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- Convenors:
-
Katrien Pype
(KU Leuven University)
Wale Adebanwi (University of Pennsylvania)
Victoria Bernal (University of California (UCI))
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Hauptgebäude, Hörsaal XIa
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Lines between fact and fiction have blurred, offering spaces for creative expression of alternative futures. Looking at engagements with fakery, fictions, and imaginaries, we ask: What are the everyday digital modalities through which Africans imagine or construct personal and collective futures?
Long Abstract:
We have already entered a future where the lines between fact and fiction have blurred, where
what was once unimaginable has happened, and people struggle to determine the real from the fake, or work to keep the faith in what they believe to be true even in the face of contradictions. Such blurred boundaries and slippages offer productive spaces for the play of imagination, deception, and creative expression in the present, and for the envisioning and developing alternative futures. Afrofuturism has emerged as a significant form of cultural expression imagining futures from an Africanist perspective with science and technology at the centre. Digital media as well have opened up new opportunities in this regard. In various African countries, fake social media accounts have emerged through which political leaders are critiqued, mocked, and exposed. These generate various political discourses, assessing the ills of the present, and formulating visions for "better" political futures. Looking at diverse mediated practices of engaging with fakery, fictions, and imaginaries of the future, this panel asks: What are the everyday digital modalities through which people on the continent and among African diasporas imagine or construct personal and collective futures? How are digital media mobilized in assessing, accessing, leveraging and/or contesting emergent opportunities for the production of documentary evidence? What are the digital aesthetics of these alternative futures? How are these narratives plotted? What genres appear? Additionally, how is "Africa" imagined in these futuring practices? We solicit papers that engage with these topics empirically and conceptually.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 June, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Three dimensional video games are a common mode of creative expression. They are also rooted in the historic practices of colonial mapping and military simulation. This paper examines fabrication of virtual worlds as an intervention on African migration and its histories in colonisation.
Paper long abstract:
Calling back to colonial cartography, visual simulations are commonly a process of naming and claiming ownership to a land. Two dimensional mapping is a process through which colonial powers would represent their conquest. Within the contemporary era, visual simulations are steeped within a global Military Industrial Complex. Imperial military conquest shrinks lands into navigable three-dimensional spaces to be traversed through in realtime. Continuing the project of colonisation, modern simulations call for high fidelity photorealistic images and faster computation. Concurrent with this military impulse for high-end imaging, is the development of consumer technologies that render virtual worlds with striking texture and glossy lustre. Whole cities, past empires, and future worlds become 1:1 scale playgrounds. Everyday game players have the military power of visualisation and with that, the possibility of counter-visualising practices. This paper will explore the possibilities of counter-simulations—speculative or fictional visualising practices that encourage the building of alternative political worlds from the ground up. Focusing the fabrication of virtual worlds with 3D animation and video games, this paper will examine the technological imaginaries of African migration. It will investigate the alternative (de)bordering practice posited in the videogame ‘Dreams of Disguise: Errantry,’ created by the author. Exploring fabricated virtual worlds, this paper addresses the possibility of escaping the ever-present border as an African migrant. It places fabrication as decolonial intervention on modern migration.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper an interdisciplinary approach to African futurisms seeks to make sense of the concept while employing possible world semantics, decolonial anthropology and past-present-future relations. The concept of possible worlds is positioned in contrast to the separation of fiction and reality.
Paper long abstract:
Lewis’ (1968) manifests “[t]he most extreme (and provocative) position” (Zimmermann 2013) in the field of possible world semantics. He claims that there are multiple worlds equal in their existence compared to the one this abstract is written in and in no spaciotemporal relation to it, while all objects in one world are defined to be related spatially or temporally. Other logicians range in their definitions of the actual world, between optimistic accounts (Leibniz) as “the best possible world chosen” and therefore existing in contrast to the not chosen worlds, whose ontologies are argued, and pessimistic approaches (Schopenhauer) which describe the present (chosen) world as the worst of all cases.
What if we apply the concept of possible world semantics to a decolonial understanding of anthropology? What if we define the planet Earth as a vessel consisting of adjacent possible worlds all ontologically valid as really existing contemporaneously? What if a decolonial understanding of anthropology would equal a spaciotemporal shift from a past-present relation ((post-)colonial understanding) to a present-future relation (decolonial understanding) and a broadening of possible worlds in contrast to an artificial separation of reality and fiction?
What if those worlds were indeed in spatial and temporal relation to each other?
What meaning would those applications mean for an interdisciplinary sense making of African futurisms (Okorafor)?
How could Okorafor's and other African futuristic literature be read and analyzed through the lense of possible world semantics?
Paper short abstract:
We explore the digital as a public sphere for testifying, demonstrating, and performing occult possibilities in Africa. Digital affordances of virtuality provide modalities for evidencing, communicating, and enacting the veracity of otherworldy forces, and transferring such efficacies on others.
Paper long abstract:
Building on our paper “Decolonizing the Virtual”, we wish to explore the ways in which the occult is rendered visible or demonstrated as true using digital platforms. We investigate the various fault lines between genres of witnessing, testimony, reporting and magical performance that have emerged in what some now call “Digital Africa”, the virtual space in which people from Africa or the African diaspora, dialogue, present themselves, and engage with digital content. We have observed the emergence of witnessing videos, that give testimony of occult activities, mysterious experiences, and new forms sorcercy, witchcraft and magic. Others perform magic across digital space, healing, cursing, exorcising or producing money on screen for the benefit of clients or fans. Some of these miracles are mirage, employing the techniques of fakery, fiction and illusionism to generate images of future possibility. African digital content producers often explore scenarios of human and “extrahuman” relationships; in these narratives, digital infrastructures and devices gain more agency and blend with occult forces. These posters, uploaders and their audiences engage with metanarratives of the emergent veracities of our digital era. After all, digital platforms are new spaces in which occult forces are manifest, witnessed, and experienced collectively. We bring these narrative genres together to ask questions about the imagination of the visible, the invisible, and the means by which truth, suspicion and transformative potential become interwoven with these new public spheres.
Paper short abstract:
The spread of camera-equipped mobile phones among the Samburu of Kenya enables the creation of fake videos and audio recordings. Their sharing within this pastoral community politicized the notion of fakery and contributed to the emergence of an art scene that now challenges the local power system.
Paper long abstract:
The widespread use of camera-equipped mobile phones among the Samburu of northern Kenya from the early 2010s has opened unprecedented possibilities for these semi-nomadic pastoralists to record and store images of their daily practices. Scenes of cattle theft, audio recordings of marital infidelity, or armed conflicts between pastoral communities spread virally from one mobile phone to another through the exchange of files via Bluetooth or SD cards. According to the Samburu, a part of these audio and video recordings are outright fakes inspired by the classic cultural topoi of their society (the young wife cheating on her elderly husband with a warrior, the circumcised young men stealing cattle from neighboring communities). Sometimes the set-up is evident. Other times the indeterminacy of the boundaries between staging and reality generates endless discussions about the veracity of a given recorded event. The goal of this presentation is to show how mobile phones have transformed and politicized the notions of fakery and fiction among the Samburu. The production of fake recordings was the first step toward the emergence of a semi-professional art scene consisting of Samburu actors and content creators whose shows, shared via mobile phone, take a critical stance against the power of the elders and the regional government. The ambiguity of their performances, perceived as “reality” by some of their viewers, allows these artists to question the local political and gender hierarchies and to introduce within their community new cultural and social categories embedded in a fictional “traditional” framework.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the public debate about the phenomenon of fakery and the attendant politics of verification define the future of democracy in Nigeria.
Paper long abstract:
In the early years of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic (1999-), the media revealed significant cases of certificate forgery by highly placed political office holders. The most shocking was the case of the Speaker of the Federal House of Representations, Salisu Buhari, a 29-year-old high school diploma holder who claimed to be a 36-year-old graduate of the University of Toronto, Canada. Buhari’s case became not only an example of the phenomenon of political lives based on false claims and certificate forgeries in the context of Nigeria’s return to democratic rule, it also signaled the politics of veracity in a political culture transformed by, and transfixed in, the martial culture of imposition, falsification and falsehood.
This paper examines how the public debate about the phenomenon of fakery and the attendant politics of verification define the future of democracy in Nigeria. What ‘truths’ about Nigerian politics are evident in this phenomenon of fakery? What does the politics of veracity and its complications say about the future of democracy in Nigeria?
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes how West African asylum seekers in Italy manipulate their self-presentation on social media in the effort to unlock a positive future. This manipulation of information represents a way to cultivate relationships and honor social obligations, rather than a form of deception.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the use of social media by West African men seeking asylum in Italy. Drawing on ethnographic data, I will analyze how they manipulate their online communication in the attempt to assure themselves a positive future. First, I will analyze how their self-representation as “genuine refugees” to social media followers increases their chances of being recognized as “genuine refugees” by state authorities. I will interpret this online fabrication against the backdrop of African popular culture of “make believe”. Adopting an emic point of view, I will then show that the construction of a “good” future in Europe requires spiritual harmony that can be achieved by cultivating “good relationships” on social media with one's family members and peers. Through forms of communication that skillfully combine informing and concealing, people secure prayers and blessings and avoid jealousy and mystical attacks that could undermine their migratory projects. Throughout my paper, this manipulation of information will not emerge as a form of deception, but as an attempt to honor social expectations and moral obligations, while pursuing personal aspirations. Maintaining secrets and lying will be seen as ways to express affection and respect, keeping existing relationships alive and forming new ones; discretion will be connected to cultural norms that praise vagueness over the clear communication of painful information, bypassing the (moral) distinction between sincerity and fabrication.
Paper short abstract:
This paper extends the conversation around restitution of African art and heritage enacted through digital means. Here I consider the minting of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on blockchain ledgers as a vehicle for reclaiming and monetizing African art housed in the museums of the global north.
Paper long abstract:
This paper extends the conversation around restitution of African art and heritage enacted through digital means. Here I consider the minting of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on blockchain ledgers as a vehicle for reclaiming and monetizing African art owned and housed in the museums of the global north. Blockchain technology, while commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, stands to bring radical structural change to African arts and creative industries yet it remains to be seen how NFTs will reshape discussions surrounding cultural repatriation, even as the medium brims with potential. Pitfalls lie ahead — such as the ethics of financializing the digital sale of heritage, though the biggest obstacle might be institutional resistance since minting of NFTS loosens museological grip and authority. This paper, in presenting an example of blockchain and NFT use in the arts also raises implications in three regards, yet to be fulling explored: the blurring of the for-profit / nonprofit distinction, changes in the ownership structure of art housed in museums, and potential for new structures of public and private support for arts, heritage and restitution cases by African constituents. Ultimately, blockchain and NFTS holds the potential to tip the role of the arts toward democratic availability through collective ownership structures, or toward further commodification of cultural assets.