Using the daring conceit of an abstracted mock trial (African society vs. global financial institutions) playing out in the midst of a more straightforward family drama, Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako has created a "seething, complicated and disarmingly beautiful investigation of Africa's social, economic and human crises" which "tackles the central question of the film - have the ostensible good intentions of the West, in particular the World Bank and similar institutions, contributed to the impoverishment and demoralization of the continent? - calmly and systematically, though with evident passion." (NY Times) "Rather miraculously, [Bamako] succeeds in painlessly educating its viewers about global politics and economics while it describes contemporary Africa with freshness and clarity." (Variety) In French and Bambara with English subtitles. More at bamako-film.com. Introduced by Silivia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, on Friday, March 30.
Being shown in conjunction with conference Between Primitive Accumulation and the New Enclosures. The conference will gather four outstanding thinkers within the field of analysis that both relies on and extends Marx's disquisition in Capital (volume 1) on what he calls "primitive accumulation." This process of the assertion of the right of private property over land that was previously held in common, that is, of enclosure, has in recent years been understood to continue to extend its reach globally and in ways that Marx could not have anticipated. The participants in the conference, mainstays of the Midnight Notes Collective and the Retort group, are among the most significant contributors to a theory and historiography of the New Enclosures, and to interventions aimed at recovering the commons.For more information and conference readings contact Barry Maxwell, bhm4@cornell.edu. The conference is sponsored by Society for the Humanities; Institute for German Cultural Studies; Future of Minority Studies Research Project; MITWS (Minority, Indigenous, and Third World Studies Research Group); Africana Studies and Research Center; Ethics and Public Life Program; Anthropology; Development Sociology; Asian American Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Comparative Literature; History; English; Peace Studies.
2007, color, 1 hour 55 minutes, Mali/USA/France