Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution. London: Pluto Press (hb £20 – 978 0 74534 176 7; pb £12.99 – 978 0 74534 622 9). 2020, 368 pp.

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (5) ◽  
pp. 926-927
Author(s):  
Aja Lans
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Violence

Bacurau as Science-Fiction Revenge Fantasy

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-86
Author(s):  
Jocimar Dias
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Colonial Violence

When Bacurau (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) was released in Brazil, it was mainly received as a left-wing critique of the rise of the far right in the country’s political landscape. But some critics argued that the feature’s insistence on graphic violence was actually a celebration of barbarism, equating the oppressed villagers to their genocidal oppressors. This article refutes this view, borrowing from the analysis of science-fiction revenge fantasies and also following Foucault’s genealogical perspective. It argues that Bacurau actually reenacts Brazil’s foundational colonial violence through its complex temporality, in order to rediscover the forgotten past of real struggles that remain surreptitiously inserted in all levels of society, perhaps in the hope that new ways of resistance may flourish from its spectatorial experience.

Speaking in Tongues, Speaking without Tongues: Transplanted Voices in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 535-552
Author(s):  
STEFAN SCHÖBERLEIN
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
American Gothic ◽  
Speaking In Tongues ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
Main Plot ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Recent Claim

This essay examines an underexplored aspect of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland – namely its German–Indian context – and reads it through the story's main plot device: ventriloquism. Using some of Brown's manuscripts as well as journalistic pieces, the essay brings together the more puzzling aspects of this central US American gothic tale into a study of colonial violence and transplanted voices. Following Sarah Rivett's recent claim of a “spectral presence of American Indians” in the story, this essay argues for a rereading of the character of the “bioloquist” that brings to the surface a deep history of the dispossession of Native peoples (especially the Lenape) carefully interwoven into the novel's subtext.

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