Runnie Exuma (G2) interviews Damani J. Partridge, Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and the Humanities Council

Runnie Exuma (RE): Welcome to Princeton. It's exciting to have you here joining us. What currently excites you about coming (for the first time) or returning to Princeton? What are you looking forward to for the year?

Damani Partridge (DP): I think the first time I came to Princeton was when my grandmother was a visiting fellow at the Princeton Theological Seminary. That was actually my first time. She grew up and was born in New Jersey, so I was often in the state. I grew up in upstate New York. She’s no longer living, but she’s buried near here, in New Brunswick. Her legacy is part of my engagement with the state and the town.

RE: Oh, that’s beautiful.

DP: That’s also how I come. But then, also, I went to Amherst College. And this reminds me a lot of there. I like college towns. [Princeton] is just like a slightly bigger version. I was walking through campus with my wife at night when we arrived, and there were students singing A cappella. For me, it's a new institution, but it seems familiar.

RE: That's a wonderful response. That's really nice. And have you had the chance to visit your grandmother?

DP: I'm going to do that. I will visit her grave soon.

RE: OK, so second question, you're teaching ANT 362, titled “Filming the Future of Liberation.” And I wanted to basically ask you more about your work as a filmmaker and director, especially about your project “Filming Future Cities” in Detroit and Berlin. And I wrote, like a whole thing,
summarizing it for people who just didn't know. But the question is — the questions are — what role does filmmaking play in your work as an anthropologist? More specifically, what does collective, transnational image-making as method afford you in your research? How did you arrive at this medium to pursue your questions as an anthropologist? And what kinds of questions do you hope to open up with your course?

DP: I’m going to begin with an anecdote and then I will answer some of the questions. If I miss something, of course, you can let me know. There are a lot of questions there. I remember when I applied for the Rhodes Scholarship when I was a senior in college, and I had this extremely intimidating interview. I had to go to this social club in Boston. I hadn’t been to a club like that. You know, it feels like I’m not actually supposed to be in that space. And then a prominent Republican, who was part of the selection committee, said, ‘Well, what are you going to do at Oxford?’ He asked, ‘What do you want to for your career?’ And I said, ‘I want to become a professor and a documentary filmmaker.' And he told me, ‘That’s impossible. You can't do that.’ I wasn't used to that kind of hostility in an interview. I didn't do well, and I didn't get the scholarship, but I still chose to pursue that kind of possibility. 

I am committed to collective research and to thinking about film/video as a medium, to also think about the possibilities of social change. I'm not sure that I've achieved that yet, but, I mean, it’s my goal. Film is also, potentially, more accessible. It's not necessarily more accessible, but I'm thinking about accessibility and collective filmmaking. I’m also thinking not just about film as the product, or as a thing that we're producing; we're also producing a process, a process of collective organizing, and of collective research, for problems that concern the people in the space. So in Detroit, we've been doing the project since 2014. Detroit is a post-industrial city, a Black city, like 80% Black, which has incredible (social, political, cultural, and intellectual) resources for thinking about the possibility of a different kind of future, out of necessity, but then also out of the knowledge that it has gathered over the years, in the midst of capitalism, which hasn’t worked for many of its people. 

Being in a city that's like… There’s one student I had from China who said, ‘When they showed us Detroit in China, they showed it always as a failed city, as the failure of capitalism.’ Now, in the US, the discussion is about Detroit’s comeback, which is, from the perspective of many Detroiters, a misnomer. Because they're not, they, themselves are not coming back. They were there the whole time. They were living, thinking, transforming, and moving things. And also, the thing that is supposed to represent the comeback is displacing them. So then, how does one think about the possibility that emanates from these kinds of tensions and contradictions? And how does one do it through film? Part of the process of making the films, is that we make short, ten-minute films. We start by discussing the research questions as a group. And then people make pitches. And then, on the basis of what they find compelling, they form the groups. We then spend time working with the camera, and then we actually start filming. And then we teach the filmmakers how [to edit]. 

We did the project in Berlin for the first time in the summer of 2015, the so-called “summer of migration.” One million refugees from Syria came to Germany. My collaborator, Ayla Gottschlich, and I were working with a theater called Theater X, named after Malcolm X. It’s a post-migrant migrant theater, mostly People of Color, but not only. And so that was on of the best teaching experiences ever for me. That year, our films were based on what we called “noncitizen perspectives on the future of the city.” We were working against the framework of the nation-state, to generate other kinds of possibilities. We were also thinking about the future through film. That was a collective learning process, not just for the new filmmakers, but also for me. The Detroit and Berlin projects have been in operation for nearly ten years. Now we're working on an exhibition and thinking about how to distribute the films, that is, how to show them to other publics who haven't seen them, who wouldn’t otherwise have access. 
 

RE: I was going to ask about your article, “Hostility as Technique: Making White Space in a Black City.” I also want to summarize that article for readers who don’t know, but I wanted to ask about — and this might be more of a personal question — but, I wanted to ask about your experiences of being in these two cities, Detroit and Berlin. The question is twofold: As a city is perpetually unfolding and mutating, what does it mean to film its future? How do you observe cities over time? And how does the city connect to your work on a broader scale? How does it help you think through questions of identity and belonging? A lot of questions, but you can pick what you want to respond to. 

DP: Okay. I have trouble with this idea of belonging. They had a conference in Berlin called “Beyond Belonging.” We don’t want to recreate something like the nation-state; we don’t want to recreate those kinds of exclusions. We want to create possibilities. That’s why [my] course here
talks about liberation. It asks, “What does it (actually) mean to be free?” How do we live together as free people? You know, is it anarchy? What does one do with sovereignty? These are the sorts of questions, I think, we have to start to address. These two cities, in particular, Detroit and
Berlin, are excellent places to begin. In Germany, you have the legacy and history of the Holocaust, which was orchestrated in Berlin. But you also have the history of socialism and post-socialism as well. You have current migration and de-industrialization in both cities, in Detroit and Berlin. Before the wall fell, West Berlin was also the city where, if one didn’t want to serve in the army, then you didn’t have to do the year of military service. If you didn’t want to do that, you could move to Berlin. So that helps to constitute the city as a space with a different kind of possibility. And then, the history of socialism and post-socialism meant that people are also thinking about the present and the future differently, constantly differently. And so those cities — Berlin and Detroit — have offered possibilities for thinking about the future differently.

RE: Thinking about film as a time-based medium, it’s like: how do you capture — or not capture necessarily — but think about different registers of movement, of flow, of different spaces, and also of capturing the sensorial aspects of being in a city. If any of those questions speak to you,
having gone to both cities… 

DP: This idea of capture is interesting. There are a lot of violent metaphors, like shooting, and capturing in film-making.

RE: Yeah, that’s why I was kind of wary of using that word [laughs]. 

DP: Yeah, I’m not necessarily invested in capture as the thing that we’re doing, but more in the ongoing process, and then also the collective engagement and the people who are not yet inside of that process who can be brought in through the films themselves, through these screenings, and then hopefully through the exhibitions. Well, even the idea of exhibition is also problematic, but we’re also thinking of that process differently, through re-creation and re-showing, re-distribution and re-circulation, as part of future making. I still didn’t get to the harder [questions] that you’re asking (laughs). 

RE: (laughs) Totally fine. The question was, how do you observe a city over time, and what is the relation between your filming practice and how you perceive these different memories? Like, in the case of Berlin, the politics of memory around the [Holocaust]. There are so many things that you have mentioned, like BLM (Black Lives Matter). Thinking about the confluence of all these things and resisting capture, trying to make sense of them, but what it means to sit with them, and experience them, especially working with a medium like film. 

DP: Yes, and you talked about the sensory as well (laughs). Smell is not there, but touch is, because it’s also the question of being touched, being moved. What is the way in which one experiences that physically? I mean, to some extent, we’ve only been making the films for ten years, so that seems like a short time, but on the other hand, a lot has happened within those ten years in both cities, in Detroit and Berlin. We also did this in Philadelphia too, for one semester, which is another Black city and another post-industrial city, which is interesting. 

But yeah, how does one observe a city over time, and then how does one observe the connection between these cities?

RE: I’m also thinking about the process you mentioned being more important, or bigger, than the product of the film itself, in connecting with people — other people on those terms as well, especially people who have lived in those cities their entire lives. 

DP: I mean, personally, because I’ve been doing this project for almost ten years, I’ve learned a lot, some of which was reflected in the piece you talked about, “Hostility as Technique.” Detroit is a space that one, as a researcher, as an anthropologist, doesn’t enter easily, because there’s lots of suspicion about being captured, I mean people just extracting knowledge from the city and then using it for their own purposes. I’ve been aware of that, and sensitive to it, in thinking about what I’m trying to do. 

And that also strengthens my sense of the importance of the collective as well, in both cities, because Theater X doesn’t allow researchers to just come in and then leave. They kept telling me to come back, even after I was like, ‘Okay. That was great. We did this.’ So that’s also been a constant thing. In terms of long-term engagement, it’s been on those terms. And the observations people make about the city are also based on things that they find critical to investigate right now. In Detroit, and in Philadelphia, the themes have been open. I didn’t give [people] a specific topic to work on. But then in Berlin, we did work on specific themes. The first one was Noncitizen Perspectives, then we did one on African Perspectives with regards to the future of the city, and then we did a series on “Who decides the future of the city?” 

We did both very short and longer short films on safety — Who’s safe? Whose safety? — from the perspective of the people who are normally disenfranchised. What does it mean for non-and anti-citizens to rely on the police for safety? What does it mean to think of safety from the perspective of people who themselves are not safe, like undocumented people, people without papers, from the perspectives of people in these positions who are also part of the project, including people without papers who have to work as security guards in order to survive. These are the kinds of issues we’ve been observing and addressing, and then thinking about collectively. And I don’t know if there’s a single way in which we’re thinking about senses or the visual; there are multiple ways, and in some of the films, that is what we are trying to think about now. 

This is a process — and in thinking about exhibition and/or re-screening, we are trying to go back and re-examine the films and think about how they speak to each other. But we’re just at the beginning of that, so if you came back to me after a couple of years, (laughs) … I think we’re at the beginning of thinking about if there’s a collective vision for the sensory experience and the relationship to these kinds of films.