Otelo Burning

This article examines questions of revolution and revolutionary desire in the post-apartheid film, Otelo Burning (2011). The trope that underlies the form of the film is anagnorisis, which demands a process of re-evaluation of the past in the light of recently acquired information. The past is South Africa of the 1980s, and the more recent experience is that of the African National Congress’s betrayal of its promise to rule “by the people, for the people” in its massive corruption. The conversation between self-consciously political, revolutionary youth and those of youth who want to become winning surfers, winds through several iterations of interpersonal and systemic betrayal. The central juxtapositions of the film are manifest in its past- and forward-looking timescape and its portrayals of the radically poor constraints of Lamontville township against the aspirational freedom represented in the swimming pool and the ocean surfing scenes of its geoscape. Otelo Burning’s form enables us to ask key questions about freedom and betrayal and the multiple meanings of revolution

Art · Betrayal · Political science · Sociology · Temporalities · History · Law · Political theory and Gramsci · Spanish Culture and Identity