We are delighted that critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth A. Povinelli will join us to discuss a program of her films. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late settler liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This potential theory has unfolded across five books, numerous essays, and thirty-five years of collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues in north Australia, including, most recently, six films they have created as members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Ahead of her visit, we will watch The Inheritance and Day in the Life.

The Inheritance Alice Henry Ink, 2021, 80 min.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, little Elizabeth Povinelli struggles to understand the meanings of her Alpine inheritance hidden in the rich-hued ridges of a framed image hanging in her family’s home and expressed in the sudden flashes of anger and deep pockets of melancholia that pool round it, only to discover the source of her inheritance is not in the past but in the present racial and colonial infrastructures that surround her in the US.

Day in the Life Karrabing Film Collective, 2020, 32 min.
Day in the Life explores the ordinary obstacles Indigenous families face as they move through an ordinary day. Across five chapters–Breakfast, Playtime, Lunch Break, Cocktail Hour, and Dinner Time–and an audioscape directed by its younger members, DIL is a visual and sonic landscape that dramatizes and satirizes the settler forms of governance and extractive capitalism that Karrabing members encounter over the course of a day.

This event will be presented remotely over Zoom. The FSC will circulate links to the films in advance to watch on our own, and then we will get together online to have a conversation about the work. We have limited capacity regarding the number of participants we can accommodate, so if you are interested in attending (and are not currently an FSC fellow or CMP student), please email Cozette Russell at cerussell@fas.harvard.edu.