The Intimacies of Four Continents in Caribbean Cinema

Lecture & Film “Black Atlantic Cinema”

Lecture: Usha Iyer (Stanford)

his program of two films from the Caribbean – a fiction feature and a documentary will extend the frame of the Black Atlantic by considering connected migrations across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and histories of African enslavement and Asian indenture. The many connections and frictions between African, Indian, Chinese, Javanese and indigenous cultures of the Caribbean reveal the intimacies wrought by plantation capitalism between four continents – Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

In the experimental documentary, My Mother’s Place (1990) fourth-generation Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian video artist, Richard Fung, weaves a loving portrait of his mother, Rita Fung, whose grandparents came to the Caribbean from China as indentured laborers in the mid-19th century. Wan Pipel, released a year after Suriname’s independence from the Netherlands, features a rich tapestry of characters and locales that captures the Black and Brown Atlantic as well as the energies of a newly decolonized nation.

Usha Iyer is associate professor of film and media studies at Stanford University and the author of Dancing Women. Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020).

Film program:

6 pm / 6 p.m.: My Mother’s Place, Richard Fung, 1990, 49 min.
8 pm / 8 p.m.: Wan Pipel, Pim de la Parra, 1976, 105 min.