Akomfrah’s Foreigner

Abstract

In John Akomfrah’s essay-film, The Nine Muses (2010), the aesthetic paradigms of politics and art are broached so evenly that it is as possible to speak of a ‘cinema of politics’ as it is to speak of a ‘politics of cinema’ – both concepts are equalised, so that each is constitutive of the other. A bricolage of extraordinary intertextuality, Akomfrah’s film is equally concerned with the socio-historical problem of migrant subjectivity and the politico-aesthetic distribution of hierarchies relating to forms and technologies of art. The thematic concern for migration becomes a formal ‘foreignness’, creating a reconfigurative possibility for cinema and its adjacent art forms. Following Rancière’s utopian framing of the wandering ‘foreigner’ (1990: 3), I claim that Akomfrah film ‘persists in the curiosity of his gaze, displaces his angle of vision, reworks the first way of putting together words and images, undoes the certainties of place’ (1990: 3). The foreigner is an urgent political concept at a time of consensus and especially crucial in regards to public responses to mass migration from the Middle East to Europe.