{"id":45737,"date":"2016-02-22T00:32:53","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T00:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45737"},"modified":"2016-07-10T01:22:27","modified_gmt":"2016-07-10T01:22:27","slug":"bocafloja-confronts-anti-blackness-across-the-americas-in-new-documentary-nana-dijo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45737","title":{"rendered":"Bocafloja Confronts Anti-Blackness Across the Americas in New Documentary \u2018Nana Dijo\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bocafloja Confronts Anti-Blackness Across the Americas in New Documentary \u2018Nana Dijo\u2019<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Remezcla<\/a>
\n2016-02-17<\/p>\n

Walter Thompson-Hern\u00e1ndez<\/a><\/strong>
\nLos Angeles, California<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When musicians and filmmakers Bocafloja<\/a> and Cambiowashere<\/a> first set out to create Nana Dijo<\/em><\/a>, a gripping documentary about the African diaspora in the Americas, both wanted to stray away from traditional documentary approaches that have tended to sensationalize the Afro-descendant experience in the Americas. Nana Dijo<\/em> instead provides viewers with a host of intimate accounts of people whose lives have been defined by their ability to negotiate a black racial consciousness in a series of disparate racial, social, and political contexts. But while the film\u2019s directors sought to reconcile regional difference by not providing viewers with the names of locations throughout the film, Nana Dijo<\/em> also highlights the complexity of identity as it centers blackness through a diasporic lens that moves beyond geo-politics and nationalism.<\/p>\n

We sat down with Bocafloja to talk about the inspiration for his documentary and decolonizing our notions of race and identity…<\/p>\n

…Your music tends to center on popular conceptions of the African Diaspora, de-colonialism, indigenous rights, and anti-black racism in the United States and throughout the Americas. Your new film Nana Dijo<\/em> is doing the same thing, albeit through a visual medium. What was the inspiration for this film?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I understand this as a historical responsibility in which we reclaim our narratives from a perspective that is not subjugated to cultural hegemonies. Most of the visual work that has been done in regards to the African Diaspora in Mexico or Latin America happens to be inclusionist, politically safe and focused on a culturalist approach instead of other more transgressive elements that are inherent in the whole experience. Nowadays there is an \u201cAfro-Latino\u201d boom which under the liberal democracies framework becomes just the ideal experience to promote shallow forms of multi-culturalism that are not really promoting any type of process of empowerment or deep analysis about the effects on our psyche as colonial subjects today. I identify myself as a black and brown individual, so for me this project was definitively relevant in order to give voice to thousands and thousands of people that in the context of Mexico and Latin America never found an outlet to express or justify the true genesis of their identity…<\/p>\n