ALA Lecture: March 28 – Grace A. Musila on The Aesthetics of Refusal

On the ALA YouTube Channel

In the face of the current polycrises, coupled with neoliberal capital’s seemingly triumphant infiltration of every nook of human and non-human life globally, it appears that precarious communities—poor people, rural communities in the global South, undocumented migrants, refugees and similarly vulnerable people—have limited scope to counter the systems that structure their unhumaning. While this is the tragic reality to a significant extent, I am encouraged by artists’ use of narrative imagination to meditate on precarious communities’ contestations over what it means to be human in neoliberal time, through the frame of refusal.

Building on the work of the Practicing Refusal Collective; and Tina Campt’s and others’ theorizations of refusal, I examine the im/possibilities that refusal holds as a conceptual tool, and an ethical and aesthetic practice. In this talk, I examine the Lesotho film-maker, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s film, This is not a burial, it is a resurrection (2019). My talk teases out the forms of refusal staged by Mosese’s artistic choices as well as his characters’ responses to the systems they’re up against. I read these in dialogue with Bhekizizwe Peterson’s insights on the work of narrative imagination and Black publics’ navigation of what it means to be human in unhumaning times.

About the Speaker

Grace A Musila teaches in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. Like many, she is depleted by the times we live in. Some of her work is available at: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1572-4477 . Also, she envies Karl Bushby’s capacity to see through his 1998 pub bet that he could walk from Chile to England. In her next life, Grace would like to be able to make such a bet and honour it, if she chooses to. The infrastructures that underwrite such beautiful,bizarre, randomness, would be nice to have. She is also pretty exhausted by the extractive logics of the academic publishing industrial complex, and would like the freedom to unsubscribe from it, preferably in this lifetime...