Colonial violence and criminology: A confrontation from the documentary Concerning Violence/Violencia Colonial e Criminologia: Um confronto a partir do documentario Concerning Violence.
| Autor | Vilela, Ana Laura Silva |
| Cargo | Texto en ingl |
Introduction (1)
From the top of a helicopter, uniformed soldiers shoot at cattle at the grazing land. Why do they shoot? Against whom is the war waged? The sequence does not explain; however, there is a previous scene that shows a lady surrounded by books--the Indian intellectual Gayatri Spivak--, presenting an author and his work, criticizing the images that will follow. It is with such audiovisual piece, which collects fragments of a book and past wars to think about the present time, that we propose a dialogue with Criminology.
The author is the Martinican Frantz Fanon. The book that gives rhythm to it is The Wretched of the Earth. If the images do not explain why the soldiers kill the cattle, the low-pitched tone of Lauryn Hill's voice denounces that "colonialism is violence in its natural state". From this, it is inferred that before the imminent defeat, the cattle die because the colonial army prefers to kill them rather than leave them to the "rebels".
Through such contrasts, Concerning Violence does not provide the viewer with obvious connections about the relationship between colonized and colonizers. We encounter a documentary that questions what is considered violence in the colonial context, and, above all, the permanence of colonialism after the movements of independence.
This article, by establishing a relation between cinema and Criminology, instead of developing technical approach, is about understanding that cinema is capable of serving Criminology in the "confrontation of subjects" (AGUIAR, 2012, p. 13). The thematic confrontation that Concerning Violence offers to Criminology can articulate the question: how does a discipline that deals with violence as one of its analytical fundamental principles is related to the violence based on the notion of race inaugurated (and perpetuated) in colonialism?
The approximation between cinema and criminological knowledge is made possible since the existence of cinematic genres whose contents approach the penal culture; crime films, "criminals", and punishments, among others (ANITUA, 2016, p. 16). This articulation is not limited to repeated speeches known by jurists and criminologists, and can act as a way to report the dehumanizing criminal reality (ANITUA, 2016, p. 14). As such, it shares the intentions of Critical Criminology and serves as a useful pedagogical tool for criminological teaching (ANITUA, 2016, p. 14-19).
In order to gather a criminological learning of Concerning Violence, the methodological approach to the documentary presented some difficulties regarding the use of videos and images as elements of research. For the analysis of the film, the first step was to "watch and feel", in order to understand the work in its entirety and identify the research question that was imposed (FLICK, 2009, p. 224).
The film is divided into nine scenes, thus the difficulty in selecting scenes and interpretive keys was even harder (FLICK, 2009. p. 224). Therefore, the solution was to prioritize the context both of the film and Frantz Fanon, the author who inspires the documentary. In addition, some scenes and references were selected because they would allow an epistemological dialogue with Criminology.
In the first part of the paper, we present some information about the life and work (BHABHA, 2004; MATA, 2015) of Frantz Fanon (1968, 2008), specifically his contributions on racism and colonialism. In addition, we also call attention to the structure of the film, aspects of its production and some criticism directed at it.
In order to initiate the debate with Criminology, it is necessary to mention the second scene of the documentary, entitled Indifference, in which a black intellectual of the Ancient Rhodesia reflects on his experience in jail. This articulation is mobilized through the analysis of criminological paradigms and its racial implications (DUARTE, 2016). It is argued that the notion of colonial hypothesis (ARGOLO, et al, 2016) is used as a tool so that Criminology, built in colonial contexts, can provide answers to the corpses, the colonized, and the peripheral (ZAFFARONI, 2012).
By illustrating colonial violence, the documentary enables the reflection of its permanence in contemporaneity. Thus, the focus is addressed to the Brazilian reality, specifically to the obstacles in the recognition and confrontation of the genocide of the black population. In the Brazilian context, it is established what the Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe (2011) has named Necropolitics, which is the understanding of sovereignty as a power of death that was constituted in colonialism. Subsequently, statistical data is presented on the genocide of the black population (BRASIL, 2016; CERQUEIRA, 2017), and at the end the "racial borders" of genocide are discussed (FLAUZINA, 2006; 2014).
1 Concerning a "teaching film"
Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes of Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense is a documentary film released in 2014 by Swedish director Goran Hugo Olsson. It was produced out of Swedish television archives that portrayed Africa's decolonization processes between the 1960s and 1980s and based on the text The Wretched of the Earth (published in 1961) by Antillean intellectual and militant Frantz Fanon.
The documentary presents itself as a heterogeneous audiovisual piece by presenting distinct images that resemble a choreography (2) for Fanon's mythical text, which gains musicality through the narration of North American singer Lauryn Hill. For this reason, before addressing the structure of the film, the author and his work are presented in general lines.
Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique--a Caribbean territory occupied by France --in 1925. Being a child from a middle-class upbringing, he studied at the Fort France High School, where he was Aime Cesaire's (3) student, and was able to live in an "intellectually and politically stimulating environment" (MATA, 2015, p. 10). During World War II, he joins the Allied Forces to fight against Nazi Germany. The military service earned him a scholarship in France and he was able to graduate in Psychiatry (MATA, 2015, p. 11).
In his first work, Black Skin, White Masks (4) (published in 1952), he elaborates a psycho-affective analysis of racism in its constitutive dimension of colonialism. Upon arriving in France, Fanon realizes that he has no privileges for being a middle-class man in Martinique or a Psychiatrist, with his existence reduced to being a black man. In colonial reality, racism is an essential violence, the feeling of inferiority introjected into the consciousness of the colonized (FANON, 2008).
The author analyzes mechanisms such as language, affective relations between white and black people among other aspects, and demonstrates how "white civilization, European culture have imposed an existential deviation on the negro" (FANON, 2008, p. 30). The black man would only exist in the presence of the white man; and, when confronted with this perspective, the black individual is characterized as irrational, unattractive, without moral or ethical values, prone to crime, having his religious devotions associated with evil and being devoid of history prior to colonization (FANON, 2008).
Stemming from his testimony of the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria between 1953-1957--where he served as a Psychiatrist for the National Liberation Front--Fanon carries further his critique on colonialism (BHABHA, 2004, p. 23), supporting radical processes of decolonization. This background is the substrate of the book The Wretched of the Earth (published in 1961), considered a testament book, since it was written in the last months of his life, after a diagnosis of leukemia, which would take his life at thirty-six years of age (5).
In this work, Fanon (1968) refuses to see colonialism as an event in which European countries took on a mission of bringing progress and civilization overseas, understanding it instead as violence constituted in racism, as well as predicting the difficulties that African countries would have if they stood up as nations without facing true processes of decolonization. The latter aspect is a warning--indeed a premonition about the risks of African countries to free themselves from European colonialism without getting rid of the economic, institutional and intellectual models imported from Europe.
In Black Skins, White Masks (2008), he demanded his generation and the next ones to carry out the historical tasks that their contexts needed: out the processes of decolonization, they should invent a new humanity. This mission consists in not being content with the imitation of European humanism--present in theories and institutions that was never practiced towards the colonized (FANON, 1968).
However, his main work would be known almost exclusively for his elaboration on the violence undertaken by colonizers and colonized, emphasizing the latter as the only effective mechanism in face of widespread colonial oppression. Sentences such as the one chosen to start the documentary: "(...) Colonialism is not a thinking machine, it is not a body endowed with reason faculties. It is violence in its natural state and it only can be yield when confronted with greater violence" and to a large extent Jean-Paul Sartre's foreword to the work, made the text be interpreted as an apology to violence.
Regarding Sartre's text, both Indian intellectual Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (who is responsible for the spoken preface to the film under review) and other authors who discuss Fanon's work (MATA, 2014; BHABHA, 2005) perceive as detrimental the emphasis that the French philosopher gives to violence. Sartre and other readers do not seem to have read or grasped Fanon's complete message.
This lack of understanding, the confiscation of the book in France and its censorship in several countries, in addition to Fanon being read by contending groups around the world (6)--being regarded as the "Bible of...
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