions are either negligent or extremely punitive, and collective action is dwindling in the face of a depoliticized post-political landscape.

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Bamako brings together the sharp subject and a genealogy of images continuously reappropriating times to reveal how history is written and forms of agency that can develop from it. Therefore, highlighting the interaction between images and the self-interrogating subject is bringing to the forth what kind of representation is needed when we do research. This question of representation emphasizes images as a platform to search for evidence and answers because it is the clash of images that social tensions and contradictions play and new forms of agency reveal, making the difference between being an object of knowledge rather than a subject and the power of reparative narratives. As such Bamako emphasizes cinematic technology as an asset for development, and the knowing subject formed out of independence of thought, freedom of speech, and affective resistance necessary for the quality of regimes of discussion, free association, critical intimacy, and democratic consensus to level the playing field dominated by highly uneven power differentials. The knowing subject, consequently, brings up to the forth issues of enlightened selfinterest, self-denial aesthetic, creativity, dignity, and styles to break with habitus and routine and open up new mechanism for development balancing logic and reason with creativity and freedom within the building of an egalitarian mentality and equality of condition, and the making of social institutions to ensure the balance. From there, Bamako features the character of Zegue Bamba launching in griot singing in the Senufo language that is not spoken in Bamako. Zegue’s oratory skills, however, describe the African power of magical incantation and the soul of a resilient continent. These incantations emphasize a rhetoric of sincerity highlighting a concept of linguistic divorce, demonstrating the emergence of a long tradition of eloquence and linguistic techniques that were the cornerstone of competent citizenship in precolonial Africa. Zegue’s incantations are not merely the stuff of long lost folk practice but a tradition that continues to live in humanity and reconnects it with its magical nature and spiritual being. Zegue can harness and auto-re-engender himself in the face of total annihilation in a world where people are worshipping the Golden Calf, the basis of liberalism, free competition, a war of each against all and all against each on the inexorable path of the personal and collective apocalypse, are the new heroes. Hence, Zegue Bamba is more than a character but a meta-filmic narrative within Bamako to demonstrate the power of African eloquence and the poverty of corporate language that dominates in the West. Bamba is the manifestation and an emblem of a long African tradition that remained impenetrable from outside forces, what Jean-Pierre Bekolo in Les Saignantes (2005) calls “Mevungu.” He is a personification of a continent before Western ideas of progress took hold and destroyed a way of life. Thus, like Majolie and Chouchou in Les Saignantes, Zegue Bamba is the reification of a way of life, a tradition, a system, a culture, and a way of

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doing things. And his presence in the film is a way for Sissako to point out that justice is also an equilibrium, and an imbalance or unequal society makes it hard for democracy to grow. And the fact that Zegue Bamba is still there to testify means that he is the real hero of the trial because he demonstrates that the community still has the source to resist and recover by reconnecting African traditional temporality with modernity. Bamba epitomizes the Africa Felwine Sarr discusses in Afrotopia (2016), the informal and underground networks of Africa that constitute the quintessence, the ontological ether, the heart of the continent’s spirituality, ethics and business activities, and how these vast assemblages are interconnected. This is an Africa that does not aim to catch up with the rest of the world but to find its resources and inspiration for its development. And so, this is a place with its own temporality and own philosophy of development based on the knowledge that there is no justification for developmental policies to make people poor, and by staging Bamako, Sissako is leading the way on how to bring supranational organizations, such as the World Bank and the IMF, into accountability. In aggregate, how human beings were embedded in the Big Bang to witness the eternal harmony and beauty of the universe that will always overcome human greed and frailty. These observational tableaux show that the goal of infusing real lives into the trial is not so much that people are expecting something from the verdict. The scenes serve to point to ordinary people’s understanding of the inner working of global finance and to radically change the image of Africa as a space of war and famine, what Judith Butler calls a permanent elsewhere. Thus, Bamako serves to put a human face on global economic policies and demonstrates that ordinary Africans are not dupes. Bamako was shot with four running cameras during one week. The film is a mixture of digital video and 16mm film. There is always one camera visible on the frame to destabilize boundaries between documentary and fiction. In the trial, Sissako aligns a long list of fantastic performances from a long list of non-actors. The plaintiffs are represented by a team led by Senegalese lawyers, Aissata Tall Sall and Frenchman William Bourdon. While the Burkinabe Mamadou Savadogo is leading the defense with the Mamadou Konaté and the French Roland Rappaport who, in Sissako’s love of pranks, receives a head butt from a goat which signals that even the African animals are outraged by the World Bank and the IMF. Hamèye Founé Mahalmadane is the chief justice, assisted by Mariam Cissé, Alou Diarra, and Oumou Diakité Berithé. The accusing party is made up of the activist Aminata Dramane, a former minister of culture of Mali, who argues that Africa is a victim of its wealth, not poverty. Madou Keita tells a tragic experience of migration through the desert; Professor Georges Keita discusses the national economies of African states and their role in the problems that countries face in the continent; and Assa

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Badiallo Souko who denounces privatization policies amid the neocolonialism of multinationals, and a varied collection of locals being victimized by the politics of the structural adjustment programs. Sissako’s Brechtian drama hits a fever pitch with a Sergio Leone’s parody of the wild West in Africa with the insertion of the short film Death in Timbuktu. In it, Sissako plays himself. The Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, the American actor Danny Glover, and the Congolese director Zeka Laplaine contrast Hollywood’s legacy and the plundering of the continent. This group utilizes an economy of celebrity to complicate their own participation in this global economy and notion of celebrity culture, complicity, and the global economy as a financial global architecture that contribute to the financial enslavement of ordinary Malians. Here, Sissako plays up the subtle difference between spectators and actors and how the audience of Bamako is also both (spectators and actors), and complicit with the global economy in terms of the consumption of Western films. With the black hats/white hats tropes, Death in Timbuktu demonstrates that cowboys are not all white and that the West is not solely responsible for the ills of Africa. Thus, there is a direct connection between the inner working of global finance in Africa and bank heists framed in Western films. Sissako also draws the parallel that the invasion and the plundering of Africa by the West came packaged with a symbolic invasion regarding the imposition of Western images on the continent to highlight how the dominance of the West goes hand in hand with its symbolic supremacy, making a perfect alliance between hard and soft power. 1 Death in Timbuktu, as a result, is a reworking of both the Fordian and Leonian Western to introduce issues of gender, the performativity of gender and how this performativity is structured by economic processes. As with the pillage of the continent’s resources by the West, there are ways in which the continent is feminized because the notion of testosterone, virility, penetration, and violence are often associated with male characteristics. The motif of the cowboys, therefore, exemplifies how issues of heroism, communal love, and integrity break down and how the legend of the Western cuts both ways, whether you are the cowboy or the Indian, the object or subject of capitalist genocidal violence. In Bamako, accordingly, Sissako engages the notion of court and courtyard. Thus, in a courtyard of a neighborhood of Bamako (Mali), The IMF and the World Bank are put on trial for their grand extortion and theft of Africa’s resources. In Bamako’s narrative strategy, there is none of Hollywood “you cannot handle the truth!” trick. Bamako is neither a representation nor a spectacle of the law. As a soothing contrast from the trial, life goes on in and out of the courtyard as if the trial taking place is of modest importance. The movie’s insight is that, for Africans, there is nothing that resilience would not solve. And so, life keeps evolving independently of external evil forces trying to bring about the continents de-

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evolution. Consequently, Bamako works in aggregation highlighting the frustrations of under-development only to put into relief the remarkable contrast between imaginations and the imaginary. The movie is self-consciously improvised reminding us that power begins with self-knowledge, not its representation, and that the truth is stronger than its representation. Here it means a continent in touch with its own reality, in control of its own fate. At this point, Bamako transcends its own object to raising the universal question which is, how in our contemporary society of spectacle could one escape the pull of the ephemeral, the trivial when important matters of economic and social justice are at stake? Bamako sides with people by recognizing the necessity to go beyond images. It is also important to note that Death in Timbuktu is not the sole connection between Bamako and Timbuktu. In the opening scene of Timbuktu, a Jihadist is facing the camera and claiming not to be fighting the West but injustice. Here, Sissako draws on the notion of capitalism and the Golden Calf. The Golden Calf in the Bible happened when Moses was at the top of the mountain but his people—impatient and not willing to do the ascetic work demanded by God—decided to worship a Golden Calf as a metaphor for capitalism and voluntary servitude to material forces. Hence, that opening scene, in Timbuktu, draws attention to the connection between economic injustice and processes of radicalization and what constitutes a real economy of salvation. It begins with the reflection that the Jihadist also needs to have a political-economy theory of the continent and that real Jihad means fighting injustice. In a very practical term, the work of saving souls. Indeed, the system we use today to compel work is debt. Debt based slavery has millions of people working in jobs they care nothing about. Many, in jobs they actively detest but they have to pay rent, electricity, mortgages, and food bills or they and their children will die. This fight for saving souls is not easy, particularly, when even the Jihadist is a wounded soul. The question becomes, in culture, where all the subjects are visceral meaning frustrated bodies where institutions of mediation have crumbled, can the visceral subject be a bringer of justice? To answer that question, Stuart Jeffries writes that “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” Sissako, both in Timbuktu and Bamako, points out that the Jihadist is exactly the person for whom economic calculation does not matter. The Jihadist can die for purely ideological and abstract reasons (Jeffries, TheGuardian.com, 9/9/2016). It is the idea that globalization no longer provides spaces for the sacred in ways that nationalism and tribalism do. As such, the African knowing subject, Sissako calls for, is able to respond to intellectual demands, fulfill a func-

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tion of representation and work liminal mechanisms in a society dominated by spectacle, neoliberal and autocratic logics. Hence, a radical politics of hope and methods of pacification and social justice. NOTE 1. Sissako’s next film will focus on China, and that will without a doubt constitute an opportunity to reflect on China’s hard and soft power and its dominance on the African continent.

SEVEN Timbuktu (2014) Notes on Art, Terror, and Cosmopolitan Politics

Sissako’s latest film is entitled Timbuktu, a mythical and historically charged place in Mali and the home of 333 Islamic saints. The movie has a reddish color which reflects the metaphor of the Jihadist as the sandstorm that has invaded spaces and forced ordinary people to run for cover. As Sissako shows, it is very hard to fight against sandstorms, but this metaphor of the wind is the sublimation of the landscapes and the sense of loss that the Jihadist invasion generates. And the subsequent phantomization of the experience of the self and the world that Tom Gunning writes about in early cinema of attractions pointing the interaction between early film and other forms of entertainments such as the theaters, vaudevilles, and here I will add oral tradition and folktales (2010, 46). Indeed, the Jihadists appear on the screen as phantoms always coming from the background of the scenes to interfere with a soccer game, a music jam session, and lovers hanging out, and even people praying at the mosque. Their presence pollutes and corrupts the screen, and these processes turn political when they start stoning ordinary people. Within this chaos, Sissako adds a touch of irony—how the only presence which keeps a sense of direction is a cow called GPS. 1 This image of the sandstorm is useful to contrast the good and evil demiurge in Timbuktu. The evil demiurge produces the Jihadists that keep interfering in people’s lives. The good demiurge creates Timbuktu which in reality is a mythical town that symbolizes African openness and erudition. Timbuktu is known as the first city to archive African indigenous knowledge. 111

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There is a relationship between Bamako and Timbuktu and how Sissako names his films after cities, usually, to demonstrate how these centers of hospitalities are becoming entangled in global processes that threaten to rewrite what they stand for. In the larger context, Bamako and Timbuktu become an expression of the interaction between the local and the global within globalization processes. THE LEVIATHAN, THE CAMERA-EYE, AND THE PROMISED LAND The massacre of Charlie Hebdo and the Kosher Supermarket in Paris, on January 7, 2015, multiple bombings, shootings, and killings that have taken place worldwide in Paris, Beirut, and Bamako on November 2015 were perpetrated by terrorists claiming allegiance, respectively, to Al Qaeda in Yemen and the Islamic State in the Levant (Isis, Isis or Daesh). President François Hollande qualified these horrific events with a martial rhetoric embracing words such as “acts of war” perpetrated by “soldiers of Daesh,” raising the central question as to why mostly young European Muslims are so enraged to resort to extreme violence to settle disagreements. This extreme violence comes packaged with the notion of appropriate responses to these homicidal and self-sacrificing practices and whether or not French Republican ideals can survive a regime of exception to fight Daesh. These acts of terror symbolized as France’s “9/11” created a wave of anxieties about loss of the French collective identity and security. Violently disrupting the boundaries of the conventional notions of what it means to be a French citizen, and giving rise to the stigmatization of the French Muslims and Islam as the default religion of the violent poor and the oppressed, discarding in the process, the history of Western countries’ interaction with Muslim countries and the growing development of global inequality within countries and on a global level. The lack of proper introspection from the French elite has led to the institutionalization of the figure of the “banlieusard” as the embodiment of chaos and violence, sapping the foundations of France’s institutions and cultures (Guenole, 2015). 2 These forms of stigmatization do not provide a convincing explanatory narrative to explain the raison d’être fueling the formation of radical Islamic groups attracting a sizable number of Western youths. Stigmatization and discrimination do not provide graphic narratives as to why radical Islam has become the primary vessel for committing heinous and barbaric acts. Moreover, why is the mobilization of Western universalist intellectual and cultural resources failing to have an impact on Western Islamic youth and why has secularism come to be associated with authoritarian practices and bourgeois liberal decadence, producing

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a siege and binary mentality of us versus them that is erroneously associated with a so-called clash of civilizations. This work interrogates the notion of terrorism within Abderrahmane Sissako’s prescient Timbuktu (2014) and how that movie became a symbolic space to discuss terrorism, social and physical violence, and whether or not a joint democratic project is still possible in countries struggling with violent radical Islamic Jihad. These processes begin with the recognition of the duality of social invisibility/hypervisibility and stigmatization that produce and essentialize Muslim activism with violence. They raise the relationship between epistemic injustice and symbolization and the capacity for the condition of the subaltern to get into a position of enunciation and reception. At present, Timbuktu calls for a new democratic consensus with the reform of conventional political parties, regimes of representation and electoral politics to improve functions of participation, deliberation, evaluation, and control through the formation of independent authorities. Thus, a significant demarcation from Western liberal democratic regimes now reduced to hoarding power and wealth while legitimizing neoliberal mechanisms of inequality, exclusion, and poverty creation which relies on electoral populism and demagoguery through great circuses. 3 Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu challenges that dichotomy between active participation and observation. The movie serves to complicate prevailing views about the root causes and essentialization of these processes. The goal is to get at how colonialism and imperialism had de-structured colonized traditional societies and opened up the way for authoritarian regimes and processes of ideological radicalism to take root in the name of fighting against a new world order dominated by Western imperialist politics and way of life. Now, the problem is that in the name of fighting the imperialist infidels, terror presents a new form of prophetic authoritarianism that questions the symbolic infrastructure of the modern nation-state, the heritage and patrimony of modern human right practices and democracy, coupled with issues of filiation and sacrality in the secular modern neoliberal state. The conflict between the Western “infidels” and their allies, and the radical and fanatical Islamists, has generated a competing global project. Islamic terror is now defined as a question of national security, national interests, realpolitik, democracy, and globalization by the Western countries. On the other hand, there is the construction of a global caliphate to oppose Western hegemony with a zero-sum faith-based warfare, peppered with a sadistic and macabre showmanship as an expression of “Necropolitics.” For Daesh, it means the total eradication of the so-called infidels and the primacy of the Oumma and the Sharia as a perfect form of political organization through the caliphate. 4 Through these macabre processes, there is, sadly, an attempt at a moral equivalence between absolute justice and absolute undiscriminate murders from Daesh.

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In the following pages, the way Sissako depicts that search for the Oumma runs counter to Universalist principles that stress freedom and emancipation for all. These processes signal the weakening of PanArabist ideology and leftist emancipatory politics and how that vision of the world has now descended into tribalism and identity politics. The competition between these extreme positions is taking place in the context of failed states and the privatization of violence. Daesh stakes out “Necropolitics” as a form of theocracy where political sovereignty is reduced to life and death, and it operates within a global vacuum where Pan-Arabism and leftist ideologies are weakening, and the hunt for a global consensus on forms of political sovereignty is anemic. Violence, hyper-modernity, and nihilistic consumption seem to be common features shared by these respective enemies complicating notions of the clash of civilization or Westernization. 5 Rene Girard’s notion of mimetic desire, acquisitive mimesis, violence, and the sacred is an invariant drive shared by many civilizations, and Girard writes that peace is the product of an anterior crisis. Here, Sissako plays on the complicated relationship between self-image and cinematic images, and the kind of narcissism that turns up empty. Meanwhile, this author calls for an urgent reflection on the work of scholars such as Tariq Ramadan and Edouard Glissant to discuss notions of emerging rational practice that is steeped into Kantian and Weberian ethics with the centrality of the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction. To understand what is at stake is how this emerging rationality challenges the tensions between concepts of El Wattan (nation-state) and the Oumma (community of the faithful living by the laws of the prophet), and how these two modes of political organizations create symbolic production and imagined communities around these concepts. In the Oumma, the structure, customs, and habits of the population are not made by human actions but must strictly reflect the teachings of the prophet and Tariq Ramadan argues that the text must continually be retheorized to adapt to contemporary realities. The goal is to reconcile the ongoing modernization of the modern secular state. Often in that state, religion is reduced to mere opinions and freedom of speech. In the Oumma, on the other hand, all subjectivities and forms of identification are processed through the prism of religion, all power comes from God, and the Oumma as a fantasy of original unity, a theocratic power where all mechanisms to enforce this theocracy are deemed legitimate. This work of reconciliation calls for the production of new norms and practices and where to put the cursor between relativism and absolutism in the public sphere. These processes demonstrate the necessity to produce new emergent rationalities that ally the production of knowledge created by techno-scientific rationality and the human desire for transcendence. Beneath these processes, it is the argument that the traditional narratives of a “clash of civilizations” may seem seductive (and

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serve contemporary political interests), but they are inadequate for thinking about the Middle East’s many overlapping histories. The reality on the ground is far more complex and infinitely more interesting than such a simple paradigm can account for (Blanc and Naudin, 2015; Malcolm, 2015; and Eltahawy, 2015). The counter-argument starts with the idea that emerging rationalities require the redefinition of the Oumma not only as a community of the faithful but in its ontological sense which is the biblical idea of the brother’s keeper. The notion of being one’s brother’s keeper already exists in the Islamic canon, therefore, the necessity of solidarity and the appurtenance to a global human community which is an invariance that religions descended from the Abrahamic tradition, Judaism, Christianity and Islam share in common. In practical terms, there are the questions to be asked when it comes to notions of the Oumma: How are social necessity, legal, religious created? Can the self-constitute itself as an object of study in the Oumma? And then there is the question of continuity of forms of knowledge. These processes bear on Ranciere’s notion of “partage des sensibilities” or “distribution of the sensible” in his book Hatred of Democracy and how democracy itself is a scandal because at the core is the challenge of asymmetrical relationships that can filter into every stratum of society. Thus, Ranciere reinforces the core tenets that in a democratic culture everyone has equal rights with the recognition that these basic tenets are scandalous in patriarchal stratified and vertical societies and, therefore, what it means to be a Democrat is the necessity for all to respect the democratic process. To answer the questions raised necessitates thinking deeper about the Oumma. Later in the chapter, I will argue with the work of Edouard Glissant and Tariq Ramadan, the necessity to bring out a recognition that the interpretation of religious texts has to be updated to conform to social and political expectations and the formation of new common sense in the twenty-first century. This work begins with the necessity to reinterpret religious texts in line with contemporary human rights discourses and democracy. As with Timbuktu, this section seeks to provide an original analysis of artistic sovereignty and the social production of Jihadist cruelty and spectacle. And the tangled web of nihilistic “Necropolitics” where the artist is battling terror for what Virilio calls weapons of mass communication and logistic perception. These weapons serve to control a form of power that is now crystallized through the pixels produced by Foucaultian’s apparatuses of surveillance and control and where the dividing lines between real danger and manufactured threat are increasingly blurred, and politics devolve into a zero sum game where political conflicts are settled by death. If anything, this author confronts how cinema tackles terror as both parts of larger processes of modernity and an ongoing invention of tradition that contains a strong historical dimension and those who control the production of historicity control power. This confrontation

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weaves together metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological processes, particularly, the ways in which totalitarianism always presents themselves as the beginning and end of history which explains its constant attacks on schools and universities where critical thinking is encouraged or other religions producing alternative forms of historical intelligibility. How African filmmakers such as Sissako are reframing the debate within globalization to present art as the quintessential space of creativity and self-expression to produce appropriate mechanisms for signification, sense-making, and values production. The analysis of Western neoliberal politics and radical Islam is a prelude to discussing how this battle operates on global media. In these media, terrorists are represented as sensationalistic and cruel because they give neither much-needed backgrounds to their image production nor any forms of legitimate justification, and focus on the lethal brutalities, not only against human beings but antiquities depicted in the videos. The alterity produced by the media shows an Islamic subjectivity where ideology has transformed into “Necropolitics” rather than the press as an expression of democracy and where the perpetrators have abdicated any connection with the non-Muslims. In these media productions, there is not even such a thing as an Islamic subjectivity, and the dissymmetry plays around issues of freedom and equality in the Western media and murderous reign in terror media. In “Necropolitics,” the destroyers of civilization have no use for the values of public opinion and deliberation. The only thing they care about is quickening the apocalypse. These processes highlight the function of image-making as an important site of values and norm-productions. In the process, terror media through its monstrosities seems to delegitimize any forms of legitimate grievances they might have. In fact, terrorists do have legitimate grievances. France’s relationship with the Middle-East is filled with double-standards. Among these legitimate grudges lie the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by the French and the British. The participation of France against Nasser during the Canal of Suez crisis, the botched decolonization in Algeria, the support of Arab dictators and the failure of the Arab Spring, the question of Palestine and social and economic issues that are manipulated through an attack on Islam via secular laws under the banner of “Laicite.” Now, Thomas Picketty demonstrated that growing inequalities make democracy tenuous in a world where the top eighty richest people own the equivalent of 3.5 billion people regarding resources (Picketty, 2014; and OXFAM Report on Global Inequality, 2015). 6 As such, Daesh is also an expression of modernity where the notion of freedom and prosperity for all, this idea of liberty and trickle-down economics and the ideology that “anyone can succeed if he tries hard enough” mentality does not work in practical ways for many people.

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Hence, the gruesome videos put together by Daesh, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and the hyper-Karcher murders are acts of medieval barbarity that constitute misguided responses from humiliated people using violence to spread a culture of fear. Striking fear into perceived enemies is the primary tool of the terrorists. This fear serves not only to shock but to foment a culture of hate. At this juncture, the world needs pedagogues rather than demagogues to attack the terrorist’s sense of righteousness and the root causes of terror in the West. TERROR AND PEDAGOGY As with Timbuktu, the need for more teaching will not come from France. Instead of tackling issues of inequality, the French intellectual class has opted for a defeated and archaic vision of identity politics and nostalgia for a pristine France void of foreigners which becomes a genuine testimony of the French intelligentsia’s capacity to build new forms of consensus. Nostalgia becomes a platform to rail against the modern age. The prevailing belief is that Western culture has been going down the tubes since 9/ 11. Alain Finkielkraut’s L’identité Malheureuse (2013), Éric Zemmour’s Suicide Français (2014), Michel Houellebecq’s La Carte et le Territoire (2010) and Submission (2015) are the recent bestsellers in that intellectual battlefield. Houellebecq (2010) presents France as a haven for global tourism, “with nothing to sell except charming hotels, perfumes, and potted meat.” Houellebecq’s latest novel Soumission (2015) is a dystopian parable about the election of an Islamist president in France, set against a backdrop of a general collapse of enlightenment values. For Houellebecq, as his fellow nostalgics, Islam is a religion associated with immigration, globalization, and the breakdown of French culture which makes Soumission very provocative for the ways in which religion is often used to process social tension. Fareed Zakaria writes that globalization has moved to its ultimate stage beyond fast and free movements of goods, services, technology, and information to the people. In the United States, 14 percent of the population is foreign-born compared to 1 percent fifty years ago. The same practices are occurring in Europe where many natives feel they no longer live in their countries, where activities such as the Brexit, the United Kingdom leaving the European Union in order to police its borders better (Zakaria, 2016). All these authors thrive on the perceived ineffectiveness of the French political class and exploit these problems and accentuate them to sell themselves as prophetic intellectuals. The contradiction here is that these so-called French organic intellectuals have a stake in these challenges, staying unresolved to continue making money which has called for the exploitation of some nostalgia porn, evidenced in the trouble encoun-

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tered by scholars such as Michel Onfray, who has been accused of getting on that gravy train just for crass opportunism. Moreover, what all these authors have in common is that none of them address the causes of the French malaise but only its effects and rely on personal ethics and morality as the solution. Thus, a significant underlying consideration here is the perception of the decline of French as a global language, and its (much-resented) replacement by English. A variety of groups and associations have long been campaigning vigorously against the importation of English words into French. The linguist Claude Hagège referred to the invasion of the English language as a “war,” claiming that its promotion “served the interests of neoliberalism.” Since 2011, the website of the Académie Française has a section dedicated to weeding out anglicisms from the French language. Among the expressions recently singled out for censure were conference call, off the record, Donner son go (authorize), chambre single, news and faire du running (notwithstanding this crusade, the word “selfie” is set to be included in the 2016 edition of the Larousse dictionary). French thinkers have been especially influential in shaping modern conceptions of citizenship—notably the revolution’s concept of civic patriotism (based on adhesion to common values rather than ethnicity), the notion of the general interest, and the vision of the state’s enabling and enlightening power, embodied in the holistic philosophy of Jacobinism. But this penchant for abstract generality also has its darker side. An insensitivity to the potentially intrusive and coercive role of the state; a suspicion of social groups that do not conform to shared universalistic norms (in the past, these included Catholics, women, and colonial subjects); a disposition to fall back on stereotypes, negative fantasies, and conspiracy theories; and a fondness for dividing the political sphere into antagonistic camps of good versus evil. This French penchant for abstraction appears in most paradoxical (and perverse) form in the absence of precise statistical information about their Maghrebi minorities, as it is illegal to collect data about ethnicity and religion in France. And so, instead of drawing on particular social facts and trends, the debate about minority integration has become mired in crude ideological oversimplifications. The equation of secularism with Frenchness; the suggestion that the (white, secular) French are the bearers of “reason.” Meanwhile, those who practice the Islamic faith are “reactionary” (the very same argument deployed earlier against any natives who dared question French colonial rule); and the essentialist assumption of an immutable, and yet paradoxically fragile, French national identity. This unitary and implicitly masculine sense of the French collective self, one of the less salubrious Legacies of Descartes’ conception of philosophical reason, remains widespread among progressives today. As the editor of Libération, Laurent Joffrin put it in an article in February: “Only an Abstract Conception of Man Can Confer Unity upon France.” (Hazareesingh, 2015).

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This colonialist legacy still casts a long shadow over the ways in which France treats and perceives its ethnic minority citizens, especially those originating from the Maghreb. These minorities are demonized in the conservative French press and by the extreme right, in a way that would be found shocking in Britain. This vilification has been made easier by the typically abstract way French progressives have framed the debate about minority integration. Thus the principle of laïcité (secularism) has been deployed not to protect the religious freedom of the Maghrebi minorities, as would follow from a strict interpretation of the 1905 law of separation of churches from the state, but to question their Frenchness. Those who have opposed the ban on the veil in schools have been spuriously accused of communitarianism and Islamism—terms all the more terrifying in that they are never precisely defined. Since the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo, there have been widespread calls for French citizens of Maghrebi origin to “prove” their attachment to the nation. Presenting the issue of civic integration in such terms has proved counterproductive, not least because it has detracted from the real problems confronting these populations: unemployment, racial discrimination, and educational underachievement. Moreover, French politicians, from the left and the right have decided to contain the problem instead of tackling it head-on, and in the process, playing into the hands of Marine LePen’s far-right National Front. Foreign nationals, mostly from northern African countries, who were invited to help rebuild France after War World II, were concentrated into Stalinist buildings away from the city centers. Additionally, French nationals called, “Pieds Noirs,” Jews and Arabs fleeing North Africa were also installed in these neighborhoods. In the 1960–1970s, with the economy growing at a 5 percent rate, those who could afford it left these slums called “banlieues” for better places and the rest are stuck in vertical slums with little hope to escape. These slums have no place to build communal lives. Anything that didn’t serve a vital function was apparently deemed superfluous by the planners, so it’s just tower block after tower block, turning these spaces into a dystopian reality. The contrast between Paris and what it separates itself from with the Boulevard Peripherique, even aesthetically, shows a basic lack of care. The reason there is so much anger in such places is that no political party in France has ever taken any interest in the descendants of immigrants, and so these people have organized their politics. The fact that this new politics is fundamentalist Islam, where for a woman to wear the traditional form of covering dress is more a political statement rather than an aesthetic choice, is irrelevant. To my thinking, a great deal of Islamic fundamentalism in the industrialized world is the consequence of the indifference of Western politicians over the last forty years. Abderrahmane Sissako exposes these practices.

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TERROR: OBJECTIVE VERSUS SUBJECTIVE VIOLENCE Objective and subjective violence are notions that come packaged with the concept of spectacle that Paul Virilio defines as logistic of perception (1989, 7). In this logic, human beings are social animals and violence comes to be seen as a social construct. And therefore there is a moral dimension to violence in a world where the tolerance for violence is very low due to the activism of animal rights, anti-spanking in schools, and sanitized coverage of wars, and how over time, ordinary people developed better skills at dealing with disagreements. As with the Boko Haram in Nigeria, which has pleaded allegiance to ISIL or Daesh, it is crucial to contemplate terror as objective and subjective forms of violence; and its tangled web with masculinity and the strong social and gender hierarchies it produces, and how these processes are embedded in a macho culture that correlates with global crisis in neoliberal capitalism and anti-establishment politics and postures that put an emphasis on local and nationalistic grievances and predatory business practices. It is important to explain how in the world what Steven Pinker describes as having a low tolerance for violence, terrorist groups are using this same violence as an advertising tool. Boko Haram has already produced 10,500 deaths from 2011 to 2014 and 1.7 million people displaced and how the Boko Haram uses contemporary social media to aesthecize these deaths mixing the aesthetic of violence and the increasingly morbid voyeurism it creates on the Internet (Osundi, 2015). 7 Isis or Daesh in the Middle East has gained notoriety with tapes of head-cutting that were quickly put on the global Internet network and social media and turned into propaganda and recruiting tools by providing a smooth, action-packed video that plays with an aesthetic close to video games (Difraoui, 2013). The popular reception of these tapes on social media is a testimony that these images are constitutive of the Jihadists’ mentality. They express an imaginary built on the belief that the laws of the prophet are superior to human and socially constructed laws. Therefore, the infidels can be maimed at will. Consequently, it is through the media that the hate of the other is sacralized. As with Daesh, who Boko Haram has pleaded allegiance to, the Boko Haram exploits the mythology of the gore and how this violence mirrors the exploitation of slasher and gore films of the 1950s B-movies shot in Hollywood. At this juncture, the Boko Haram has more in common with the Mafia movies and terrorist organizations such as the Baader-Meinhof complex in Germany, Action Directe in France and the Red Brigades in Italy. This awareness naturalizes a long history of film which has been cultivated over decades and appeals to male fantasies of power and subjugation of women. In an age of the digital, there is something more attractive with violence in 2-D where death is desacralized but eroticized; and violence aims to create emotion and exploit emotion to create a bi-

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nary ideology of us versus them and naturalize “Necropolitics” regarding who should live and who should die. In some respects, the recruitment of Jihadists is no longer based on face to face interactions but a culture of addiction to technology, speed, and violence. Hence, Daesh exploits a participatory media culture in a feedback loop where external reality is no longer present and images have lost any connections to their object but new mythologies are created by picking and mixing from an already existing pool of images (Jenkins, 2003, 306). Therefore, how images are producing reality and how our reality changes are trapped into a culture of simulacra, abjection, and hygienic practices such as the extermination of the infidels. The emphasis on terrorism and objective and subjective violence must take into account Richard Dawkins’s notion of human beings as “survival machines known as genes.” This is a description of human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true. It may not be an accident that torture is often deployed in the special operations that have replaced more traditional types of warfare. The extension of counter-terrorism to include assassination by unaccountable mercenaries and remote-controlled killing by drones is part of this shift. A metamorphosis in nature is war under way, which is global in reach. With the state of Iraq in ruins as a result of U.S.-led regime change, a third of the country is controlled by Isis, which can inflict genocidal attacks on Yazidis and wage a campaign of terror on Christians with nearimpunity. In Nigeria, the Islamist militias of Boko Haram practice a type of warfare featuring mass killings of civilians, razing of towns and villages, and sexual enslavement of women and children. In Europe, targeted killing of journalists, artists, and Jews in Paris and Copenhagen embodies a type of warfare that refuses to recognize any distinction between combatants and civilians. Whether they accept the fact or not, advanced societies have become terrains of violent conflict. Rather than war declining, the difference between peace and war has been fatally blurred. While knowledge and invention may grow cumulatively and at an accelerating rate, advances in ethics and politics are erratic, discontinuous and easily lost. Amid the general drift, cycles can be discerned: peace and freedom alternate with war and tyranny, eras of increasing wealth with periods of economic collapse. Instead of becoming ever stronger and more widely spread, civilization remains inherently fragile and regularly succumbs to barbarism. This view, which was taken for granted until sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, is so threatening to modern hopes that it is now practically incomprehensible. The linkage between the meditation on global terror and the films under study must be made more effectively. This work, consequently, addresses the question of perception, images, and conceptions of the real

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and the global war on terror. I begin with the notion of the camera-eye, much like Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s notion of Mevungu which defines African camera apparatuses as the ultimate observer and chronicler of African subjectivity. Even more so, the camera highlights the capacity, before language capacity for abstraction and imagination that go beyond ordinary human contradictions. It is a form of off-screen, nondiegetic, a present which is not there, representation and mimesis, visibility and value of authenticity, and how values of authenticity have a history, the shaman-artisan and the power to construct and provide models of identifications to mediate the public sphere. This notion of the camera-eye helps to respond to the central question: Can the subaltern speak? In this war of seeing and subjectivity, the symbolic of the camera-eye comes as a vessel to discuss processes of human embodiment and immersive human experience. The camera-eye is a form of the anthropology of visibility and mimesis production to rethink processes of visibility and the totality of the social, the democratization of public space, the constitution of spheres of public and a critical and competent citizenry. These processes entail the distinction between visibility, values of authenticity, a model of identification, recognition, affectivity, desire, and the production of difference and similarity through media related industries and structures of interaction, and the dissymmetry created by symbolic mechanisms of massification, hierarchy, and performativity produced by the totalitarian state. Sissako engages the cognitive function of perception and how the logistic of perception is organized in totalitarian states. The camera-eye introduces transparency and rational discourse into a community being straight-jacketed into abstract uniformity. This symbolic struggle aims to open up a privatized space to discuss sense and value beginning with the contradictions between personal virtues, voyeuristic tyranny, the right to knowledge and democratic practices such as the right to privacy, mobility, responsibility, and accountability. Hence, the capacity of the cameraeye to operate as a cultural resource to produce and create alterity and therefore an expression of democracy in ways that theocratic regimes that consider image production as the source of idolatry and iconoclastic practices. Fiction makes reality better the role of narrative choice and subjectivity and the role of fiction is to understand the mechanics of the real. Emerging rationalities are equations between subjectivities and the social environment while complicating the notion of divine and electoral promise. The camera-eye cultivates an alternative form of subjectivity in the age of image saturation and regimes of truth. The camera-eye aims to film not only images but the state of consciousness, the notion of know thyself and cultural citizenship as the capacity to narrate one’s life, putting words into our experience to produce our subjectivity and also the reality you want to live under. In this case, how theocracy provides

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events where the difference between beliefs and thoughts are often confused. And so, the camera highlights how the relationship with the real is constructed and how the relationships with causality are organized. Thus, the camera-eye is essential to engage the relationships between aesthetics and terror and how agency can be located in the capacity to build and sustain cultural resources to stage battles of fictions and images against violent theocratic regimes in a globalized visual culture that organize contemporary reality. And so, Sissako’s Timbuktu is a reflection on the political function of images and the imbrication between visual technologies, the logistics of perception, practices of seduction and agency. Hence, the knowledge that the frontier between natural and artificial perception is increasingly blurred and how aesthetic judgments are necessary to grasp and discern the quality of emergent rationalities. These processes put an emphasis on creativity, democratic practices, functionality, aesthetics, and the capacity to produce and integrate alterity. This alterity serves to clash with the concentric circle of nationalism, solidarity and groupthink, hyper-modernity, capitalism, and processes of global racial formation and stratification to shed some explanatory lights on terror, normative perspectives, practices of distinction, and capacities for criticism under cosmopolitan politics Timbuktu The movie Timbuktu opens with the structuring scene where the terrorists are seen “tiring the gazelles” and shooting at cultural artifacts including the fertility goddess, in the process, eradicating centuries of peaceful coexistence among various religions and tolerant administrative structures. The metaphor of the gazelle is a window into the Jihadists’ mindset. First, this hubristic’s notion that men still rule over nature. In the age of the Anthropocene where human being’s geophysical activities are creating global warming, and the gradual eradication of humans and other species from the face of the earth, because of melting glaciers and receding forests, unless remedies are swiftly put into place the idea of men as the ruler of nature is laughable. The consequences of this mentality are the necessity of a non-human anthropology because non-humans are also drastically affected by geothermal conditions they have nothing to do with. Most importantly, how failures in social relationships are also causes for disaster. Sissako is clear that problems plaguing the African continent go beyond Islamic Jihad. In Mali, more than Islamic Jihad, there is global warming and the ancestral competition between herders and fishermen, which in Timbuktu resulted in Kidane (herder) killing Amadou (fisherman), tribal war between Peuls and Tuaregs, northern and southern Malians over the Azawad, the secessionist Tuareg republic, north Mali, and in so doing, how these issues are imbricated into each other and influence each other.

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Second, the Jihadists’ invasion of northern Mali is a metaphor for a sandstorm that kills everything in its path, and does not value life and freedom. The idea of sandstorm here is the virality of evil infecting northern Malians auto-immune defenses turning the place into a social nightmare. Later on, they are seen shooting at sand dunes just because they remind them of the female body. Sissako points out that Jihadism can be the product of sexual frustration. It is a form of perversity where the Jihadist has trouble relating to women. Here, Sissako argues that a human being cannot lead an authentic life when he fails to engage with his sexuality properly. And one reason Sissako made Timbuktu was his anger at images of stoning that happened during the invasion of northern Mali by Islamic Jihadists and the movie becomes a way to reinsert freedom against the force of fatality. 8 The attack on the masks has many logics. First is the notion of offscreen space and how in films, such as Sissako’s Timbuktu, off-screen events are as compelling as events appearing on the screen. For instance, the destruction of the masks also indicated the previous destruction of cultural heritages perpetrated by the Jihadists, such as the destruction of manuscripts in Timbuktu’s library and the desecration of Islamic saints in the city. Second, the destruction of masks refers to what anthropologists calls “The Mana” which is a talismanic object which has useful and supernatural power. In most Africans’ metaphysical culture, the world is divided between the spirits of the day and the spirits of the nights, and people who have real power can straddle both worlds. This metaphysical division reflects the animal world and species that thrive at night and sleep during the day and vice versa. In African culture, each has a comparable totem in the animal world. By destroying the masks, consequently, the terrorists are cutting themselves off that power to straddle both worlds and curse themselves because they are in fact rupturing their genealogical filiation with the people they seek to govern. This anthropological rupture demonstrates the lack of understanding of the context in which they operate. This also signals their imminent demise because they show themselves as not having the intelligence and the skills to rule. That comes into play, for instance, when Kidane, the herder, kills Amadou, the fisherman, in the act of human frailty and fragility. Kidane is condemned to death within twenty-four hours. The Jihadist cannot handle proper justice because they do not understand the culture of fishing and herding and the basis out of which these unfortunate events occur. At this juncture, there is another subtle critique of the clash of civilization because not everything is about Muslim versus the West in the Muslim world. Through the killing of Amadou, Sissako plumbs the darker depths of that invasion to demonstrate that religion is not the only determinant in that part of the

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world. There are also political, economic, social, and ethnic tensions that need to be addressed competently. To understand Kidane’s dark gesture, one has to refer to Rene Girard’s work, particularly, Violence and the Sacred (1977, 49) where he writes that the loss of distinction creates violence. Kidane and Amadou are both wounded souls engaging in the politics of viscerality. Politics of viscerality is predicated on the idea of loss. This loss, however, is not even conscious often. The protagonists might not even be fully aware of what is being lost. For instance, after killing Amadou, Kidane professes how much he misses his family and that Amadou was a brother. The resolution of this killing is not conventional either. The Jihadists completely lose control over the proceeding and Kidane, and his wife Saitima, are sacrificed for something that is not clearly related to Amadou’s killing. By sacrificing Saitama, additionally, Houria Abdelouahed argues that the unsurpassed horizon of many fundamentalist Muslims is tribal and misogynistic. Women, and even their paradise, are represented as a land of milk, honey, and an endless supply of virgins, and how that dystopian imaginary is the blueprint for the repressive theocracy set up by the Islamic fundamentalist from the Daesh to the Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. This exploitation of the Islamic faith serves to advocate for an archaic form of patriarchy (Abdelhouahed, 2015). With these structuring images, Sissako takes the viewers on the steps of the evolution from hurting animals to total tyranny, particularly, how a laundry list of personal grievances and confusion culminate into public events and national trauma. Sissako shows processes that explain how, in the broken mind of terror, history begins and ends with the terrorist. With this beginning, Sissako emphasizes the relationship between cinema and history and the production of alterity and expression of democracy. The discussion between movie and the real begins in Timbuktu with the terrorist’s destruction of masks in Timbuktu with their AK-47 (Rohe, 2012). 9 The first mistake is not to understand the power of communication exchanges and symbolic practices that structure societies on the African continent, and the role masks play in how these Africans perceive and organize their communities. Hence, the mask is a template about how ordinary Africans think about themselves and the world. African masks mirror the same symbolic practices starting with the Greeks and how the practice of masks serves to differentiate between men and the gods. Wearing masks for ordinary humans is a practice to recognize their humanity and pay tribute to heroes such as Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, to symbolize their representativity and the role that memory plays in political practices of representation. The mask is representative of a subjectivity and a state of consciousness. The mask is equally the difference between God and humans because the mask appears at a time when gods used to appear in human forms and to differentiate ordinary humans from God, the humans have to wear mask. Likewise, masks can

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also be a reference for genealogy and epistemology. The mask is the capacity to narrate one’s life, putting words into our experience produce our subjectivity and also the reality you want to live under, generate events, and the difference between beliefs and thought, and this is where theocracy impedes thinking. Thus, the mask is a place of symbolic interactions and development of subjectivity. Implicit in these destructions, it is the argument that by destroying the mask, the terrorist is, in fact, destroying the face of the other because, as Slavoj Žižek claims, that Emmanuel Levinas writes that alterity is central to the development of subjectivity. Levinas writes that when face to face with the other, I am infinitely responsible for him. This is the original ethical constellation (2005, 148). As such, the opposite of alterity is alienation, and the mask plays a great articulating of the relationship between communal and individual identities (2005, 134–90). These practices emphasize social and gender fluidity, permeability where ordinary men and women can transform into an animal. This form of humanism is tolerant and open and advocates for a work of civic participation that balances values and feeling for the making of productive and emancipatory politics. In Timbuktu, this line of fracture essentializes the difference between the Oumma, the community of the faithful institutionalized by the prophet, and the organization of the syncretic modern liberal state in Africa inherited from colonization. The Oumma does not recognize historical processes that lead to the constitution of the modern nation-state. For them, the struggle is between good and evil. By shooting at the masks, moreover, the terrorists signal a desire to amputate the interactions between supernatural entities and creative practices and judgment. The shooting highlights Freud’s notion of monotheism and violence, and the difference with so-called pagan societies. It puts into context issues of universalism, cosmopolitanism versus uniformity and how in monotheistic societies the collusion between the state and religion leaves little space for ordinary citizens to negotiate their lives which is not the case in pantheistic society. Within that context, it makes sense that Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, one of the leaders of that Jihad insurgency in northern Mali, came to his senses, plead guilty, and apologized to the Malian people for destroying their cultural heritage. Al Faqi al-Mahdi accepted his sentence of nine years at La Hague for destroying human heritage cultural resources, the first sentence for this kind of offense ever. Timbuktu becomes necessary to address artistic sovereignty and the constant dialectic between new forms of imagination and legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence, and how these processes open up new subjectivities through innovative entrepreneurship, revolutionary labor practices that create accumulative pressure to advance modernization and democratic values. Thus, this work captures the shift between turning a social condition into an experience of imagination that displays this

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constant negotiation between violence, desire, and processes of subjectivation. It mediates the creation of modern liberal right-based values in a world dominated by violence. As such, this section seeks to highlight the connection between cultural development, professionalism, middle-class values, and the connection with the violence. And also the necessity to rethink determinants, such as the interplay between violence and imagination within the modernization of the modern states in Africa, and what Paul Virilio calls the logistics of perception and how those who control power also control screens. Precisely, how images and values promoted by Nollywood are competing for attention with the “terror-porn” produced by the Boko Haram. Additionally, this chapter articulates these mechanisms within a new digital economy that re-arms new discourses and subjectivities and the creation of new critical spaces to escape repressive mechanisms to imagine new democratic communities to rethink notions of cosmopolitanism. Hence, Timbuktu (2014) is a widely critically acclaimed film and Academy Awards nominee for a best foreign film directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. Timbuktu documents the town’s real-life occupation by Islamic extremists which disintegrates into a fascist theocracy, allegedly in the name of God. Timbuktu (2014) flows from Death in Timbuktu, a short Western inserted into Bamako (2006), a cinematic essay on the mythological power and intertextuality of the Western, particularly the spaghetti Western defined by the Trinita movie series that at times were considered throw-away exploitation cinema. Sissako, however, reclaims this film as a source of cinematic influence and experimentation. These tropes of the Western movie genre were referenced in earlier African films such as Mustapha Alassane’s The Return of an Adventurer (1966). And the work of filmmakers such as Djibril Diop Mambety and Alphonse Beni allowed them to comment on the difference between reappropriation and mechanical reproduction, therefore, how reception can become a creative experience (Sissako, 2006). 10 Sissako follows the same logic to demonstrate that originality is the talent and the authorial capacity to infuse creative intervention and new meanings into old texts. His screen emphasizes the correlation between spatialization, perspectives, and points of view and the need for wisdom in the constant negotiation between old and new knowledge. These frames set the stage for Sissako to complicate the Western’s cultural dynamics regarding the struggle between civilizations over nature, rationalism versus irrationalism, status quo versus movement. In Timbuktu, when the bad guys roll into town, there is neither a lone sheriff, ranger, nor a posse of mercenaries making a last stand against the invaders on behalf of the city, but a set of strong local women holding up their nerves to brave the Damocles Sword of apocalyptic annihilation. These attacks on women are symptomatic of the zealots’ puritanism but also something that can be called self-hate. The film bypasses religion to

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become a window into thuggish recolonization within a discourse on pathological masculinity that is ultimately intertwined with this civilizing mission or Jihad and raises questions of virility, violence, and legitimate self-defense. These deconstructions of masculinity are to emphasize pretexts for masculine bullying and domination that can be read in Timbuktu as any anti-hero in conventional Western movies. Timbuktu becomes emblematic of a cinematic reflection on art versus terror, and one senses Sissako challenging cinematic production values to highlight the importance of artistic sovereignty and an aesthetic reading upon these difficult issues. It resorts that these Islamic zealots are not as culturally retrograde as they appear. They are high-tech media savvy and well inserted into global circuits of consumption and shown not to be living up to the rigid standards they set for others. Correct. These Muslim zealots are addicted to their mobile phones, cars, video cameras, and weapons. This generation of Jihadists is heretofore caught up in the unacknowledged product of historical processes of modernity and violence beyond their grasp. 11 This is where this work relies on the scholarship of Aihwa Ong and her notion of “roaming identities” and Hamid Naficy’s notion of “exilic, diasporic and accented film, in-joke, and self-inscription autobiographical and doubling (Ong, 1999; and Naficy, 2001). Timbuktu, therefore, is useful in testing the relationships between aesthetics and terror and how agency can be located in the capacity to build and sustain cultural resources to stage battles of fictions and images against violent theocratic regimes in a globalized visual culture that organizes contemporary reality. Thus, Sissako’s Timbuktu is a reflection on the political function of images and the imbrication between visual technologies, the logistics of perception, practices of seduction and agency. Hence, the knowledge that the frontier between the natural and artificial perception is increasingly blurred and how aesthetic judgments is necessary to grasp and discern the quality of emergent rationalities. And how the Oumma, in Timbuktu, is not representative of the holy land and the promised land. As Baudrillard (2001, 166) writes, however, that simulation no longer refers to a territory, a referential being or substance but instead a form of hyper-real where the real has no origin or reality but merely fiction imitating something that appears to be a reality. In this sense, Baudrillard goes further to argue that images are in fact blocking reality. And, they prevent reality within the meaning that the Promised Land is no longer an objective to work toward but the Islamic zealots pretend that is an objective that is already attained. This Promised Land is fictional for the way that the chief Jihadist regularly clashes and imposes his will on the Imam and de-sacralized his mosque by entering this holy setting with their shoes on and strapped with their AK-47 to which the Imam retorted “have you come to do your Jihad into our mosque?” The Imam’s irony points to the obvious knowledge that ignorant people cannot pretend to be Jihadists when they neither understand nor

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respect the scripture. This scene is also important because the Imam’s words point to the fact that proper Islam is the cure to terrorism and how terrorism emerges out of barbaric, superstitious theocracy rather than an erudite reading of the scripture. In a scene that follows, the chief Jihadist forced his heretic reading of the Koran upon the Imam and a family by claiming that it was the duty of a woman to be subjected to forced marriage and repeatedly marital rapes because a woman’s consent was irrelevant when it comes to Jihad. The chief of the Jihad, played by Salem Dendou, consequently, overrules the Imam by making legal a wedding where the family of the bride has already rejected her wannabe husband turning this marriage into legal marital rape. The idea that the chief Jihadist knows the Koran and has the right to proclaim Fatwas is blasphemy. In Islamic jurisprudence, Fatwas are deliberative, and a collegial practice and the real Fatwas will only happen on judgment day. In the Surat 75 of the Koran, judgment belongs to Allah exclusively. Allah is the ultimate judge. In this sense, Islam is an Abrahamic religion and therefore access to the Promised Land is a human process, a goal that can only be achieved through the acts of God. The concept of the Promise Land is a prophetic and utopic idea, not a finality to be accomplished on earth but as a form of reward in heaven. The finality, consequently, is to earn a favorable judgment from God and the kind of arrogance displayed by the Jihadists veer on the side of blasphemy. The finality is to stand in front of God with humility, and the kind of arrogance displayed by the Jihadists is blasphemy. Sissako paints a portrait of Jihadists only preoccupied with material conditions through the ruthless and exclusive appropriation of all government machinery which only result in failed institutions and widespread corruption they claim to be fighting against. The question of religion and ethics are not even evoked in a government that aims to become a theocracy. They are not concerned with the common interest, with an emphasis that can be shared by all, such as respect, humility, beauty, peace, love, music, all instruments that can facilitate communion with the highest order. Thus, the Oumma depicted in Timbuktu is a simulacrum of the past without an injection of conscious awareness. Terror, in Timbuktu, is nothing but a performance whose foundational visual iconography of this Jihad was produced by 9/11. It brings a paradox to this radical practice of Islam which is anti-iconography but has over time developed a recognizable visual language with a black flag and the chaada and the AK-47 which replaces the sword of the prophet. The Jihadist as Asshole The concept of the Jihadist as an asshole aims to demonstrate that the terrorist is neither the product of sociology nor the environment but a

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perverse psychic disease. And the order that Sissako describes from the beginning in Timbuktu, which the Jihadist is taking pleasure in the abject torture of a deer where they derive pleasure at seeing the deer running into exhaustion, or the preventing of young boys from enjoying soccer games, banning music and dance, while secretly enjoying smoking cigarettes, soccer, harassing women, and legalizing marital rape. As with the notion of the asshole, it places Jihad within the broad society and how these patterns of behavior apply to all religions and not solely Islam. Atheists also share some of these behaviors that scholars, such as Christopher Lasch, has attributed to the concept of the individual king and a growing culture of narcissism. To deconstruct the image of the Jihadist is to reveal personalities, patterns of behavior and psychology of reasoning that go beyond religion but to the broad societies and how these issues must be addressed in the public sphere. The claim being made here is that the Jihadist, as depicted in Timbuktu, is not a religious figure but fits the description of the asshole described by Aaron James (2012). 12 James’s definition of the asshole here is important because there is an invariance in all Abrahamic religion which condemns the murder of the innocent. The asshole in this sense is a libertarian perversion of libertarian ideals of thinkers such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, transforming anarchic libertarian politics into me first ideology to expose their banality. Aaron James defines the assholes as a person who allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically; does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people (2012, 5). The asshole is superior, immune to your complaints, though he insists you listen to his. He is reflective, but only to the extent that it allows him to justify his behavior morally. And though he ordinarily acts within the boundaries of the law and exacts a relatively small material toll on society, which distinguishes him from the sociopaths, he nonetheless triggers feelings of powerlessness, fear, or rage in those who cross his path. Most important, he behaves like this systematically. He is terminal, incorrigibly, an asshole. Two of James’s insights about the asshole are particularly striking. First, why is the asshole so infuriating, even when the harm he does is slight? James’s answer is that the asshole’s entrenched sense of entitlement—the asshole’s refusal to treat others as equals—adds a particular sting to the injuries he forces upon us. It’s not just that he cuts in line or takes the last two cookies for himself. It’s that, even when confronted, he refuses to recognize us as a deserving equal consideration for line position and cookie consumption. A little jerk—in James’s terminology— might be moved upon reflection to confess the wrongness of his actions. However, the more you protest, the more the asshole glazes over and rises, in his mind, above you. Second—and equally infuriating—the asshole, unlike the psychopath, is morally motivated. It’s not just “morality be

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damned; I’m getting mine!” Rather, the asshole feels morally entitled to unique advantages. Injustice is done, he feels, if he has to wait in the post office line equally with everyone else. Sanctimonious selfishness is the mark of the asshole. In the conclusion of his book—his “Letter to an Asshole”—James addresses the asshole with remarks like this: “we should ask about the nature of your own presumed special moral status” (2012, 198). And “I address you here to give you . . . an argument that you really should come to recognize others as equals, that you should in this way change your basic way of being” (2012, 190). This is off key, I think, because many assholes, perhaps most, would not explicitly acknowledge, even privately to themselves, that they deserve special moral consideration; they would not deny that “all men are created equal”—in the morally relevant sense of “equal.” Rather, I suggest, their spontaneous reactions and their moral judgments about particular cases reveal that they implicitly regard others as undeserving of full moral consideration; but when pushed to verbalize, and when reflecting in their usual self-congratulatory mode, they will deny that this is in fact their view. Timbuktu and Emerging Rationalities Sissako demonstrates a filmmaking practice that takes into account multiple temporalities. Notably, the historical tension between herders and fishermen that is completely botched by the new rulers exposing their incompetence, which begins by their lack of knowledge of the local languages, which demonstrates their status as an army of occupation. On the ethnographic area, the Jihadists fail to understand the ethnic composition of the place with the Touregs and the local ethnicities, such as the Songhay and the Bozos and the pre-Islamic and pre-colonial past of Africa, which legacies are still present. Not everything is about Islam. The killing of Amadou, the fisherman, by Kidane, the herder, can be attributed to the stress induced by global warming and how the competition over water is turning deadly. 13 One way Sissako addresses the inventiveness of the Malian youth and contemporary global culture, particularly a powerful scene where they are shown miming a soccer game in the face of the Jihadists who have declared war on any leisure activities. Sissako, who admits not to be a mad football fan himself, captures the essence of that game as a ballet running on improvisation, creativity, agility, and virility, a form of interpersonal communication that communicates a panel of emotions from the viewer. With these scenes, Sissako uses his knowledge of silent films that shoots through his filmography. Moreover, he shows that sport and will are interconnected in ways that the body, foremost, is an expression of the will and the soul of the person. There is also an ethic to sport because it represents a form of self-accomplishment through discipline

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and perfect gesture. As with the soccer scenes, Sissako demonstrates that rituals precede the mythology and how soccer began as a collection of ritualistic gestures. With these scenes, moreover, Sissako exemplifies how a cinema of limited resources makes up in creativity. There is also the problem of gender and sexuality and the changing nature of sexuality in Mali that the Jihadists do not know how to handle with their millennial ideology. This tension culminates with Fatoumata Diawara singing the movie theme song to her family while the Jihadists are pipping all over the neighborhood looking for the singer with malicious intent. In this sense, Timbuktu is a reflection on how dystopia and utopia are entangled and how cultural development also depends on the production of symbolic resources in countries where the unity of the power of the states is fractured, authority in crisis and the monopoly on violence diffracted. The lack of the structuring power of the state is opening a vacuum for terrorists to exploit. The debate, however, must be recentered on cinematic technologies as practices of emancipation and how these processes are contaminated by pathologies such as terrorism. The notion that terror is also a war on seeing and the production of reality, and locate agency in terms of creativity and self-expression that reflect personal speeches, heroism of authenticity, local rationalities and dynamics, and turn the figure of authority from a place of the tragic to a resource of creativity and inspiration to articulate new possibilities, shared citizenship and respect for diversity. The real problem is the creation of a new elite in states that were created by a colonial power. Going back to the origin is a conscious process of deliberation, we live in a modern age and must be careful not to treat people like objects. Cinema, therefore, helps ordinary citizens to constitute themselves as autonomous bodies and subjects. Timbuktu becomes a cautious tale of a subaltern who wants to become the measure of all things, despite, the fact that the postcolonized is himself caught up and entangled within the legacy of Western modern state formation, neoliberal capitalism, and global racial formation. And therefore, how the postcolonial subject has to regularly interrogate the relationship between the real and images in order to avoid fetishizing the past, and in this case how this production of the past comes to be expressed as a violent demiurgic fantasy, and this is where Sissako takes up Paul Virilio (1989), and how modern subjectivity tends to reflect dominant modes of perception engendered by new technologies. Therefore, how new technology becomes a mode of action rather than a mode of representation. It is important to discuss issues raised in Timbuktu in the light of recent theorizing coming out of the “Banlieue.” The “Banlieue” has always been depicted as a place of what Judith Butler calls “the permanent

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elsewhere.” Scholars such as Tariq Ramadan and Edouard Glissant have always challenged that cliché. Tariq Ramadan in Quest for Meaning (2010), is a profound reflection on what can constitute a new theology of hospitality. In it, Ramadan calls for a Copernican revolution in Muslim political thought with the objective to develop a philosophy of pluralism. One that allows us to step back from the narrow window of our limited viewpoint and plunge into notions, concepts, and questions, to open ourselves to the deep study of what the world’s philosophies, spiritual traditions, and religions have told us down through history. Ramadan, therefore, seeks creative ways to open up bridges among religions as the means to reform and adapt religions to contemporary global realities, particularly, the ones concerning Islamic orthodoxy and secular democracies. Ramadan is not just a religious warrior. He thrives to open up a space of thinking with its proper vocabulary, to reconcile the prophetic argumentation of the Koran and intellectual thinking, to challenge the notion that Islam always rejects reason in the name of dogma. Here, Ramadan agrees with other Muslim scholars, such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, who argue that Muslims in France are lucky to live in democratic countries where religious rights to practice their religion is a guarantee (2002, 76). Those scholars’ purpose is to begin by understanding how Islamic doctrine, which in the past has encouraged science, the arts, and philosophy is now taking a backseat to these disciplines. They consider that Ben, the so-called incompatibility between Islam and science, is a manufactured controversy. Ramadan starts his concept of Islamic rationalism with a tribute to Immanuel Kant and the idea that the knowledge that we produce is knowledge that is limited to our capacity of perception and experience. Therefore, the mind and the intellect is an object that must continually be challenge to adapt to contemporary realities. 14 Second, by quoting Kant, Ramadan makes the case that people who believe in God are not irrational. In this case, it is adapting the religious text to time and the idea that religion is a constant negotiation between the text and the context, and the concept that a good mufti is somebody who not only understands the religious text but the surrounding environment and the experiences his fellow human beings are going through. Thus, people who read religious texts literally are the ones that are irrational. This is important because Ramadan writes that Muslims have to accept the social contracts in place in European countries unless they are directly violated. Here Ramadan seeks to give a sense of responsibility for Muslims and fights the notion of fatalism to reinforce Islam and re-enchant the idea of progress at a time when the ideology of progress, such as Pan-Arabism and leftist ideologies, are waning. Ramadan goes with the notion that faith is universal and his definition of Jihad is not war but to resist all forms of alienation and oppression, internal and external. He describes himself as Muslim by religion, European by culture, and Swiss by citizenship. Hence, Ramadan

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is assimilated, but assimilation does not mean a renunciation of personal memory and history and the idea that citizenship does not preclude the idea of belonging to the human community, which is essential in religious texts, be it the Koran or the Bible. Therefore, freedom of worship is part of the democratic experience. Ramadan begins with the Koranic knowledge that diversity itself is the will of God as in the Koran “To your religion, to me mine” (109:1–6). Therefore, Muslims must appreciate diversity as a gift of God, intolerance against other religions traditions and extreme proselytizing is discouraged. Ramadan makes the difference between teaching and indoctrinating, and recognizes that Muslims must compete to make their values and ethical principles known, and are active in the public sphere through the construction of space of testimony [dar-al-shahada] (Ramadan, 2010, 145, 202). And so, Ramadan calls for forms of theoretical creativity and syncretic visions that must engage both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars. Ramadan’s goal is to fight against religious prejudices with the means of reason. He pinpoints the complexity and difficulty to have a reasonable discussion in a digital age dominated by information overload, drawing attention to this paradox. Moreover, how underneath that discourse of pluralism, demagogues attack religious faith under laws such as “laicite” which go under the guise of the respect of secular democracy. These demagogues are going into reverse position mandating that Muslim women remove their veils and those who pray in the streets for lack of mosques are stigmatized as “occupation forces,” according to the farright leader Marine LePen. The pluralism Ramadan has in mind is the knowledge that there is a good deal the West has learned from Islam in the past, and there is more that it can still learn. A pluralistic society, with Islam as part of it, could be the way forward, beyond the sterile secularism of the Western European model. Thus, it is a new attitude to learning and pedagogy. Islam, the religion, and the Muslim world is a major element in global history, and has been a largely external but adjacent and opposing force to Christianity and the Christian world. So knowing about it is part of being informed and cultured. Ramadan is interested, not just in having us know something about Islam, but in determining what our attitude should be toward it. This position is motivated by the idea that plurality won’t work in a context of ignorance. For Ramadan, pluralism means visibility for all religions. On that score, he is against the idea that Laicity laws mean that religion must be restricted to the private sphere. Ramadan, naturally, is working on the articulation between civil and religious laws, therefore, the idea that Muslims should not have a problem being integrated into the larger society. Technically, Ramadan’s view is that religion, typically, starts where superstition ends. This assertion means that religious practitioners are rational actors. Admittedly, religious pluralism is always a process, a practice in a pluralistic universe that challenges stereotypes

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and clichés and foregrounds double knowledge which is awareness of the self and knowledge of the world and how the objective is always a transformational experience. Ramadan’s “philosophy of pluralism” has been theorized before by thinkers such as Edouard Glissant and his notion of “Tout-Monde” and how in practice we experience polyphony without cacophony. Glissant, with “Le Tout-Monde,” engages with as many possibilities of a global dialogue, while resisting the homogenizing forces of globalization. Glissant’s thought is about the archipelago, the exchange that takes place between the islands, allowing each to preserve their identity. Being from the French island of Martinique, Glissant derives his idea of “Creolization,” which is the blend of cultures, in ways that continents reject mixings whereas archipelagic thought makes it possible to say that neither the person’s identity nor the collective identity are fixed once and for all. I can change through the exchange with the other without losing or diluting my sense of self. And that’s what Glissant shows us, how different forms of rationalities keep emerging from the dynamic of cultural interactions. It begins with the idea that there is no origin to go back to because the rupture already happened. What is real is what is happening. NOTES 1. The movie was shot in the town of Oualata, Mauritania, after a suicide bomber targeted the crew in Timbuktu, Mali. The film took six weeks to shoot under heavy security measures. 2. French thinker Thomas Guenole has a book on this topic called Les Jeunes des Banlieues Mangent t’ils les Enfants (2015) as a reference to the anti-communist propaganda of the Cold War where the communists were portrayed as eating babies. 3. Many politicians know how to get themselves elected but do not know how to govern; ordinary citizens have to reclaim initiatives in policy making, and if the policies are not enacted, mechanisms of election recall—such as in Switzerland—must be required to kick incompetent or corrupt politicians out of power. As it stands, citizens seem only to have the authority to sanction politicians but not to make policies. 4. Daesh is a sprawling multination terrorist enterprise. UN Report, “Number of people fighting for ISIS has tripled to 71% therefore 25,000 fighters for over 100 countries,” http://www.ibtimes.com/terrorist-groups-isis-al-qaeda-attract-more-25000-fore ign-fighters-un-report-1867392, April 2, 2015. 5. As with privatized terrorist organizations, such as Isis, there is no respect for the Geneva Convention of the distinction between captured prisoners, wounded fighters, and civilians. The whole population is treated as the enemy combatant which brings up the issues of proportion and proportionate violence, autonomous actors away from state apparatuses and official history. 6. Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014 and OXFAM report on Global Inequality 2015: “The Richest 1% will own more than all of the Rest in 2016,” OXFAM.org, published January 19, 2015. 7. From lecture by Chikwudi Osundi, “Examining Boko Haram,” paper presented at the African Conference, Austin, Texas, April 3, 2015. 8. These attitudes raise concerns about Jihadists’ sexual confusion as well as the Orlando killer, Omar Mateen, and Mohammed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who drove over

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eighty-four people in the city of Nice on Bastille Day, were dealing with mental problems and sexual confusion. 9. Olivier Rohe in his latest book, Ma derniere creation est un piege a Taupe (2012) argues that the act of shooting an AK-47 is often a mindless act and how Kalashnikov’s emphasis on efficiency, reliability, and gun aesthetic, ended up creating an easy to use killing machine at the expense of the consequences. Jacques Ellul thinks of technique as progress at the cost of well-being. 10. Abderrahmane Sissako’s Death in Timbuktu is available on YouTube at this address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kuWUMo2KtI. 11. One can argue that these practices are the results of limits of the politics of symbols, indoctrination, commodification of beliefs, and information processing biases. Moreover, psychopaths are known to display rigid adherence to rules, particularly, when the subject emerges out of failed ideology. Moreover, Dick Hebdige (“Contemporizing Subculture,” 2012, 403) and Žižek, seeing fiction through reality are additional informative work on the subject. 12. There have been some controversies engineered, mostly by his Republican opponents, attacking President Obama for not using the terms “Muslim terrorist.” I agree with the president; there is no such a thing as a Muslim terrorist only terrorist because of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are Abrahamic religions which condemned the murder of innocents. Thus, people killing innocents are putting themselves out of the faith. 13. On this note, Sissako has also been criticized for not putting an emphasis on the diversity of the real city of Timbuktu by focusing on a Toureg family as the focus of his film. 14. Ramadan also appreciates the work of Edgar Morin with which he produced a book Au Peril des Idees, (Paris: Presse du Chatelet, 2014).

EIGHT Conclusion Marginal Subjectivities and Globalization: The Subaltern Speaking

The artisan’s control over the environment produces greater competency, agency, and radical hope. Radical hope means maintaining a culture of initiation, rites of passage, apprenticeship, excellence, and values. Values generated by the artisan’s work ethic are important here because these values are not simply about skills but about raising competent and selfreliant citizens. 1 As such, Abderrahmane Sissako can be considered to be in the same artisanal class because of the ways in which his cinema works for the production of new citizenship by challenging the asymmetrical relationship between the filmmaker and the audience. Sissako’s films puts the filmmaker and the spectator on the same level regarding intelligence and capacity and the movie, therefore, espouses radical politics beneath the exploitation and the glossy cinematic pyrotechnics. Sissako’s cumulative effects are to rethink the meaning of the independence of the continent, and all the obstacles preventing the establishment of an egalitarian productive citizenry where ordinary people are not assigned identity and subjectivity in an arbitrary fashion. 2 Cinema becomes an egalitarian practice, where the production of the spectacle works on an even playing field, with a constant feedback loop between the audience and the filmmaker where ideas are constantly embedded and recirculated within these cultural transactions. These processes work on what Cameroonian filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, calls “cinema of anticipation,” a cinematic practice where the spectator is not patronized by the filmmaker, but is seen as an interlocutor in the process of producing new emancipatory subjectivities. As with Bekolo, Sissako understands the function of 137

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art in Africa as resources that help ordinary Africans to think through issues that directly affect their lives, and strategies to build collective imagination for emancipatory politics. In this sense, the African filmmaker is not merely a conduit for entertainment but a person whose cultural output must match a reputation of a human right impresario bent on taking on totalitarian states in Africa. 3 In aggregate, this work defends the idea that cultural policies are not only designed for big institutions. The interactions between the artists and the audiences highlight tools, new methods and technologies that capture and communicate organic changes in the social and cultural landscapes adequately. These processes take the form of the developments of new cultural policies from the grassroots and in real time to adapt to a fast-changing and increasingly complex cultural landscape. African cinema turns into an ongoing demonstration of its participation in a larger organic social movement toward the gradual increase of cultural and political democratization. Thus, the production and reception of African cinema derive from interlocking cultural practices between the sovereignty of the artists and audience participation. These productive politics communicate new forms of intellectual creation out of outdated cultural norms. Manthia Diawara qualifies these creative forms as “doing new things out of old ways” to emphasize and give consistency to endless creative ways African artists structure the present on the continent to confront cultural and political orthodoxies (2010, 143). Diawara underlines the notion that cinematic consumption in Africa is a productive collective and inclusive social experience that takes the shape of a traditional palaver tree, creating cultural circumstances where conditions of the possibility of democracy are mainstreamed, and discussed through a wide-ranging set of issues such as inequalities, witchcraft, gender, sexuality, religion, corruption, and tribalism. This work claims that these processes allow for the emergence of a broad spectrum of political subjectivities, to argue that, Diawara posits that African popular cinema is creating the future language of films. He means the new epistemological posture of a film that mobilizes resources and an aesthetic of function that produces narratives and images that are inseparable from their audience’s experiences. I claim here that auteurist vision values narratives and a flair for images that speak to the public. At the same time, those filmmakers aestheticize social questions to engage the audience in issues they find of interest such as the management of the state machinery, modes of production, mobilities, political representation, hierarchies, power, witchcraft, the critique of institutions, modes of living, and cities. This paper develops the argument that filmmakers such as Djo Tunga wa Munga participate in this creation of a new filmic language and the production of these new modes of subjectivities. To articulate the contradiction between the sovereignty of the artist, cinema as the production of processes of immersive human experience,

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social realities, transparency versus religious spectacle, and voyeuristic tyranny. They reflect on postcolonial struggles for individuation and selfdefinition embedded within tensions between selfhood and essentialist practices in relationships to institutional racism, social construction, practices, and manifestations, and the creative capacity to produce alternative cultural resources for decolonized identity processes, and progressive associational autonomy. This work proposes an examination of the status and function of the African filmmaker and artistic sovereignty that indicates forms of cultural resistance unaffected by political, religious, and market forces in the context of theocratic terror. In unsafe political spaces, the artists’ critical independence is relevant to help redress colonial legacies, and to bring forward the role of imagination and insights to produce a new cultural and political dynamics that complicate conventional perception, and appearances, and resist commodification to deliver original and useful critical-thinking practices that validate a new political consciousness that cuts short the oxygen fueling self-inflicted terroristic practices. These new cultural and political practices produce alternative public spheres to contemplate the role of art and how it informs on the symbolic struggle and public sentiment against terrorism in Africa. As such, the camera-eye is a democratic and transformative cinematic technology, an omniscient eyeball and an important pedagogical tool that captures the totality of the social to produce a ritualized performance where oneness can be achieved with others through the camera-eye connection to African oral history and storytelling practices. The camera-eye derives its symbolic power from its understanding of the collective and capacity to locate and codify patterns of meaning formation in its historical development, therefore, identifying the world as it is and anticipating what lies ahead. These processes include pedagogy and circulation of meaning and profound signification buried beneath the everyday life, therefore, adding a fourth dimension to reality. The camera-eye works through the redemptive cultural force of the hors-champs, a space of critical engagement that cannot be commodified, which is the capacity to produce social intimacy, and unlock the sensual and transgressive power of the camera-eye, which includes drawing continuities between realist and neo-realist cinema, and documentary aesthetics, and the hybridity between modern cinematic technology with indigenous cultural production to highlight the difference between visibility, transparency, and intrusive, voyeuristic tyranny encoded within African cinematic images and facts, reality and imagination. The goal is to present the limits of political representation and symbolism and to break the jinx of tyranny reduced to a pulsational and disruptive force taking one shot at producing a coherent reality and rewire the culture that organizes, aligns, and associates appropriate subjects with the original community created by the prophet of Islam. The camera-eye assembles these fractured time-line and realities to reinvent a

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new African subjectivity through a radical conception of resistance to forging new paths for emancipatory politics, and escape from the historical confines of neoliberal capitalism and its genocidal politics. It calls for a constant production of new forms of sense-making and, in this context, the difference between symbolic retribution and redemption, and a new social contract that involves a reconnection between institutions, horizontal citizenship, and direct democracy. It includes questions of emergent rationalities, transmissions, and pedagogy that bring a complexity to issues of racial ideology, essentialism, apocalyptic millennial prophetic religion, and forms of an alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Can the subaltern speak? The discussion in Timbuktu is an example of how the subaltern is putting themselves in the position of enunciation, symbolization, and reception. The symbolic of the camera-eye is a vessel to discuss processes of social embodiment and immersive human experience as forms of anthropology of visibility and mimesis production to rethink processes of visibility and the totality of the social, the democratization of public space, the constitution of spheres of public, and a critical and competent citizenry, and the distinction between visibility, values of authenticity, model of identification, recognition, affectivity, desire, and the production of difference and similarity through media related industries and structures of interaction and the dissymmetry created by symbolic mechanisms of massification, hierarchy, and performativity produced by the totalitarian states. Sissako engages the cognitive function of perception and how the logistic of perception is organized in totalitarian states. Hence, the capacity of the camera-eye is to operate as a cultural resource to produce and create alterity and therefore an expression of democracy as opposed to theocratic regimes that consider image production as the source of idolatry and iconoclastic practices. Fiction makes reality the role of narrative choice and subjectivity the role of fiction to understand the mechanic of the real. The emerging rationalities are the adequation between subjectivities and the social environment while complicating notions of religious and electoral promise. NOTES 1. As a result, Richard Sennett argues that there is no longer a division between the Homo Faber and the Homo laborans which are the difference between blue collar “dirty” jobs and white collar “knowledge” work which centers around labor, savoir-faire, and ethics. And the idea that blue collar workers are robots stuck in brainless repetitive labor and whose limited cognitive resources prevent them from understanding the ethical ramifications of their labor the way the Homo Faber can (2010, 17). Sennett argues that blue-collar workers are not simply cogs in the wheel of industrial capital. Both Homo laborans and Homo fabers require intelligence, judgment, and practical skills. Richard Sennett’s work reflects Matthew Crawford’s The Case for Working with Your Hands (2011), where Crawford, a well-respected academic philosopher talks about his

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second job as a motorbike mechanic. Reading Crawford, it becomes apparent that blue collar work can be as intellectually, if not more challenging, as reading and grading papers because they both require skills and judgment. 2. The sex scene between the colonelle and her lesbian lover is not accidental here. The colonelle is an institutional figure but also a lesbian and that denotes the desire to have a public sphere where subjectivities or sexual orientation are not criminalized. 3. Conversation between the author and Jean-Pierre Bekolo.

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Index

A Screaming Man, 49 Abdelhouahed, Houria, 125 Abrahamic tradition, 114 Action Directe, 120 Afrotopia, 26, 27 Agamben, Giorgio, 38 Al Morabitun, 29, 30, 31 Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI), 29 Al Shabab, 29 Alam Al-Mithal, 22, 23, 87 Alam Al-Khayal, 22, 23, 87 Algeria, 116 Allasane, Mustapha, 127 alternative public sphere, 27 Ansar Dine, 29 Appadurai, Arjun, 31 Arab Spring, 116 Arendt, Hannah, 30, 45 Aristotle, 20 Armstrong, McLees, 9 Baader-Meinhof Complex, 120 Badiou, Alain, 14–18 Balibar, Etienne, 6 Balufu Bakupa Kanyinda, 4, 35 Balseiro, Isabel, 94 Bamba, Zegue, 106 Bambara, Toni Cade, 79 banlieusard, 112, 132 barrages of impossibilities, 14, 16 Baribanga, Alfonso, 69 Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 9, 10 Baudrillard, Jean, 128 Bauman, Zygmunt, 56, 79 Bekolo, Jean-Pierre, 4, 35, 49, 81, 106, 137 Beni, Alphonse, 127 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 84 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 64, 133

Benslama, Fethi, 61, 89 Boko Haram, 29, 120 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8 brother’s keepers, 115 Butler, Judith, 132 camera-eye, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12–18, 32, 42, 49, 77, 139 Canal of Suez, 116 Castells, Manuel, 84 Cesaire, Aime, 33, 35, 49, 58, 75, 79, 82, 85, 91 chiffonier, 3, 4, 9 clash of civilization, 66, 112, 114 Comaroff, Jean, 53 Comaroff, John, 53 Corbin, Henri, 23 creative sovereignty, 14 crystal-image, 21 Dawkins, Richard, 121 Death in Timbuktu, 108 Derrida, Jacques, 8 Deuleuze, Gilles, 19, 25 Diagne, Souleymane Bachir, 59 Diawara, Fatoumata, 27 Diawara, Manthia, 35–36, 48, 52, 54, 58, 138 Diaz, Junot, 21 Difraoui, Assem El 120 Dolar, Mladen, 89 Dreyfus, Herbert, 5 El Wattan, 114 Eiffel Tower, 98 Eliot, T. S., 33 Essien, Kwame, 43 Falola, Toyin, 43 Finkielkraut, Alain, 117 149

150 Foucault, Michel, 23 France’s 9/11, 112 French malaise, 118 Girard, Rene, 114, 125 Glissant, Edouard, 114, 115, 135 global neoliberal consumerist culture, 62 Golden Calf, 109 Goree Island, 98 GPS, 111 Griaule, Maurice, 11 Griffith, D. W., 81 Guattari, Felix, 25 Gunning, Tom, 111 Hagège, Claude, 118 Hall, Stuart, 23 Harrow, Kenneth, 3, 9, 10 Harvey, David, 86 Hebdo, Charlie, 112, 117, 119 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 50, 53 Hitchcock, Alfred, 77 Hollande, Francois, 112 Houellebecq, Michel, 117 hors-champs, 28, 77 Hudson, Michael, 41 hyper-Karcher store, Paris, 117 ideological radicalism, 113 Islamic State (ISIS) or Daesh, 29, 46, 112, 114, 120 Islamic State in Yemen, 112 “Independence Cha Cha,” 45, 65 James, Aaron, 130 Jameson, Fredric, 10 Jeffries, Stuart, 109 Jenkins, Richard, 120 Jihadist as asshole, 129 Jinn, 82 Joffrin, Laurent, 118 Karamoko, 92 Keita, Salif, 108 kosher supermarket, 112 laicite, 116 Latour, Bruno, 39

Index Larkin, Brian, 11, 95 Lash Christopher, 98, 130 Lear, Jonathan, 20, 21 LePen, Marine, 119 Leiris, Michel, 12, 80 Le Jeu/The Game, 69 Levi-Strauss, Levi, 87 Lichtung, 5 Maghreb, 119 Maiga, Aissa, 108 management of savagery and chaos, 62, 63 marabout, 19 marginal subjectivities, 14, 16, 27, 45 Marks, Laura, 23 Marx, Karl, 6, 89 Mbembe, Achille, 18, 27, 34, 43, 44, 76, 80, 99, 101, 104 Mevungu, 106 MNLA, 29 MUJAO, 29 Muslim scholars, 25 Naficy, Hamid, 95, 128 Naji, Abu Bakr, 62 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 116 Necropolitics, 114, 115, 116 Neoliberal ideology, 16, 26 Niang, Sada, 4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 103 Niger, Paul, 91 Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, 25 October/Octobre, 69 Ong, Aihwa, 128 Ottoman Empire, 116 Onfray, Michel, 117 Ontological beauty, 39 Ontological security, 39, 42 Oral tradition, 21 Oumma, 82, 113, 114, 115, 126, 129 OXFAM, 116 Palaver Tree, 30 Pan Arabist Ideology, 114 Picketty, Thomas, 116 Plato, 24 po-ethics, 8

Index politics of viscerality, 125 Postman, Neil, 46 Prabhu, Anjali, 77 primordial ontology, 49 Pygmalion, 39 radical hope, 21 Ranciere, Jacques, 8, 40, 42, 43, 115 Ramadan, Tariq, 114, 115, 133 Red Brigade, 120 “revenant/nomad,” 87 Rocha, Glober, 17 Rohe, 126 Rosset, Clement, 84 Rostov-Luanda, 69 Rouch, Jean, 12 Roy, Olivier, 46 Sadra, Mulla, 5, 19, 20, 21, 24, 87 Saar, Felwine, 27, 106 Said, Edward, 93 Sangare, Oumou, 103 Sharia, 113, 114 Scheherazade, 103 Schumpeter, 102 Sedar Senghor, Leopold, 26, 48 sensor-ship, 44, 47 Sembene, Ousmane, 70 Singer Ben, 81 Simon, 97

Simone, Abdul Maliq, 101 Sobchack, Viviane, 36 Sohrevardi, Sheikh Shahabuddin Yahya, 5, 19, 20, 21, 24, 50, 87 space of transcendence, 21 subaltern, 27, 102, 113 Subramanyam Sanjay, 87, 92 spaghetti Western, 42 Spinoza, Baruch, 6 Teno, Jean-Marie, 4, 35 Tonda, Joseph, 81 Toure, Moussa, 98 vampire, 87 VGIK, 69 Vertov, Dziga, 16 Virilio, Paul, 115, 120, 132 Weber, Max, 102 Welles, orson, 77 Westernization, 114 Wynter, Silvya, 6 Y2K, 81 Zakaria, Fareed, 117 Zemmour, Eric, 117 zombies, 90

151

About the Author

Olivier-Jean Tchouaffe is a film scholar originally from Cameroon. He is the author of Passion of the Reel (2014) and Varieties of Literature in Contemporary Cameroon (2016). Besides many book chapters, his work has also appeared in the Journal of Applied Semiotics, Flow, Journal of Modern Contemporary Thought, Journal of African Cinemas, PostAmble, Journal of Information Ethics, Reception Studies Journal, Cinema Journal, and Velvet Light Trap.

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