Corrêa, Graça P.2024-04-082024-04-082022Corrêa, Graça P.. "On the Necropolitics of Contemporary Human Uprootedness: Ecocentric Empathy in Film and Philosophy," Refugee Forms: Essays on the Culture of Flight and Refuge, ed. Mike Classon Frangos and Sheila Ghose. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.ISBN 978-3-031-09256-5http://hdl.handle.net/10451/64027As early as 1949, Simone Weil used the term uprootedness to denote a condition where human beings lack living connections to their environment and community, and thereby are bereft of ties with their past and a sense of belonging in the world. In the past two decades this condition has been extremely aggravated, with large segments of the rural population relocating to crowded unsustainable urban areas, and mass movements of international migrants, refugees and asylum seekers fleeing away from their homelands, well after the violence of the colonial period. Drawing on concepts and perspectives from philosophers Achile Mbembe, Bruno Latour, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Deborah Danowski, whilst applying them to film aesthetics, this paper argues that current human uprootnedess—of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people—reveals a necropolitics in action that may be viewed ecocritically. Uprootedness has many causes, with two of the most forceful being ecological and political, for it not only indicates the loss of one’s home or oikos—at the origin of ecology—but is also the result of treating people and land as commodities, to be profited from, disposed of, and exploited. However, as noted by the philosophers above, there is no sense in lumping into one undifferentiated “anthropos” the human agents responsible for shaping the planet and triggering this condition. Hence, they propose to designate our period of geohistory as the “capitalocene,” in order to ascribe responsibility to those to whom it actually belongs. Accordingly, this paper probes into contemporary films—recent documentaries such as Kalyanee Mam’s A River Changes Course (2013), Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (2016), among others, but also Godfrey Reggio’s more “abstract” Powaqqatsi (1988)—because these works reveal an ecocentric empathy and aesthetics of affect within an ecocritical and necropolitical understanding of contemporary human uprootedness.engSimone WeilAchile MbembeBruno Latourecocriticismanthropocenecapitalocenebook parthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09257-2