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- Convenors:
-
Melanie Boehi
(Université de Lausanne)
Cassandra Mark-Thiesen (Africa Multiple Cluster, University of Bayreuth)
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- Discussants:
-
Pamila Gupta
(University of the Free State)
Percy Zvomuya
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- History (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S90
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel considers the polyvocality of media in Africa, and especially how African broadcasters, their subjects and their publics have used media to express futurity and claim their stake in the African future.
Long Abstract:
Media bears witness to time in a number of ways. Shaped by technology, structural dynamics and the agency of diverse media producers and users, media connects the present to the past as well as to the future. These connections are dynamic and entangled with national, regional and global political developments. Thus, this panel will consider the polyvocality of media in Africa, and especially how media were used to express futurity and claims to the African future. In recent years, the study of African broadcasting has moved beyond analysing the immediate political concerns of the present, to also ask in what manners broadcasters, their subjects and their publics use media to embrace the future they want to see, in both historical and contemporary contexts. Tina Campt, for one, has linked Black and diasporic image making practices with the carving out of Black futurity.
Audiovisual archives from Africa have recently been attracting an unprecedented amount of attention, beckoning scholars to interpret their production, content and reception in new ways. The future features in these archives as a discourse that was expressed directly in content as well as invoked in embodied visual and sonic practices. Ideas about the future further shaped the profession of media producers, the curricula of journalism education and individual career trajectories. The future was also a subject of contestation and censorship. Papers may consider broadcasters across a broad spectrum – on television, radio, in the digital realm. We invite them to consider discourses addressing future-making, contestation, refusal and speculation.
Accepted paper:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Noemi Alfieri (CHAM - NOVAFCSH, ACM - U. Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
This communication reflects on the ways in which literary reviews and bulletins were used in the 1960’s to claim independent and decolonized futures in Angola and its diasporas. It dwells on circulations and networks, as crucial to the construction of those possible futures.
Paper long abstract:
This communication addresses the ways in which some written medias, with focus on literary reviews bulletins, were used in the 1960’s to claim independent and decolonized futures in countries such as Angola and its diasporas. We are concerned with the ways in which circulations and networks were crucial to the very construction of this possible futures, as well as with the ways in which those representations were hidden and censored by the salazarist regime.
Tensions between Panafrican and negritudinist-inspired orientation of the publications sometimes were evident, in a decade in which nationalisms were revolutionizing the political asset of the continent.
Some anticolonial novels were aldo adapted to cinema in order to reach a widest audience. Movies like Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga, resulting from the adaptation of Luandino Viera’s novel A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier, were attempts of transposition of a denunciation narration and message into a more intelligible language code, as wells as into an accessible material both to the Angolan people and in order to gather international support. Those and further examples will be taken into consideration in order to dwell on the multiplicity of representations of possible African futures in that period.