A prelude to postcolonial cultural histories of education: “reading” Amanda Kernell’s Sami Blood

ABSTRACT

The focus on colonial power and domination tend to muffle the emotional complexities, ambiguous attachments, and cultural paradoxes of persons who become wards of colonial educational systems. Drawing on feminist thought, film philosophy, and postcolonial cultural theories, Hannah M. Tavares provides a reading of Amanda Kernell’s film Sami Blood. Tavares argues that the focalisation on the female protagonist’s body Elle Marja and the different humiliations and kinds of experiences that mark, mutilate her dignity, and complicate her desires in the film is instructive for thinking and writing the dense and multilayered thickness of postcolonial cultural histories. Tavares concentrates on the film’s compositional elements and narrative to introduce an approach that is attentive to the preoccupations of postcolonial theorising to the English-speaking reader.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• blood
• body
• cinema
• postcoloniality

Acknowledgement

Nobody writes or thinks in a vacuum. Our intellectual preoccupations are given life by the many people we have had the good fortune to encounter. I want to thank Heriberto Cairo, Kathy Ferguson, Marie Fulkova, Nicole Grove, Helena Kafkova, Martin Nitsche, Michael J. Shapiro, Amy Sojot, and the two exceptional journal reviewers for all of your questions, insights, and critical comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Kernell has made several award-winning short films. Sameblod is her feature film debut, it premiered at the Venice Film Festival 2016 and won the Europa Cinemas Label for best European film. It has since won several awards including top prize for Best Nordic Film/Dragon Award at the Göteborg International Film Festival 2017 in Gothenburg.

² Nick Vivarelli, “Swedish-Sami Director on Sami Blood and Past Racism Against Sami People in the North of Sweden,” Variety. https://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/swedish-sami-director-amanda-kernell-on-sami-blood-and-racism-against-sami-people-in-the-north-of-sweden-1201941707 (accessed December 14, 2016).

³ Guy Lodge, “Film Review: ‘Sami Blood,’” Variety, September 1, 2016, https://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/sami-blood-review-1201849915.

⁴ Godfrey Cheshire, “Sami Blood,” https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sami-blood-2017 (accessed June 2, 2017).

⁵ See e.g. Nicholas Bell, chief film critic for IONcinema; Jaime Fa de Lucas for Culturamas; and Morgan Rojas for Cinemacy.com.

⁶ Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

⁷ I take “just reading” from Moi, Revolution, who takes it from Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007).

⁸ Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1984).

⁹ Cleo Cherryholmes, Power and Criticism (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).

¹⁰ Pradeep A. Dhillon, “(Dis)locating Thoughts: Where Do the Birds Go After the Last Sky?” in Critical Theories in Education, ed. T.S. Popkewitz and L. Fendler (New York: Routledge, 1999).

¹¹ Hannah M. Tavares, Pedagogies of the Image: Photo-archives, Cultural Histories, and Postfoundational Inquiry (Dordrecht: Springer Nature, 2016).

¹² William E. Connolly, “Suffering, Justice, and the Politics of Becoming,” in Moral Spaces Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, ed. D. Campbell and M.J. Shapiro (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

¹³ Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry M. Franklin, and Miguel A. Pereyra, Cultural History and Education (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001).

¹⁴ Jane Bennett and Michael J. Shapiro, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Moralising, ed. J. Bennett and M.J. Shapiro (New York: Routledge, 2002).

¹⁵ See Dhillon, “(Dis)locating” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Worlds (New York: Routledge, 1988).

¹⁶ Connolly, “Suffering,” 128.

¹⁷ Moi, Revolution, 178.

¹⁸ Ibid., 180.

¹⁹ Ibid., 193.

²⁰ Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cinema Interval (New York: Routledge, 1999), xi.

²¹ Ibid., 77.

²² John Mowitt, Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

²³ Ibid., xxv.

²⁴ Ibid., xxvi.

²⁵ Brian Laetz and Dominic McIver Lopes, “Genre,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. P. Livingston and C. Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009).

²⁶ Mowitt, Re-takes, 45.

²⁷ Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics (London: Routledge, 2016).

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989[1952]); and Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks trans. C.L. Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967[1952]). Moi considers the parallels between Beauvoir and Fanon’s texts and asks why present-day colonial and postcolonial critics have done nothing to unearth Fanon’s neglect of Beauvoir’s influence on his work. See Moi, The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 223.

³⁰ Toril Moi, Sex, Gender, and the Body (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 67.

³¹ Lynda Stone, “Modern to Postmodern: Social Construction, Dissonance, and Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 13 (1994): 49–63; Nancy Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (Routledge: New York, 1991); and Teresa de Lauretis, Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

³² Stone, “Modern to Postmodern.”

³³ Moi, Sex, Gender, and the Body 69.

³⁴ Cited in Moi, ibid., 70.

³⁵ Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. S. Simon and P. Rabinow, trans. D. Bouchard (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

³⁶ Stone, “Modern to Postmodern;” Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Changing Terrain of Knowledge and Power: A Social Epistemology of Educational Research,” Educational Researcher 26, no. 9 (1997): 18–29.

³⁷ Bernadette Baker, New Curriculum History (Rotterdam: Sense, 2009).

³⁸ Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso, 1995).

³⁹ Many have written on these topics including; Connolly, “Suffering;” Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy, Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial (New York and London: Teachers College Press, 2001); and Tavares, Pedagogies of the Image.

⁴⁰ Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), xiii.

⁴¹ Angela McRobbie, “Finding the ‘Real Me,’” in Media and Cultural Studies Key Works, ed. M.G. Durham and D. Kellner (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006).

⁴² Gregory Castle, Postcolonial Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

⁴³ Dimitriadis and McCarthy, Reading and Teaching, 6.

⁴⁴ Stuart Hall, “When was ‘The Postcolonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in The Postcolonial Question Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. I. Champers and L. Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 242–60.

⁴⁵ See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in In Other Worlds Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 202.

⁴⁶ Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2004), 9.

⁴⁷ Ali Behdad, Belated Travellers (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 3–4.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 6–8.

⁴⁹ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 46.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 39.

⁵¹ Alain Badiou, Badiou and His Interlocutors, ed. A.J. Bartlett and J. Clems (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

⁵² Aijaz Ahmad notes that “postcolonialism” had weight among the social sciences during anticolonial struggles of the mid-twentieth century. Ahmad prefers to keep postcolonialism separate from postcoloniality. See “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race and Class 36, no. 3 (1995): 1–20.

⁵³ John Roberts, “Photography and its Truth-Event,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 3 (2008): 463–8.

⁵⁴ Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 15.

⁵⁵ Trinh T. Min-ha, Cinema Interval (New York: Routledge, 1999), 7.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ Ibid.

⁵⁹ On film composition as political theory see Michael J. Shapiro, The Cinematic Political (New York: Routledge, 2020); as ethical experience see Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics.

⁶⁰ Kaja Silverman, “The Dream of the Nineteenth Century,” Camera Obscura 51, no. 3 (2002): 1–29.

⁶¹ Mowitt, Re-Takes, 3.

⁶² Gillian Rose, “The Question of Method: Practice, Reflexivity and Critique in Visual Studies,” in The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. I. Heywood and B. Sandywell (London: Berg, 2012), 542–58.

⁶³ Lynn Fendler, “Apertures of Documentation: Reading Images in Educational History,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 751–62.

⁶⁴ Scott MacDonald, “Introduction,” in A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 3.

⁶⁵ Robert Stam, “Film and Language from Metz to Bakhtin,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 86, no. 1 (1986): 112.

⁶⁶ Claudia Ruitenberg, “Don’t Fence Me In: The Liberation of Undomesticated Critique,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 38, no. 3 (2004): 348.

⁶⁷ Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” in The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, ed. D. Ingram (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002), 5.

⁶⁸ Gert Biesta, The Beautiful Risk of Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).

⁶⁹ Daniel Lindmark, “Pietism and Colonialism. Swedish Schooling in Eighteenth-century Sápmi,” Acta Borealia 23, no. 2 (2006): 116–29.

⁷⁰ Mieke Bal, “Mieke Bal,” Text Matters 4, no. 4 (2014): 18.

⁷¹ Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics, 8.

⁷² Jessica Bardill, “Parts, Transmission, and Remains: How Blood Makes and is Made into Life,” The American Journal of Bioethics 15, no. 2 (2015): W1–W2.

⁷³ Connolly, “Suffering,” 129.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 130.

⁷⁵ Tröhler et al., Schooling, 5–6.

⁷⁶ David Gillborn, “Softly, Softly: Genetics, Intelligence and the Hidden Racism of the New Geneism,” Journal of Education Policy 31, no. 4 (2016): 365–88.

⁷⁷ Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

⁷⁸ Tavares has noted that part or mixed-race Hawaiians were described and viewed as a threat to full-blood Hawaiians by government officials. The former was referred to as enterprising while the latter in need of care, protection, and rehabilitation. See Hannah M. Tavares, “Postcolonial Studies and Education,” in Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Philosophy: Education, ed. B. Warnick and L. Stone (Farmington, MI: Macmillan, 2017), 141–52.

⁷⁹ Valentina Vitali-West, “Yeşim Ustaoğlu Interview,” Framework 43, no. 2 (2002): 197.

⁸⁰ Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017), 8.

⁸¹ Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time Modernity and Avant-garde (London: Verso, 1995), 127.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Otso Kortekangas, “Useful Citizens, Useful Citizenship: Cultural Contexts of Sami Education in Early Twentieth-Century Norway, Sweden, and Finland,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 1–2 (2017): 82–3.

⁸⁴ For a philosophical discussion of contemporaneity see Peter Osborne, The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays (London: Verso, 2018).

⁸⁵ Mowitt, Re-Takes, 87.

⁸⁶ Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 120.

⁸⁷ Giorgio Biancorosso, “Sound,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009), 260–67.

⁸⁸ Ulrika Kjellman, “How to Picture Race? The Use of Photography in the Scientific Practice of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology,” Scandinavian Journal of History 39, no. 5 (2014): 580–611; and U. Kjellman, “To Document the Undocumentable: Photography in the Scientific Practice of Physical Anthropology and Race Biology,” Journal of Documentation 72, no. 5 (2016): 813–31.

⁸⁹ Hannah M. Tavares, “The Racial Subjection of Filipinos in the Early Twentieth Century,” in The History of Discrimination in US Education, ed. E.H. Tamura (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 17–40.

⁹⁰ Allan Pred, The Past is Not Dead (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

⁹¹ Iain Chambers, “Signs of Silence, Lines of Listening,” in The Post-colonial Question, ed. I. Chambers and L. Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 47–62, .

⁹² Ibid., 59.

⁹³ Daniel Tröhler, Thomas S. Popkewitz, and David F. Labaree, Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1.

⁹⁴ Ibid.

⁹⁵ Mieke Bal, “Memory Acts: Performing Subjectivity,” Boijmans Bulletin 1, no. 2 (2001), 9.

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Hannah M. Tavares

Hannah M. Tavares is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations.  Her research focus is on the entanglement of colonial encounters specifically but not exclusively in the context of Oceania.  Her inquiries are shaped by questions related to hybrid identities, diaspora, memory, and historical knowledge as they relate to the body and its socio-historical constructions.