Sarah Hamblin — All the Modern Cons: On Revolution Without a Future
A still from Air Conditioner (Fradique, 2020)
This presentation explores how we can understand radical political cinema in the age of the Capitalocene. Dominant twentieth century narratives have imagined revolution as a future-oriented endeavor. Yet these projected futures, whose realization is predicated on the power of human agency to transform the world, have historically grounded themselves in the promises of petromodernity and anthropocentric fantasies of humanity’s sovereignty over nature. Indeed, it is precisely such devotion to industry and technology that has made the world inhospitable to human flourishing, and the apocalyptic reality of catastrophic climate change has rendered the future profoundly volatile. As such, the Capitalocene forces us to fundamentally reconsider the basic tenants of the revolutionary imagination. This paper therefore asks what revolutionary transformation looks like when: one, we must abandon modes of resistance and visions of the future that remain wedded to what Dominic Boyer refers to as the “epistemic infrastructures of high carbon life”; two, we can no longer project ourselves into a safe and stable future but must reckon with the hostile reality of catastrophism; and three, we cannot sustain the fantasies of human vitality or mastery of nature and must instead decenter ourselves as the sole agents of our history.
To begin exploring some of these concerns, this paper takes up the Angolan lo-fi Africanfuturist film, Air Conditioner (Fradique, 2020). Set in Luanda, where AC units across the city suddenly begin collectively failing and falling from windows, the film dramatizes the problems of technological collapse combined with a rapidly warming climate and offers new ways of thinking revolution from within the conditions of catastrophe. In following the daily experience of two domestic workers employed by the owner of a crumbling colonial-era apartment building, Air Conditioner focuses on peripheries – on a nation decimated by decades of colonial rule and civil war, a city on the frontlines of climate disaster, and an underclass disproportionally impacted by both. However, while impending catastrophe is tied to colonialism and the protracted conflict between communist and capitalist forces, these twentieth century Grand Narratives are resigned to the decaying infrastructural backdrop of the film. Rather than focusing on the legacy of these systems, the film is concerned with the new modes of solidarity and localized ideas of futurity that emerge from the specific geographic, economic, and cultural conditions of contemporary Angola. The film’s incidental references to socialism, combined with its meandering narrative and languid pace, render it quite different in form and tone from the revolutionary anti-colonial cinemas of independence. Against these earlier images of revolution as a sudden rupture that harnesses the power of human agency, Air Conditioner roots itself in slowness, imagining revolution as a process of deceleration and withdrawal based on the wearing out of life.
BIO
Sarah Hamblin is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on global art cinema, digital media, and graphic literatures, emphasizing the relationships between aesthetics, affect, and radical politics.