Part Four | Frames for Alterity (Ethnography, Human Rights, Class, and Race)

Ethnography in the twenty-first century has delivered images of vanishing populations made redundant or communities self-destroying, appearing as the collateral damage of the globalization of modernity. Ethnography today, moreover, only makes sense ethically and politically as autoethnography or as ethnographic fiction, as opposed to the ethnographer-as-subject delivering his or her point of view in relationship to an alien community. The works in this program draw a constellation of the contemporary discourses we are working with to frame the remnants of colonial alterity: decolonization as restitution, the unresolved contradictions of class and race polarization, human rights as an apparatus to deal with mass political and climate refugees, and empathy as the emotion that will fix all these problems.

This program is the fourth and final part of Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization, an online series of films and discussions programmed by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The series will run in four thematic parts from June 23 through August 18, 2021. Each part will include a two-week group screening, and a live discussion. 

The series concludes with a repeat of all films from parts one through four on August 18.