Short Abstract

This panel examines how cultural norms, institutions, and other regulatory forces shape what can be said, shown, embodied, and withheld across African performance and popular cultures.

Long Abstract

We invite papers exploring the multiple and refracted ways in which silence, visibility, and expression are institutionally produced. African cultural production operates within multiple regimes of silence that shape the boundaries of what can be said, shown, embodied, revealed, or withheld across African expressive forms. Such dynamics are evident across African popular and performance cultures where performers have developed strategies for communicating across boundaries of cultural and political permissibility. For instance, in Nigerian musicians, 9ice and Asa’s music Pete Pete, political criticism is articulated through proverbs, metaphor, satire, and other forms of indirection (Amenaghawon and Salawu 2021). Nigerian comedian, Kelvin Black’s fictional Governor Amuneke similarly uses costume, parody, fictionalisation, and strategic non-naming to make political critique visible without directly identifying political figures. Conversely, Green-Simms and Azuah’s (2012) analysis of Mr Ibu and Keziah shows how institutional censorship regulate not only what may be shown but also how it must be morally framed. Bridger and Hazan’s (2023) notion of “surfeit and silence” further demonstrates how subjects may be highly visible while their voices and subjectivities remain absent. The panel invites contributions exploring regimes of silence across African film, music, digital media, oral traditions, and other expressive forms, including but not limited to:

Ethics of silence and representation in African performances;

Formal, informal self-censorship regulatory practices;

Coded, indirect, symbolic, and embodied modes of expression;

Visibility, recognition, and audibility;

Silence and gender representation;

Humour, satire and social critique;

Producers and Audiences boundary negotiations.

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