Diasporic Narratives

Memory, Affects and Archives Through Film and Video

Lecture Series – Visual and Media Anthropology Masters

Berlin, Summer 2025

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What does it mean to see from the ruins of the colonial archive? How do we write nearby the wounds of diaspora without suturing them shut?

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This lecture series charts a radical itinerary through decolonial Global South thought, where the camera, the body, and the land itself become sites of counter-ethnographic warfare.

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From the diasporic fractures of Stuart Hall to the insurgent poetics of Édouard Glissant, from bell hooks’ defiant gaze to the cinematic rebellions of Pratibha Parmar, we map how the South refuses to be a spectacle. We are staring back. 

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Drawing on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s "speaking nearby," Fatimah Tobing Rony’s "third eye," and the insurgent cinema of Sarah Maldoror, we dissect the aesthetics of power hidden in images, texts, and sounds. This is not a class about "representation." It is a laboratory for epistemic disobedience, where students experiment with fragmented narratives, stolen stories, and counter-archives to disrupt the coloniality of seeing.

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Through film screenings, guerrilla exercises, and radical close readings, we ask:

• What happens when we refuse to "explain" the Other?

• Can archives be weaponized against their own violence?

• Who owns the right to narrate pain?

 

This series is for those ready to unlearn the camera, the pen, and the authority of the frame.

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(Please inquiry for more info)