The Inheritance

The Inheritance is a three-act video montage essay on inheritance as an accumulation of racial and settler dispossessions. Seeking to intervene in what Povinelli has called the current white counter-reformation of white nativism, The Inheritance pivots the ideas and affects of history, inheritance, and social identity against the sedimentations of white supremacy and settler colonialism through a retelling of the immigration stories told to the young Elizabeth Povinelli by her grandparents. Carol Devane has written that the “modes of identification and belonging in relation to Karezol/Carisolo create a tangled inheritance, but one that faded from social experience as the family became absorbed into the privileges of whiteness in the US, even as that assimilation was at times uneasy. The haunting and vivid story of this family offers an entrée for thinking critically about social location, place-based belonging, and the privileges and punishments therein.”