Nearly every piece ever written about Claire Denis’ White Material focuses on the themes of race and colonialism. And for good reason. The 2009 film is undeniably centered on those topics. But what is perhaps not appreciated enough is that White Material and its emphasis on colonialism are about France, not sub-Saharan Africa. The Africa of the film is Africa as seen from the Global North, particularly from France. This is why the country in which the film is set is never mentioned; for most viewers—rich, white and above the equator—Africa is just an amorphous blob of black people, giraffes and mineral reserves. Why would Denis bother to clarify whether the film is set in Cameroon (where it was filmed) or someplace else? How many of her viewers can even tell the different African countries apart, anyhow? The eponymous white material is not just the white-skinned rich people profiting from shameless—and often oblivious—exploitation of Africa’s natural resources; it is also the frame of reference, the episteme, through which white audiences come to understand the continent. White Material is a condemnation of the self-congratulatory 21st-century European worldview that has deluded itself into thinking that racial domination and colonial structures are of the past. It is probably no coincidence that the film was released in the same year Obama was inaugurated.
Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) runs a large coffee plantation in the abstract vastness of “Africa” as the local community descends into massive violence. The French foreign legion warn Maria to evacuate with her family as the troops themselves retreat from the area, but Maria does not listen. She has another week left in the coffee harvest and cannot afford to flee. Besides, she insists to everyone she encounters in the story, she and her family are known around here and they are safe. But, spoiler alert: they are not safe. The surrounding town and hills erupt into violence as multiple factions of bloodthirsty mercenaries, doped-up child soldiers and retreating rebels vie for control. Throughout the whole affair, Maria single-mindedly pursues the coffee harvest, driving through armed blockades to hire workers, wasting her fuel reserves to power the generator in the mill facility and ignoring all the unsolicited advice that comes her way. She does not understand—cannot understand, in fact—the racial fault lines and revanchist ill-will coursing through her neighbors; she cannot see that she is a perpetrator of racial violence and deserving of animosity.
In a lot of ways, Maria as a paradigmatic figure of European colonialism in Africa stands as the opposite of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz. Whereas Kurtz embraces the fullness of his difference from his African subjects for his own benefit, Maria instead insists on her fundamental sense of belonging to the community. Kurtz hypes his extraordinariness while Maria is determined to prove her banality. She is not “white material”: she is part and parcel of the land. Things are not falling apart; the foreign legion and her workers and her family are all overreacting. She knows: this is her land, her neighbors, her community. She belongs here, not back in France. She does not see herself as an exploiter of African resources, but rather as a vital cog in the economy and day-to-day life of her town.
As a society, the Global North has moved beyond Kurtz. Kurtz is a vile, psychopathic racist; Kurtz knew what he was doing, knew that it was wrong and did it anyway. Maria, on the other hand, is something of the paragon of the postcolonial white perspective on Africa. She actually works on the plantation herself, she seems to be a fair employer of the local populace and she does not seem to notice race, at least not overtly. But she still lives in the big house, she still speaks her European language and she still expects to be in charge. She wants both to insist that she belongs, but also to enjoy the privileges of being a rich white woman in Africa. Unlike Kurtz, she is oblivious to her myriad crimes of racial aggression and economic theft. She is convinced of her own righteous innocence. In this way, she is the personification of the contemporary Euro-American attitude about the Global South. With such a protagonist at its heart, White Material is one of the definitive texts about race and imperialism.
The post Oeuvre: Claire Denis: White Material appeared first on Spectrum Culture.