Episode III: Enjoy Poverty: An Aesthetic Virus of Political Discomfort

Abstract

This article considers Renzo Martens's controversial 2008 film, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty). Martens's film is a conceptual film that satirizes documentaries about poverty in Africa by exposing the ways in which consumers of poverty images enjoy such images. It argues that the film, which creates troubling identifications and disidentifications for a Western spectator, offers a politically productive lesson on the power of discomfort to disrupt unethical image practices. Communication studies scholars have engaged in these conversations via studies about identification and disidentification and the documentary genre; affect in cinematic media; and more directly, through work that investigates the perils of cookie‐cutter frames for representing (racialized) poverty.

Precarity, nihilism, and grace

“…Believing that the structures keeping you oppressed will ultimately lead to your salvation is an example of cruel optimism. 5 What is particularly cruel or harmful is that individuals on the ‘fringes of the bourgeois public sphere continually reinvest in practices that continue their disenfranchisement’ (Bruce, 2016: 298). This is the focus of Berlant’s (2011) critique – how attachments among disenfranchised groups perpetuate their disenfranchisement.…”

“… 4. Precarious/ness, precarity, and precarization derive from the same root precar , as adjectives, verbs, or nouns (Bruce, 2016). The literature surrounding these terms distinguishes precariousness as the sense of bodily vulnerability and finitude (Butler, 2012); precarity as status, access, and agency (Berlant 2007); and precarization as pertaining to governmental and political relations, where self-precarization is an individual’s (mis)perception that unstable working conditions allow freedom and flexibility (Lorey, 2015).…”