The Sea Is History

Artwork

The Sea Is History

film/video
2016

The Sea is History, made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, is a free adaptation of the eponymous poem by Derek Walcott. The film is a materialist and animist critique of the monumentalization of European colonial history, reading the past instead as something intimately entangled within the present—as a mutational thing made up of the living and the dead. It is in this sense that Louis Henderson’s film suggests a way beyond the boundary event that could be called the "Plantationocene" (brought on with the onset of modernity and the system of globalized capitalism that started with the colonization of the Americas in 1492) and towards a possible "Chthulucenic" future of creolized assemblages as a politics of re-narrativizing death within life.

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