Spectres among the Shoals: Black Fungibility and Indigenous Haunting in Ibrahim Shaddad’s Jagdpartie

Abstract

In this article I examine notions of fugitivity and fungibility as they are depicted in Jagdpartie (Hunting Party, 1964). Filmed in the German Democratic Republic by Sudanese director Ibrahim Shaddad, the film depicts a white mob’s hunt for a lone Black man in a setting rife with visual and nominal referents to the US American West. Shaddad builds a narrative of escape that I read, via Tiffany Lethabo King, as emblematic of the racializing schema of European modernity. Joe’s movement in and out of the film’s natural spaces makes him visually “porous,” in contrast to the fixity of the white figures, who embody settler colonialism and white supremacy. I draw on King’s metaphor of shoaling to address the ambivalence of the German-US setting, as well as the film’s critique of the Marxist rubric of solidarity. Finally, I consider the absence of Indigeneity in the film and the demands it makes on present-day viewers.