Entre 16 e 25 de maio, estive na Universidade de Bayreuth, onde pude conhecer várias pesquisadoras e pesquisadores incríveis e compartilhar algumas das minhas derivas de pesquisa.1 Na quarta-feira, 20 de maio, tive a alegria de apresentar a palestra “Memories of the world: entropological wanderings about worldmaking and cosmopoetics in African cinemas” (em português: “Memórias do mundo: derivas entropológicas sobre invenções de mundo e cosmopoéticas nos cinemas africanos”). Respondendo ao convite da professora Ute Fendler, construí uma fala sobre o conceito de cosmopoéticas, recorrendo a um itinerário que já apresentei aqui.
A rasura no título é deliberada, e as questões relacionadas a isso e aos diversos temas que abordei podem ser conferidos na gravação da palestra, que Thierry Boudjekeu Kamgang fez para seu uso pessoal e compartilhou comigo, e então decidi editar para compartilhar. Publiquei uma versão de referência com legendas em inglês no Zenodo (disponível em https://zenodo.org/records/20799287) e coloquei no Youtube o mesmo vídeo com legendas opcionais em inglês e em português, para que mais pessoas possam acessar o conteúdo. Se quiser citar, utilize as informações abaixo:
RIBEIRO, Marcelo R. S. Memories of the World: entropological wanderings
about worldmaking and cosmopoetics in African cinemas. Bayreuth:
Universität Bayreuth, 22 jun. 2026. Palestra. Disponível em:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20799287. Acesso em: 26 jun. 2026.
Assista à palestra abaixo (você pode selecionar as legendas em inglês ou em português no menu de configurações):
Abaixo, reproduzo o resumo em inglês que foi divulgado:
Wandering through some heterogeneous remains and cinders of film history like a bricoleur, ever failing to put them together in a simple chronological arrangement, I want to try again, fail again, and maybe fail better, as I attempt to define cosmopoetics and weave together some embodiments of its anarchival force in African cinemas (written under erasure). Considering its disjunctive relations to the concepts of world system and worlding, worldmaking and internationalism, or cosmopolitics and cosmotechnics, I want to situate the anthropological meaning of cosmopoetics (understood, in this sense, as the cultural invention of the world as a common world) in relation to its entropological dimension (cosmopoetics as the dissemination of worlds). In the series of cinematographic views known as “Le village achantis à Lyon” (Catalogue Lumière, 1897), what is at stake is the commercial and symbolic economy that situates the so-called birth of cinema in the modern/colonial world system and its archival fever. By relying on an archaeology of its discursive formation, on the one hand, and articulating a phenomenological approach to its images, on the other, it becomes possible to disclose the problem of worlding, thus acknowledging the minor cosmopoetic dimension that insists in and between the images. As we move from considering Danse du Sabre, I (1897), for instance, as a remnant of early film history and the cinema of attractions, to also viewing it as evidence of the violence of extraction in modern (cosmo)technics and a cinder of African cinemas’ later emergence as an ambivalent disturbance of this operation, the problem of worldmaking becomes apparent. Whether as a fictional and artistic creation of possible worlds or as the political and economic unification of worlds of circulation, worldmaking involves a performative temporality, the complexity of which may be glimpsed in the experiences of early African filmmaking. In Et la neige n’était plus… (Ababacar Samb-Makharam, 1966), for instance, an archaeological approach to the film’s discursive formation and a phenomenological approach to its images may converge in the interrogation of the film’s investment in the figure of “black snow” as the (im)possible anarchival promise of African cinemas. While the promise of this figure has been captured by national frameworks of belonging and driven towards state-building, thus limiting anticolonial worldmaking and the cosmopoetics of decolonization within the modern/colonial form of the nation-state as it captures the cosmopoetics of the common within the reaches of the nation as arché, there remains a disturbing cinder in its figural articulation. This may also be acknowledged in 25 (José Celso Martinez Corrêa and Celso Luccas, 1977), whose relation to international networks of solidarity and anticolonial connectivity is inseparable from the transnational restlessness of its movement through cosmopoetic crossroads.
A viagem foi financiada pela Capes, por meio do Probral, no âmbito do projeto “Imagens do Atlântico Sul e do Índico: experiências estéticas oceânicas” (Edital nº. 9/2023 – Programa CAPES/DAAD – Probral 2023), coordenado por Jorge Cardoso Filho, da UFRB, e Ute Fendler, da Universidade de Bayreuth, a quem agradeço, assim como a toda a equipe do projeto, pela oportunidade e pelo diálogo. ↩