Playfully Un-making Place in Zama's Decolonial Abyss

Description

The mythmaking intrinsic to the construction of the national territory suggests that control is possible, indeed, that the nation emerges from a process of imposition of order and governance. The visual-spatial representation intrinsic to film means that it can present multiplying contestatory imagery to intervene in the (masculinist) imagination of processes of historical nation-building. This paper analyses the resignification of landscape and the repopulation of the past with diverse historical agents in Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) as a decolonial un-making of coherent nation and linear national history. In Zama, both Don Diego de Zama and viewers are playfully enticed and eventually confronted with the final lack of control, both over others and over the environment, that is the undoing of the project of patriarchal capitalist modernity. This tips the past (and the multiple presents it has created) into the groundlessness of historical and political abyss, with the resulting abyssal potentialities An Yountae argues for, through relationality and resistance.

Period	May 2024
Event title	Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia: Transnational Textures
Event type	Conference
Location	Canberra, Australia, Australian Capital TerritoryShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National