Anticolonial Aesthetics: Towards Eco-Cinema

Abstract

As the colonial roots of the ecological crisis become ever more apparent and its colonial present (in the form of environmental racism, climate apartheid, and green imperialism) also increasingly evident, one might consider climate activism and its aesthetics to be anticolonial. In this essay I discuss the aesthetics of eco-cinema from the “Global South” in terms of both artistic expression and activist uses of the medium, and examine how they propose new ways of producing films as well as alternative forms of imagination to what I will call “monoculture.” Through a reappraisal of what anticolonial aesthetics have historically entailed, and by recognizing these aesthetics in contemporary eco-films from the South, I intend to contribute to a reconsideration of the terms “anticolonial” and “aesthetics,” as well as of the relationship between the two as politics of transformation.