Crime, the City, and the Congo: Family, Race, and the Urban in Recent Belgian Cinema

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Abstract

Pieter van Hees’s Waste Land (2014) situates Belgian national anxiety in the country’s white supremacist past and present, both of which milieux are shared by the language communities. The film represents Brussels while suggesting, perhaps in spite of itself, that the city’s claim to be a centre of power is ethically, as well as ethnically, problematic. It breaks a taboo in confronting Belgium’s colonial past, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of Leopold II’s accession (1865), yet ultimately reproduces the economy of the racialized system it tries to critique. The ineffability of spatial spectacle would betray the way in which its protagonist’s narrative is ‘mapped’ onto the space of Brussels, with the character’s breakdown – hence, a failed attempt at constructing his own narrative, at mapping his life in Brussels -- being further unintentional testimony to the city’s abject history beneath it.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)21-34
Number of pages13
JournalJournal of European Popular Culture
Volume15
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2024

Keywords

  • Brussels
  • Congo
  • postcolonial
  • Belgian film
  • urban cinema

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