West Indies, the Black Atlantic and Knowledge: Med Hondo’s Ambulatory Cinema

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Lecture: Aboubakar Sanogo (Ottawa)

West Indies is not only Med Hondo’s most formally accomplished work, but it is also his most powerful manifesto and cinematic treatise on the Black Atlantic and its status as an archive, a repository and producer of multiple (beyond the DuBoisian double), contradictory, superimposed yet complementary consciousnesses and “unconsciousses.” To retrieve and reactivate them, he produces an ambulatory mode of filmmaking that also doubles an epistemology for humanity’s very future.

Abouakar Sanogo is an associate professor of cinema at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. A scholar and curator of African cinema, Sanaogo is also the initiator of African Film Heritage Project (AFHP), a partnership between FEPACI, Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Film: West Indies, ou les Nègres marrons de la liberté, Med Hondo, France/Algeria/Mauretania 1979, 105 min.