Daily Archives: August 14, 2021

EIFF is back! This years historic edition is the first large in-person film festival gathering in the UK since March 2020. For obvious reasons the programme isnt as big as in previous years, but that hasnt stopped the festival from delivering a terrific line-up of cinema from all over the world for you to enjoy.

Whilst the majority of films this year are being screened at Edinburghs legendary Filmhouse Cinema, the festival is also offering a number of screenings, Q&As, and In Person events to be viewed digitally through the dedicated streaming platform Filmhouse at Home. The popular Film Fest in the City is also back, with free screenings of cinematic favourites taking place in St Andrew Square. There are also three special event screenings, with films being shown simultaneously at partner cinemas around Scotland.

Featuring a diverse range of UK, European, and international premieres, EIFF 2021 looks set to be a fantastic showcase of new features, classic films, documentaries, shorts, animations, and so much more. As always, Entertainment Focus will be there to help you find the very best films to watch, so look out for our reviews as they drop. In the meantime, we have gone through the programme with fine-tooth comb and picked our selection for the must-see films at this years Edinburgh International Film Festival.

This years opening gala is Pig, directed by Michael Sarnoski and starring Nicolas Cage as a reclusive truffle hunter whose beloved pig is kidnapped. The marketing for this film has been somewhat misleading, making it seem like a Taken or John Wick style vengeance thriller. Prepare to have your expectations subverted by this emotional and meditative drama.

Having split critical opinion at Cannes, Annette makes its UK premiere at EIFF. Directed by enfant terrible Leos Carax (Holy Motors) and written by iconic pop duo Sparks, this extravagant and eccentric musical stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as a comedian and opera singer whose new-born child Annette, turns their lives upside down.

Making its European Premiere at EIFF, Jennifer Ngos politically urgent documentary takes us onto the frontline of the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Exploring the oppressive legislation that sparked the demonstrations, and the violent clashes with police that followed, Ngos film is told through the eyes of four anonymous activists. One not to miss.

EIFF usually hosts an entire strand of horror, but this year theres only a couple in the curtailed programme. One of them is The Night House, directed by David Bruckner (who brought V/H/S to Edinburgh in 2012, and more recently directed the terrifying The Ritual) and starring Rebecca Hall. This complex psychological thriller about a woman who is haunted by the recent death of her husband is sure to put a chill in your bones. One to watch with the lights on.

Filmmaker and musician Quentin Dupieux brings his latest film Mandibles to EIFF. Coming hot on the heels of his most recent film Deerskin which was only released in the UK last month, his latest absurd comedy follows two simple-minded friends who discover a giant dog-sized fly trapped in the boot of a car. They decide to take it home and domesticate it, in the hope of getting rich. As you do. If you enjoy your comedy with a side-order of unpredictable surrealism, this ones for you.

Rakel is a 23-year-old cartoonist who discovers she is pregnant. She doesnt want a baby, but it is far too late for an abortion. When an animated cartoon baby suddenly materialises from her own doodles, she embarks on a humorous journey encountering new people and circumstances that might help her come to terms with her situation. Taking an irreverent look at unplanned pregnancy, this insightful Norwegian comedy, based on a graphic novel, is making its UK premiere at EIFF.

The plight of the modern migrant comes under the spotlight in this lean and thrilling drama from director Haider Rashid. Following a young Iraqi trying to migrate into Europe on foot, Europa explores the brutal reality of the Balkan Route, as he tries to cross from Turkey into Bulgaria, where if it isnt the harsh landscape trying to kill you, it is nationalist migrant hunters with guns. Definitely one not to miss.

Canadian filmmaker Shannon Walsh shines an uncomfortable light on the global gig economy upon which so much of contemporary life is reliant, in this complex and compelling documentary. Exploring the massive disconnect between technological convenience of having everything you need via an app on your phone, and the invisible millions working in wage slavery to make your same day delivery a reality. In light of the past 18 months, this is essential viewing.

Writer-director Ruth Platt returns to Edinburgh with this spine-chilling ghost story, about a lonely child living in a large vicarage, full of darkness and empty spaces. When a visitor in the night talks the girl into taking something which doesnt belong to her, she sets off a train of events which may make her worst nightmares come true. If youre in the mood for some dread-filled horror, add this one to your watchlist.

After Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow anything directed by Jim Cummings is an immediate must-see for us. This time he is on co-writing and co-directing duty with PJ McCabe in this biting satirical thriller. Cummings stars as a Hollywood talent agent, who shortly before his wedding receives an invitation for an anonymous, no-strings-attached, sexual encounter. Unable to get the idea out of his mind, he accepts, and thats when his perfectly ordered life begins to fall apart.

Tickets on sale now athttps://www.edfilmfest.org.uk

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The must-see films at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2021 - Entertainment Focus

Other studies clearly evidence the outsized impact of lack of access to healthy food, climate change, unequal education, and the coronavirus pandemic on Black and brown Americans.

There is also a life expectancy racial gap. Take the roughly 30-minute walk or ride two stops on the Orange Line from Roxbury to Back Bay; thats the distance between where the average life expectancy is 59 years old to where its 92, according to a 2012 Virginia Commonwealth University study. It may be worse now, because the pandemic widened the life expectancy racial gap nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Its also true that policies born of racism harm everyone, not just Black and brown folks. Take for example the practice of paying tipped employees below the minimum wage, which was widely adopted in postbellum America as a way to avoid paying former slaves. Broadly speaking, racism has cost the US economy $16 trillion since 2000, according to a study by Citigroup.

If, as our nations foundational documents claim, we were all bestowed the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at our creation, then every American should have a vested interest in ending the persistent systemic racism in our society. But the Pew report shows that Americans just dont see it that way.

While 78 percent of Democrats said they believe the increased attention on historical racism and slavery is a positive development, only 25 percent of Republicans said the same.

When it comes to solutions to systemic racism, 74 percent of Democrats said more needs to be done to achieve racial equity, according to the study. But only 22 percent of Republicans agreed.

The divide extends to views about the very existence of racial inequities in America. While 85 percent of Democrats said that white people benefit from the advantages denied to Black people, 78 percent of Republicans said white people do not enjoy such privilege.

The political divide on the issue of race is not new, but it is widening.

These are not new divides between the parties, but they have grown in recent years, said Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research at Pew.

Its not hard to see why. The crescendo of calls for racial justice, and its embrace by Democrats, has coincided with a fundamental shift in the core value powering the modern Republican Party: grievance. Gone are the days when substantive issues like fiscal policy, limited government, taxes, and health care drove the Republican agenda. The party is now sustained largely by its own victimhood.

The biggest example of this is the GOPs ongoing embrace of the big lie about the 2020 election being stolen and baseless claims of election fraud that are driving a wave of state-level voter suppression laws at a rate not seen since the Reconstruction era.

But the Republican lodestar of ax grinding is also evidenced in its immigration rhetoric, including recent false claims that the new surge in COVID cases is caused by migrants crossing the southern border, and in its efforts to redefine the Black Lives Matter movement as a dangerous terroristic organization that poses a threat to police officers and the white, suburban way of life.

Its also turned critical race theory a phrase that has been conflated with basic race consciousness in school history curriculums into a buzz term that scares parents into believing their children are being taught to feel guilty about being white.

Small wonder that efforts on Capitol Hill to restore the Voting Rights Act or at the very least agree on a bipartisan police reform package have, so far, proven fruitless. Few issues have remained as politically polarizing as race in America, and policy solutions are impossible when the nation cannot agree to a common set of facts even when the data supporting them stare them in the face.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr can be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @KimberlyEAtkins.

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On the issue of race, politics get in the way of the facts - The Boston Globe

While movements like Stop Asian Hate can galvanize much-needed attention to the racialized violence Asian American communities face, we must recognize the ways that this victimhood is often twinned in the U.S. imagination with Black criminality, while seemingly always sidelining women.

What do MaKhia Bryant, Breonna Taylor, Daoyou Feng, Jiangqing Jessica Klyzek, Merlita Gargullo and Valentina Pasion have in common?

They are members of racialized groups subjected to state-sanctioned misogynistic violence. Yet, like many other women of color who were killed in the U.S., they have been rendered invisible in public responses to such violence. For decades now, violence against men of colorYusef Hawkins, Vincent Chin, Abner Louima, Rodney King and George Floydhas been the template for understanding who is subjected to racist violence and how to respond to this issue.

It is essential to include women of color, including both Black and Asian American women, when we think about racist violence in America. Despite necessary correctives like the #SayHerNamecampaign, gendered violence is often treated as exceptional rather than as an organizing feature of maintaining U.S. racial hierarchy. This is precisely why the debate about critical race theory is so important: It teaches us about the urgency of interrogating systems of oppression rooted in white supremacy and seeing their impact on women of color.

From the plantation slavery era in the U.S., African Americans have been treated as a threat to the prevailing social order. Even after emancipation, African Americans were constrained in their freedom to move, think, congregate, work, create families of choice, and express a self that was not contained by white supremacy. This happened through Black codes, Jim Crow laws and discriminatory practices in housing, employment, education, healthcare, political participation and legal representation.

Mainstream media has also created and refined racist representations of African Americans as lazy, dishonest and destructive, presenting them as archetypes using simplistic binaries to explain and justify violence. Importantly, these representations are gendered as well.

Mirroring the ubiquitous Black male rapist stereotype is the sexually promiscuous and aggressive Black woman archetypically represented by the figures of the jezebel and sapphire. These representations were evidenced in the 15th century and carried through to 20th century representations of the welfare queen. Black mothers are represented as toxic to real estate values, test scores, beauty standards and respectability, always prone to dispense violence, including against their own children.

In the wake of the 1960s civil rights unrest, the U.S. pathologized Black communities on the basis of such stereotypes, declaring Black mothers undeserving of support from the welfare state. These gendered constructions of Black criminality make it easier to represent Black women as deserving victims of violence, where violence is the necessary corrective to their stepping out of place.

Similarly, violence against Asian and Asian American women began as early as the Page Act of 1875 with the racist and sexualized profiling of Chinese women perceived to be a threat to the moral fabric of U.S. society. These representations crystallized on screen with the fetishization of Asian women as exotic lotus blossoms to be consumed, or dragon ladies to be feared and contained. Such Manichean representations lend themselves to violence and even state-sanctioned death, evidenced both in U.S. military camptowns in Asia, as in the case of Jennifer Laude in 2014, or as victims of police brutality in urban cities in the U.S., as in the case of Jinqing Jessica Klyzek in 2013.

With the mythical model minority construct, Asian and Asian American women experience a different kind of symbolic violencerepresented as model workers, on the one hand, and exploitable subjects on the other. We see this in the preference for Asian women in low-wage or care work industries because they are perceived to be self-sacrificing, quiet, docile or willing to work long hours; this very perception resulting in their labor exploitation.

In the much publicized Speck Massacre of 1966 in Chicago, two Filipina nurse survivors, Merlita Gargullo and Valentina Pasion, get memorialized as good and hard-working girls, while their exploitation under the U.S. Exchange Visitors Program that was created to fill Americas nursing labor shortage is rendered invisible, as Catherine Ceniza Choy states.

Racist violence also operates by pitting communities of color against one another, occluding violence against women of color, even as it invisibilizes how groups are racialized differently. The racial construct of the model minority has long served as a racial wedge and counter to narratives of Black criminality. During the 1992 Los Angeles uprising two examples of Black criminality figured in media explanations of why the uprisings happened: the killing of 15-year old Latasha Harlin by Soon Ja Du, a convenience store owner, and police violence against Rodney King.

The violence against both was explained by appealing to notions of Black criminality, blaming them for the violence they experienced. In Latashas case, the Korean American woman was presented as the victim who was defending her property. The media representation of this story ignored the negative effects of deindustrialization and disinvestment in predominantly Black and Brown low-income communities across the U.S., while shoring up presumptions about Black criminality and Asian American victimhood.

When harm is done to Black womenwhether in the form of police and state violence as in the case of Breonna Taylor, or through the layered histories of mistreatment that cost the lives of Black girls like MaKhia Bryant and Latasha Harlinthe twinned responses of blame (what did she do to deserve this?) and acceptance (thats just what happens in Black communities) remain the default responses.

Something different happens when Asian American women face violence. The Stop AAPI collective recently presented evidence of 3,795 incidents of hate, with women reporting such incidents 2.3 times more than men. The public registered surprise when these statistics were circulated, largely on account of the stereotypes about Asian American womens passivity and victimhoodnot having done anything to deserve violenceas if any group ever deserves violence.

Such discourses actually feedrather than discourageviolence against Asian American women. While movements like Stop Asian Hate can galvanize much-needed attention to the racialized violence Asian American communities face, we must recognize the ways that this victimhood is often twinned in the U.S. imaginary with Black criminality, while seemingly always sidelining women.

Re-centering women in our analyses expands the terrain of violence to include sexual, reproductive and economic violence as important sites of analysis. It helps us see how racialized violence is often predicated on gendered understandings, as feminist scholars such as Andrea Ritchie, Mariame Kaba and others have shown. This nuanced analysis amplifies the insurgent thinking advanced by critical race theory (CRT), which ensures we see the violence produced by white supremacy and provides a lens for analyzing the impact on communities of color.

Following the pandemic and the countrys proclamation of the value of essential workers, this lens allows us to see the intertwined effects on Black and Asian women careworkers in Chicago; both are providing this labor in an exploitative system that rhetorically espouses an ethic of care but ultimately renders their lives disposable. Similarly attentive to how the COVID-19 pandemic has produced as well as visibilized violence against Asian women and Black women are activist collectives like the Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, as well as youth-led efforts like the Linda Lindas that are leading the way in forging Afro-Asian and feminist solidarity.

In these polarized times, the work of expanding our analytic horizons is all the more urgent; it calls for engaging not only with Afro-Asian solidarities that counter anti-Asian and anti-Black racism, but also intersectional and feminist analyses that include the voices of women of color. If we accept that no individual or group deserves to be mistreated, marginalized or scapegoated for problems that were not of their making, then we are one step closer to supporting each others struggles.

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Afro-Asian Solidarities and Reclaiming the Erasure of Women - Ms. Magazine

Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Jon Cherry / Getty Images)

At the heart of Adam Serwers The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trumps America is a sustained attempt to pinpoint the ideological and social currents that brought Trump to the White House. There are, of course, conflicting interpretations of what constitutes the essential appeal of Trumpism. Some prioritize economic factors, like white working-class reactions to expanding income inequality. Others look to geopolitics and see a decade-long global disillusionment with democracy that has given rise to the election of right-wing nationalist leaders around the world. Still others point to philosophical explanations, such as the rise of the post-truth society, in which propaganda, social media, and rampant conspiracy have replaced research, expertise, and objective truth when it comes to explaining the election of Trump in 2016. Although Serwer is mindful of some of the explanations, his bookwhich is primarily composed of essays he wrote covering the Trump presidency as a staff writer at The Atlanticoffers a historical and cultural explanation for Trumpism. In particular, he defends a backlash thesis in which Trumpism must be seen as the white supremacist reaction to a segment of societys cultural and political decline.1

Serwer therefore sees Trumpism as a cruel backlash, to the the election of Barack Obama, the possibility that Hillary Clinton might be his successor, the swift acceptance of gay marriage, the growing diversity of cities, and the threat of immigration increase. Faced with these existential threats, Trumps supporters look to him to use the power of the state to wage war against the people who threaten their white supremacist vision of America. The adage The Cruelty is the Point, then, indicates the resentful delight that Trump and his supporters exude in their attempt to crush their opponents in the hope of re-establishing their version of the real America. As such, the forces that led to Trumps election, argues Serwer, are anything but some kind of aberration brought on by economic inequality. Instead, Serwer sees such forces as an essential element in long-term political conflicts, which he traces back to the failures of the Reconstruction Era.2

How, though, did a nation that has such a long history of being cruel elect Barack Obama twice? Moreover, what makes Trumpism unique, given the recent electoral successes of right-wing nationalist governments around the world? Might this reality not indicate the failures of a global liberal economic system? And, more generally, how can cruelty be overcome? I spoke with Serwer about his thinking on Trumpism, including its historical origins, and the cruelty he believes is intrinsic to it.3

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins4

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Why do you think the essence of Trumpism is cruelty? 5

Adam Serwer: I describe it that way, but Donald Trump also thinks the essence of Trumpism is cruelty. Whether its encouraging police to brutalize suspects, pardoning war crimes against Muslims, or carrying out a policy of child separation, Trumps answer to any dilemma is the ruthless application of state force and the humiliation of its targets. We just disagree over whether the things hes doing are good.6

DSJ: Why was Obama so easily able to beat two white Republican presidential opponents in 2008 and 2012? Were Americans less cruel during this time? 7

AS: Part of what I try to do in this book is draw a line tracing the long history of cruelty in American politics to the present, so that the Trump era is more understandable and less mystifying. America exists because of the displacement and slaughter of the continents original inhabitants, and was built in large part on forced labor. That is going to pose some clear contradictions for a country that aspires to the notion that all men are created equal, and necessitate justifications for why that idea does not apply to vast categories of human beings.8

That said, you can see the evolution of the Republican Party over the political races of those years. In 2008, John McCain tried to tamp down the slander of birtherism when confronted with it. By 2012, Mitt Romney was apologizing for his moderate record in Massachusetts, declaring himself severely conservative, and indulging birtherism while campaigning in Michigan, joking about how no one has any questions about where he was born, and seeking Trumps endorsement. After Romney lost, the Republican Party briefly considered moderating before going all in on white identity politics, in part inspired by Steve Bannons interpretation of an essay arguing that many white voters stayed home in 2012.9

By 2016, the party had selected the nations most prominent birther as their standard-bearer, precisely because the hard lines he drew around American citizenship attacked the legitimacy of the first Black president. Trump won the Republican nomination not only because he was cruel, but because he was the most sincere in his expression of that cruelty.10

Obama was an exceptional politician, and the politics of cruelty are not invinciblebut they can be very effective.11

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DSJ: You state in the books introduction that American journalism is afflicted by a presentism, a kind of goldfish memory that struggles to think outside the present or recent past. Part of this most certainly has to do with the Obama presidency. To overcome such presentism, your book makes frequent reference to the Reconstruction era (186577) and its failed promises to secure racial equality after the Civil War. Where do you see continuity, and discontinuity, between those years and more recent times? 12

AS: Reconstruction is the first time Americans genuinely try to build a multiracial democracy, an effort that is ultimately nullified by a huge backlash that embraces the politics of white identity. The idea of Black equality is radicalizing for much of the white South, and they use white supremacy as a way to rally whites across class lines against the possibility. Southern Democrats are often explicit about this, but they also borrow language from white Republicans in the North, in presenting their attempt to entrench racial hierarchy as a good government crusade against corruption and a way to interpret Black efforts as the desire to use government to obtain spoils they are unwilling to work for.13

More explicitly, something similar happened after the election of Barack Obama. And while there are many other factorsthe panic of 1873 seriously weakened the Reconstruction project, much as the slow recovery from the Great Recession buoyed Trumpthe ideological narrative that swept Trump into office was that the multiracial coalition that elected Obama had stolen what rightfully belonged to the Republican base, and Trump would restore the proper order of things.14

DSJ: Many professional historians are very reluctant to use history in this manner out of fear that they would be projecting present-day concerns and values onto the past, and thus misinterpreting historical facts. Of course, the latest aggravation of these anxieties is on display in the ongoing controversy over the 1619 Project. Where do you stand on this controversy, and how do you see it connecting to your own attempt to use history to understand the present? 15

AS: I think that Americans are constantly arguing about the past to make sense of the present, especially professional historians. The Dunning Schools negative portrayal of Reconstruction was a crucial part of the intellectual support for Jim Crow; W.E.B. Du Bois called it propaganda and offered a Marxist counter-interpretation that turned out to be far more accurate. Civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. embraced C. Vann Woodwards Strange Career of Jim Crow. Woodward himself commented to a friend in 1966, as the backlash to the civil rights movement was beginning, that all the classic 77 signals are up. John Hope Franklin wrote a history textbook that caused a massive controversy because conservatives felt its frank portrayal of Black and Native American history was too negative and insufficiently patriotic. Today, you can find David Waldstreicher in The Atlantic arguing with Sean Wilentz over the role of slavery in the Constitution, after Wilentz scolded Bernie Sanders in the New York Times.16

There are some arguments in the 1619 Project I agree with, and some I dont. But to the extent that it was arguing that events like slavery and segregation continue to shape racial disparities in the present, thats not seriously contestable, which is why the arguments have moved on to things like whether it proclaimed the United States irredeemably racist.17

Its important to draw relevant distinctions between past and present, and to hew to historical fact. Like anyone else who writes about my history, I try my best to do both. But history is how we make sense of the present, and people who, say, defend Robert E. Lee by insisting that many white people thought slavery was not wrong in 1861 are also projecting present-day concerns and values onto the past. They are trying to preserve an interpretation of the past that is precious to them.18

DSJ:The historian Eric Foner, whose work on Reconstruction you regularly cite, observed in 2010, in the pages of The Nation, that the financial bailouts of 2008 had aroused resentments that should not be ignored, even if they [were] often couched in extreme and racist language once the Obama administration took office. He went on to say that the economic policies of the Obama administration were fixed to the advantage of the wealthy and that the government was indifferent to the plight of ordinary Americans. Critics on the left, and even some on the right, would regularly use economic explanations of this nature to explain why Trump won the presidency in 2016. Why do you prove so critical of such economic explanations?19

AS: First off, Foner is a giant. Second, I find many of the left critiques of the Obama administrations response to the Great Recession compelling and persuasive, particularly when it comes to the size of the stimulus and the administrations weak effort to stem the fallout from the housing crisis.20

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The problem is that they are not, by themselves, a sufficient explanation for how Trump got elected. For example, Black and Latino voters, who suffered greater losses in wealth and experienced a far slower recovery, were among the most resistant to his appeals in 2016. Economic crises can provide an opening for a demagogue like Trump, but theyre insufficient as a blanket explanation absent a willingness to believe, say, that more racial discrimination in lending would have prevented the housing crisis. The ideological lens that makes Trumpism compelling as an explanation for your struggles has to be there.21

DSJ: Does the backlash thesis you argue for work at the global level? The recent political successes of nationalist movements are a global phenomenon, as demonstrated by India, Turkey, Brazil, and across Europe. Given these global circumstances, is there a reason that you do not place the American experience of racial inequality in an international context? For instance, you say that you are inspired by W.E.B. Du Boiss critical work on Reconstruction, and Du Bois connected racism to economic imperialism. Is there a reason why your book doesnt make such international connections, especially given the contemporary reality of global nationalist movements?22

AS: Du Bois was much smarter than me and had a greater body of knowledge to draw from as a result. Im not going to feign expertise in the politics of nations I havent studied. There are obviously certain trends that seem to be happening in many places, from the rise of right-wing nationalism to educational polarization. I dont think its a coincidence that much as in the United States, these battles are frequently about the nature of citizenship and who truly belongs in a given country. America has always been a multiracial nation, even when it was not a multiracial democracy, and not every country dealing with this phenomenon has that history, which is one I am familiar with.23

I speak fluent Italian, and I would still feel uncomfortable about writing an essay about the strangeness of support for La Lega in southern Italy. Who am I, a person who has never set foot in India, to write a book pontificating on the origins of Hindu nationalism?24

That said, the book does argue that American imperialism abroad erodes democracy at home. I note in one chapter that Republican support for imperialism helped cement the post-Reconstruction bipartisan consensus in favor of white supremacy and develop new subclasses of citizenship. And in another chapter, I contend that the War on Terror, as well as the absence of both temporal and geographic limits on that project, had a corrosive effect on democracy that helped elect Trump.25

DSJ: Lets turn to the present and specifically immigration. You provide an excellent analysis of the egregious cruelty of Trumps family separation policy. You also, however, mention that deportations were lower under the Trump administration than the Obama administration. Recently Vice President Harris said that Guatemalans should not try to come to the United States. Democrats, too, seem to be cruel when it comes to immigration. Is this what you mean when stating: politicians wearing the smiling face of liberalism can provide a more effective faade for cruelty than those who make cruelty public purpose? 26

AS: Yes. But, also, our immigration system was designed to be cruel, and the difference with Trump is that he ramped up the cruelty while also attempting to scuttle the redeeming factors of the system, such as asylum and refugee admissions. But you cant prevent a system designed to be cruel from performing its function simply by putting someone else in charge of it. And we can already see how the continuities between Biden and Trump on immigration are rendered invisible by right-wing hysteria about the border, and demands that migrants be dealt with as inhumanely as possible.27

We have this strange feedback loop on immigration, where people demand migration at the border be stopped with harsher and harsher measures. But because migration cannot be stopped through mere brute force, it just creates more demand for more brute force, and less support for policy measures that might actually help manage migration flows. This is very good for the immigrant detention-industrial complex, but it doesnt solve the problem nativists say they want to solve, because making the system less cruel would defeat the purpose for them.28

DSJ: You state that Trump was elected to destroy Obamas legacy. Obama has recently stated that Biden is finishing the job his administration started. Do you agree with Obamas assessment? 29

AS: One of the more promising signs about the Biden administration is that they seem to have internalized many of the left-wing economic critiques of the Obama administration, something we saw with the speed and ambition of the coronavirus relief bill. But theres also been a great deal of hype about a supposedly FDR-sized presidency, even though Biden has yet to pass a permanent expansion of the welfare state on the order of the Affordable Care Act.30

You now have tens of millions more people who have been able to access government health care, thanks to the Medicaid expansion, and it would be even more if not for the Roberts Court and the leadership of Republican-controlled states in the South being content to deprive their own residents of the support they deserve. I would be happy if the Biden administrations record on progressive legislation eclipsed Obamas record. But that hasnt happened yet.31

DSJ: Many liberals are predicting a doomsday scenario in which Republicans win the House and the Senate in next years midterm elections, allowing them to rewrite the rules to win future elections that will pave the way for an authoritarian state. The conclusion of your book seems to share something like this anxiety. Can you elaborate?32

AS: I think its very clear that Republicans want to insulate their hold on power from the electorate. In states like Wisconsin, because of gerrymandering and geographic concentration of Democratic constituencies, its basically impossible for Democrats to gain a majority in the legislature. And what that means is that the party that controls the legislature is not beholden to any civic obligations toward parts of the public that are powerless to remove them. It severs the link of accountability that is necessary for democracy. In extreme cases like the Jim Crow South, it leaves the nonvoting population subject to exploitation and brutality. In the case of Trump, it meant that during the pandemic he was willing to let Americans in blue states die because he did not consider them his people and so their deaths should not be considered part of his record.33

That doesnt mean the methods Republicans are employing will necessarily work, although thats no reason to simply allow them to do it. People want to be free, and mechanisms that rely on the permanence of a given coalition will eventually fail, because coalitions change and people change. But you can do tremendous damage in the meantime. Less likely than a full- blown authoritarian state is a whiter, more conservative, and more unrepresentative electorate in which the majority of Americans have little say in how they are governed. And unfortunately, we have a Supreme Court that, much like the post-Reconstruction court, views attempts to shield Black suffrage from disenfranchisement as illegitimate federal government interference in state matters, and is slowly writing the 15th Amendment out of the Constitution.34

DSJ: Can cruelty be overcome? Some might think of cruelty, for instance, as a permanent character flaw. Isnt the overcoming of cruelty necessary for what you describe as the New Reconstruction? How can it come about? 35

AS: Cruelty is part of human nature; its not inherently a right-wing or left-wing thing. Individually we can resist it, but its always going to be a part of us. What is not inevitable is a system that incentivizes the politics of cruelty, in which a party of white identity is constantly trying to disenfranchise, marginalize, and destroy the constituencies of the more multiracial party in order to maintain its hold on power, and in which cruel deeds become heroic acts of resistance against an imagined apocalypse.36

The Republican Party has chosen Trumpism because of the way the American system is structured; they can hold on to power with a minoritarian base that is ideally geographically distributed to win the Senate and the electoral college, and to win the House through favorably drawn districts. It is logical, if immoral, under this system, for the Republican Party to continue to try to win elections by persuading their voters that trans children, or Taliban-style Islamic law, or migrant invasions, are on the verge of destroying their way of life and all they hold dear.37

The New Deal coalition altered the Democratic Party from an institution devoted to white supremacy to the party of civil rightsthat was not because their leaders suddenly experienced personal growth. It was because they became beholden to constituencies that forced them to change. Similarly, the only thing that can change the present dynamic is a system in which the Republican Party is forced to reach outside its hard-core base in order to hold power.38

Editors Note: A question regarding the 2008 financial crisis has been changed in order to reflect the Obama administrations involvement in the passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. The Act was passed under the Bush administration and a Democratic majority Congress, and key components were implemented by the incoming Obama administration. The question originally stated that the Act had passed during Obamas term.

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The Long History of American Cruelty - The Nation

Its a hybrid film. Its half documentary and half bible. So describes Milo Rau, Extended Play advisory board member and arguably the most controversial practitioner of documentary theatre in Europe, when interviewed about his 2019 film The New Gospel. An interdisciplinary production, or rather, a process, The New Gospel stems from a political campaign for migrant farm workers in Southern Italy, investigates its actual events, leaders, and participants, and extracts its course of resistance into a contemporary biblical fable on the silver screennot only as a mystified historical account of the campaign itself, but also a documentary of The New Gospels own creative process. In the 110-minute run, The New Gospel takes us on a three-fold journey: the life and death of the most influential religious founder in the history of the world, the pursuit of migrant worker activists of legal rights and fair pay, and the making of the film that reconnects the ancient (and stalled, perhaps) spiritual tradition with its secular socio-revolutionary roots.

Matera, a small town in Basilicata, Italy, is an elaborate site choice that serves Milo Raus vision of hybridity. A historical town dating back to Graeco-Roman ages, Materas primeval look has made it a screen double for ancient Jerusalem since the 1960s, featured in renowned biblical period films such as Pasolinis The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) and Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ (2004). However, what is hidden behind Materas archaic scenery is the modern socio-economic system that sustains its aura and cultural functionality. The agricultural corporations in Southern Italy rely heavily on the cheap labor of migrants who came to Europe across the Mediterranean. Oftentimes not able to obtain legal residency in EU, a large number of African migrant workers is forced to endure heavy physical labor with meagre wage, destitute of sufficient housing or healthcare conditions. In this group of migrant workers, Milo Rau and his creative team find a contemporary counterpart to the very original bedrock of Christianitythe displaced, denied, and deprived human beings summoned under a solitary call against the exploitative systemwhether the ancient Roman empire, or the modern capitalist agricultural industry and the EU state apparatus.

Yvan Sagnet is one of the migrant workers. In 2011, he came from Cameron to Italy, and worked as a seasonal low-wage farmhand in a tomato plantation near Nard. For Yvan Sagnet, his fellow workers are essentially living in the same circumstance as slaves two millennia ago. Despite their labor congealed in all kinds of farm products that circulate restlessly in the markets and households of Italy, the migrant workers themselves are deprived of proper means to sustain their basic needs to survive in this country. Moreover, these workers constantly suffer from inhumane torture and humiliation from gang masters and landowners. Yvans experience is reflected in an interview at the very beginning of The New Gospel. At a humble shelter in the Matera ghetto, an African farmworker tells Milo Rau in front of the camera that he has to work at an hour wage of merely 5 Euro because he has no rights to argue for a fair salary as an illegal immigrant. Determined to bring change to this unbearable situation of modern slavery, Yvan dedicates himself to social activism. Since 2011, Yvan has been organizing strikes among his co-workers in the tomato field, and has been making efforts to bring their struggles to legislative and institutional levels, which is pressing the Italian justice system to respond to the discontent of migrant workers.

With The New Gospel, Milo Rau is inciting the Italian and European society to reconsider the contemporary relevance of their spiritual foundation, to interrogate who Jesus would be today, and what Jesus would do. Rau proposes a radical answer in his artistic choice to cast Yvan Sagnet as Jesus and the migrant farmworkers involved in Yvans activism as the disciples. For a hybrid text, it is an unavoidable question whether The New Gospel intends to pose a religious reading upon Yvans campaign that could threaten to diminish its materialist socio-economic pursuits, or if the film is citing from the core canon of Christianity in order to articulate its political connotation. Instead of limiting The New Gospels interpretative potential on either way of thinking, Milo Rau and Yvan Sagnet are trying to synthesize spirituality, the omnipresent base-color of Southern European everyday life, and political activism, the most urgent endeavor to end injustice hidden behind the seemingly peaceful mechanism that supports this way of life.

Yvan Sagnet himself was raised with Catholic upbringings; but the actual struggle of life brought a Marxist touch to his understanding of the Gospels. Yvan remarks: When you start to read the New Testament, you have a guy whos an activist for the landless people and the periphery of the Roman Empire: that is exactly the situation that we have in Italy now. In the New Testament, the apostles are all migrants who have lost their homes because of the invasions of the Romans, which is exactly the situation in Italy now. A bold yet invigorating re-interpreter of Christian preachings, Yvan embodies a Marxist Jesus in The New GospelFor me one sentence from the Bible became the leading sentence of our film, when Jesus says, Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Yvans activism, as well as his performance in the film as Jesus, is a powerful reminder that the requests for justice and human dignity are already written in the European and Italian law; the only question is to fulfill them. Yvans purpose has never been political activism against capitalism per se, but rather the revolutionary reiteration of the long European tradition, however stale and irrelevant it might seem.

As an advocate of process over product, Milo Rau and his theatre-activism company International Institute of Political Murders (IIPM) bring Yvans agenda one step forwardnot merely into the artistic crystallization of documentary film, but also an actual social movement called Rivolta della Dignita (Revolt of Dignity). According to Milo Rau:

I think it really has become a biblical film adaptation for our time, with the first black Jesus in European film history and with a cast that is diverse in the best sense of the word. Besides international stars and politicians, activists, farm workers and normal citizens play the leading roles. Mary Magdalene is a main figure in our film, some of the apostles are female and interesting fact most of the apostles of our new Jesus are of Muslim faith. But what pleases me most is that our film had a real impact. As a consequence of the Revolt of Dignity, as you can see at the end of the film, the first Houses of Dignity were founded around Matera: houses where the previously homeless extras of the film can now live in dignity and self-determination. And this with the support of the Catholic Church!

Such a keen combination of art and activism is the most crucial guideline for Milo Rau. In IIPM and NT Ghent, where he works as the artistic director, Milo Rau has been practicing his unique, contemporary understanding of Gesamtkunstwerkthere is no boundary between art and life, artworks and social conflicts, art production and mundane labor, or art institutions and communities. Upon his appointment in 2018 at NT Ghent, Milo Rau published ten rules as the guideline of his theatrical practice, known as The Ghent Manifesto. The three most fundamental rules read as below:

One: Its not just about portraying the world anymore. Its about changing it. The aim is not to depict the real, but to make the representation itself real.Two: Theatre is not a product; it is a production process. Research, castings, rehearsals, and related debates must be publicly accessible.Three: The authorship is entirely up to those involved in the rehearsals and the performance, whatever their function may be and to no one else.

On July 9th and 10th 2021, Howlround and The Foundry Theatre presented the first showing of The New Gospel in the United States. Accompanying a 48-hour streaming of the film for a North American audience, two panel discussions around The New Gospel built a bridge between the topicality of European refugee crisis and the Black Lives Matter Movement in the USA. Hosted by David Bruin, a Zoom panel took place on July 9th under the title how are artists seizing power today. Milo Rau, Luis Alfaro, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Alec Duffy and Emily Johnson were engaged in a heated discussion around a series of artists-led movements at the onset of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, and reflected on the political art making methodologies in the American theatre. On the following day, Dread Scott, Kristina Wong, Virginia Grise, Toshi Reagon and Carlton Turner gathered online in response to the question, how are artists and organizers building solidarity between art and movements.

Community was undoubtedly the top one keyword in every artists vocabulary. Against the broken landscape of the American identity upon the pandemic and systemic racism, artists are almost desperate to suture the wounds within and between communities with artistic attempts and institutional reformations. Behind initiatives like WeSeeYouWhite American Theatre, Amplifying Activism and so on, there has been a constant endeavor to establish a sense of collective and solidarity, to expand the inclusiveness of communities, to cure the social pathogens embedded in the genetics of art institutions in order to change the whole social systemin spite of the formalism, rosiness and idealist naivety these slogans might be charged with.

Among his American colleagues, Milo Rau was particularly quiet in the conversation around his work, seemingly due to the absence of the real protagonist on and off the screen, Yvan Sagnet, along with his fellow African farmworkers. BLM protests and racism in America have never been neglected in the agenda of The New Gospel despite its Europe specific subject matter. There is a scene in The New Gospel when a white Italian Matera local is auditioning for the role of a Roman soldier, and he mimics a violent racist attack as if torturing Jesus. This highly disturbing moment triggered an emotional exchange in the Zoom room around the sadistic drive behind racist hate crimes in the white American collective unconscious; however, for Yvan Sagnet and Milo Rau, whats more disturbing than the manifestation of hate crimes is the dialectical moment after this scene, where the violent white actor seamlessly transforms into the soft, mild-mannered disciple that gently takes the black Jesus down from the cross.

Yvan comments: The film is saying: There is evil in humans, but it comes from somewhere. We are always talking about racism, but were not connecting it with where this violence comes from. Milo Rau proposes a deeper investigation in the violent structure of globalized capitalism where the core of racism is rooted. Such investigation is manifested in the real, raw footage of black bodies laboring in the beautiful, idyllic tomato gardens around Matera. It cant be articulated or carried out in a Zoom room or an art institution. It takes you deeper into the field. It takes you out there into the world.

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Milo Rau, Yvan Sagnet and The New Gospel: What can an African Jesus Tell us about Racism and Globalized Capitalism? - Extended Play - Extended Play