The refusal of the migrant in Ala Eddine Slim’s The Last of Us

Abstract

Chris Lippard’s analysis of displacement and refusal in the Tunisian film, The Last of Us (Akher wahad fina), rearticulates the cinematic quest for an aesthetic means by which to express the refusal of migrant positionality. Taking a rhetorically performative approach, he suggests both the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in different forms of displacement, including disappearance and disassembly, as a means of refuting postcolonial categories and conceptions of migration. The film offers an opportunity for considering alternative aesthetics within the contemporary depiction of migration, and one for questioning the tropes of migration narratives in an imagined decolonized space where modernity and commoditization have not taken hold and an alternative migration journey is thus depicted: one that differently incorporates the experience of being other(ed) with which migration narratives have constantly to engage, though also one that, in its separation from national and transnational networks, risks a retreat into immanence.