Elsewhere in the Belgian Congo ca. 1953: Luc de Heusch Films the Tetela-Hamba

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

History

Publication Date

1-2014

Abstract

This article analyzes Luc de Heusch's 1954 “ethnographic” film Fête chez les Hamba as an ambiguous, and no longer quite colonial, visual and narrative text. Fête is considered in several ways: as a collaboration between “customary” Tetela colonial subjects and an earnest anticolonial ethnographer; as a many-layered late colonial visual artifact; and in terms of the various rituals it portrays, and in which it participated. By considering this film in relation to undisciplined filmic spaces, “excess,” and as a site of multiple inscriptions, this article shows possibilities for Tetela-Hamba self-fashioning and subject formation within Luc de Heusch's colonial/anticolonial visual and ethnographic “conversation.”

Comments

This article was originally published in Visual Anthropology. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download from ScholarWorks @ CWU.

Journal

Visual Anthropology

Rights

© Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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