President's Dream Colloquium on Creative Ecologies

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Recorded on September 19, 2019

The Karrabing Film Collective (KFC) is a group of family and friends, most of whom come from the northwestern coast of the Top End of the Northern Territory, Australia. It emerged in 2009 in the disastrous intersection of the late liberal politics of cultural recognition and of neoliberal extractive capitalism that left many of the families who would become the KFC homeless. Film and art installations are a means of representing their precarious position, creating a context around a future that could be practiced, and enticing younger members to learn about their ancestral lands by enacting them in new narrative forms. This presentation discusses the relationship between the social and financial making of our films and art installations. Rather than flawed, how can we see this surface as the truth of the contemporary refusal of the KFC to be captured by the recognition machinery of the state and arts industry even as we welcome both to rethink themselves in light of our worlds and work.

Elizabeth Povinelli is Frans Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University.

Elizabeth Povinelli’s writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. It is informed primarily by settler colonial theory, pragmatism and critical theory. This potential theory of the otherwise has unfolded primarily from within a sustained relationship with the Indigenous Karrabing colleagues in north Australia and across five books, numerous essays, and six films with the Karrabing Film Collective. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award.