Date:
Location:
“Nighthawks (Bacurau), Viral Cultural Politics and COVID-19 (and the need for informed cultural-political reviewers)”
Speaker:
Michael M.J. Fischer, PhD, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities; Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lecturer in Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
Contact:
Sadeq Rahimi
Sadeq_Rahimi@hms.harvard.edu
This seminar is cosponsored by the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
This event is online only. Please click the "Read More" link for full instructions on how to attend this seminar.
Chairs:
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Faculty Associate. Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Department of Sociology, Harvard University.
Byron J. Good, Faculty Associate. Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor, Social Anthropology Program, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University.
Michael M.J. Fischer, Professor of Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society (STS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lecturer, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
Remote Access Information:
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Please note: This meeting will be recorded.
Abstract:
This is one of a set of essays on art and emergent forms of common sense in the twenty-first century, that deploy a transnational mix of cultural genres, technological projection, and mirrorings of deep social polarizations. The 2019 film Bacurau's receptions continue to expand the double consciousness between realism and symbolic logic that semiotically structure politics in Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere. The film thus is also a social drama, stimulant, and hallucinogen to ignite flashpoints of clarity and condensations of meaning in singular images (water over a casket, the quilombo, resistance to ethnographic stereotyping, museums, computer games, and the bandit Lampãio in his seventh-generation avatar, along with his alter egos in today's Recife gangs and Brazil's prisons). Tropicalia, Cinema Novo, and Antrofago are historical referents, but the film's social drama beyond the screen continues to unfold in today's real life in a series of scandals and murders, the viral spread of COVID-19, and the viral interpellation of global genres, imperialisms, and racisms. Truth in art as in psychoanalysis is the triggering of further examples of what is suggested by an analysand or a film. To judge such interventions by the rules of genre is to demand not to know.
The film is available on a number of streaming platforms: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/bacurau
