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A series of screenings presented in collaboration with Louverture Films that seeks to generate discussions about cinema as a strategy of complexity and plurality and as a resistance to constructed realities
A film directed by Göran Hugo Olsson featuring archive material about the struggle for liberation from colonial rule in the '60s and '70s
Slought and the SP2 Social Justice and Arts Integration Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce a special screening of Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialist Self-Defense (2014), a film directed by Göran Hugo Olsson, on Friday, March 29, 2019 from 6-9pm at Slought. It will be followed by a conversation with scholar and activist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. This event is free and open to the public, however registration is requested. Please plan to arrive early as registering does not guarantee you a seat. Seating is first come, first served.
Concerning Violence is a bold and fresh visual narrative from Africa based on archive material from Swedish documentaries 1966-1987 covering the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation from colonial rule. This powerful footage is combined with text from Frantz Fanon's landmark book The Wretched of the Earth - written in 1960 and still a major tool for understanding and illuminating the neocolonialism happening today, as well as the unrest and the reactions against it. The film is narrated by Ms. Lauryn Hill, with a preface by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at the Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
She is one of the foremost scholars of contemporary literary and postcolonial theory and feminist thought, and is known for her translation of Derrida's On Grammatology and her groundbreaking essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" She has translated such works of Mahasweta Devi as Imaginary Maps and Breast Stories into English and argued for the social urgency of the humanities in recent books such as Death of a Discipline and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization.
Spivak is also an activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements since 1986. She was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for being "a critical theorist and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalized world."
"Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence...
Come comrades, the European game is finally over; we must look for something else. We can do anything today provided we do not ape Europe, provided we are not obsessed with catching up with Europe. Europe has gained such a mad and reckless momentum that it has lost control and reason and is heading at dizzying speed towards the brink from which we would be advised to remove ourselves as quickly as possible."
— Frantz Fanon