Creaturely Life in “We Come as Friends”

Mario Vrbančić ,Senka Božić-Vrbančić

doi:10.3390/h8010044

Abstract

In this article we focus on the analysis of a 2014 Austrian–French documentary We come as friends (110 min), written, directed, and produced by Hubert Sauper. We come as friends is a documentary about a corporate, polycentric, contemporary colonization of South Sudan. It is described by Sauper as “a modern odyssey, a dizzying, science fiction-like journey into the heart of Africa”. It is about Sudan, the continent’s biggest country, at the moment when it was divided into two nations in a 2011 referendum. It documents, according to Sauper, much more than the separation of the predominantly Christian south from the mostly “Muslim Arabs” of the rest of the Sudan; it shows how “an old ‘civilizing’ pathology reemerges—that of colonialism, clash of empires, and yet new episodes of bloody (and holy) wars over land and resources”. Inspired by Eric Santner’s concept of “creaturely life” we analyze a natural history of the present and creaturely expressions in We come as friends.

Highlights

In this article we focus on the analysis of a 2014 Austrian–French documentary We come as friends (110 min), written, directed, and produced by Hubert Sauper
We focus on the analysis of one representation of Africa, more precisely of South Sudan in the 2014 Austrian–French documentary We come as friends (110 min), written, directed, and produced by Hubert Sauper1
In his book On Creaturely Life, Santner argues that creaturely life is a mode of exposure of human beings to a traumatic dimension of political power

Summary

Introduction

In this article we focus on the analysis of a 2014 Austrian–French documentary We come as friends (110 min), written, directed, and produced by Hubert Sauper. We argue that Sauper’s film is a project that captures the effects of the Western belief in humanity and progress in Africa, but most importantly it captures the creaturely dimension of life—life produced by a specific kind of power that originates in Western modernity, as elaborated by Eric Santner.

Results

Conclusion