-
Race, Class, and the Limits of the Analogical Imagination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s African America
- SubStance
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 49, Number 3, 2020 (Issue 153)
- pp. 71-99
- 10.1353/sub.2020.0020
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Abstract:
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tireless opposition to neocapitalism throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s took “Africa” as the allegory and instantiation of political resistance tout court – a fact not surprising given the number of countries which began wresting back their sovereignty from European colonizers during these years. Yet there is another dimension of Africanness – bound up with the continent’s history yet simultaneously alien to it – that figures prominently in Pasolini’s aesthetics throughout the period: the African-American community and its particular cultural and counter-cultural expressions. By virtue of the United States’ fraught racial politics, sprawling ghettoes, and imperialist ambitions, the country figured prominently into Pasolini’s “third-world” imaginary in a variety of media and genres – representations relatively overlooked in his influential oeuvre, and which this article examines in detail.