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

TY - JOUR

T1 - Crime, the City, and the Congo

T2 - Family, Race, and the Urban in Recent Belgian Cinema

AU - Hartford, Jason

N1 - © 2024 Intellect Ltd

PY - 2024/4

Y1 - 2024/4

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Brussels

KW - Congo

KW - postcolonial

KW - Belgian film

KW - urban cinema

U2 - 10.1386/jepc_00065_1

DO - 10.1386/jepc_00065_1

M3 - Article

SN - 2040-6134

VL - 15

SP - 21

EP - 34

JO - Journal of European Popular Culture

JF - Journal of European Popular Culture

IS - 1

ER -