Dis-Affective Justice in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006)

Drawing on the work of Kamari Maxime Clarke and Peter Rush, this essay offers a reading of Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako (2006) as a cinematic articulation of affective justice. In particular, it explores how, via the contrivance of a staged trial against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the film makes a direct yet deft intervention in the politics of international criminal law and global justice in the aftermath of the policies of structural adjustment imposed on the South by international financial institutions (IFIs). Mobilising the possibilities of cinema as a political and aesthetic practice, Sissako presents an “imaginative solution” (B.S. Chimni) that resists and re-envisions international law in the register of an affective call to justice. This call is grounded in two particular commitments: first, in an implicit critique of narrowly judicialized forms of justice that disregard the deeply felt realities of violence and inequality in the African postcolony; and second, in an imaginative effort to look beyond the limited horizon of current law and to envisage alternative possibilities for pursuing accountability and narrowing the impunity gap in present-day frameworks of international and global justice.