Re: Africa and the Moving Image, ACASA 2014

From: Powell, Amy [[email protected]]

CFP: Africa and the Moving Image
Arts Council of the African Studies Association open panel
16th Triennial Symposium on African Art, March 19 – 22, 2014
Newark, NJ and New York, NY

By September 1: Send 500-word abstract and brief bio to [email protected].

This panel seeks to frame an African history of the moving image dating from multiple origins to the present. Acknowledging substantial overlaps between art history and film studies, art practice and filmmaking, we will seek to trace the significant ways ethnographers, scientists, filmmakers, artists, and new media practitioners have constructed and imagined Africa through a long history of technologies, including but not limited to: magic lantern, nineteenth-century optical toys, cinema, and contemporary film and video installation. Papers considering the history of photography and the moving image are also welcome.

Critical methodologies from a range of academic disciplines and art practices have demonstrated that Africa cannot be treated in isolation or as a unified subject. This open panel is broad by design to suggest the multiple origins, geographies, and practices comprising an African history of the moving image, while also holding in unresolved tension the subject’s complexity and global contexts. Equally valid case studies might include Ousmane Sembène’s classic short film Barom Sarret (1964), or Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Where is Where? (2009), a six-screen film installation about the Algerian War for Independence, Frantz Fanon’s 1961 text The Wretched of the Earth, and contemporary Finland. Comparative case studies are encouraged.

Contributors are invited to address questions of form alongside questions of history and theory. What formal techniques have artists and filmmakers developed to portray Africa in moving images, and to what ends? What theoretical tools, among them psychoanalytic theories of projection and postcolonial theories of subjectivity and representation, are required to narrate a history of Africa and the moving image, and what tools still need to be articulated?

Additional topics for consideration include current issues in African cinema and their contributions to our understanding of moving images; contemporary artworks that use old or “dead” moving image technologies in new ways, as in the work of William Kentridge; and analysis of cinematic ways of seeing, as when French novelist André Gide wrote that “all things passed cinematographically before my eyes” during his travels through Central Africa in 1925-26. As these examples indicate, this panel hopes to be transdisciplinary and trans-historical by inviting artists, filmmakers, curators, art and film historians, and historians of science to offer perspectives on Africa and the moving image.


Amy Powell, PhD
Cynthia Woods Mitchell Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow
Blaffer Art Museum
University of Houston - A Carnegie-designated Tier One public research university
120 Fine Arts Building
Houston, TX 77204-4018

Tel. 713.743.2043
Email: [email protected]
www.blafferartmuseum.org
 --

 --