Short Abstract

The panel investigates the shaping of aesthetic hierarchies in film, literature and music across Anglo-and Francophone Africa by analysing the infrastructures created by metadata, copyright and archives that left and leave African works invisible and devalued on markets, in catalogues and databases

Long Abstract

This panel, which emerges out of the work of the African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project, examines the ways in which ideas of filmic, literary and musical ‘works’ have been constructed and cemented in European knowledge systems (applied and practiced by travellers, missionaries, linguists, philologists, lawyers, and cataloguers) and how those knowledge models classified and described African art and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using a method that we call ‘critical metadata analysis’, the panel reads the historical metadata produced by these knowledge ontologies to shed light on the continued relevance of colonial ontologies in aesthetic, legal, and commercial devaluations of African cultural expression.

The discussion will be conducted along two axes:

First, we explore, (amongst others): The effects of 19th century cataloguing science to African works (for example, the rejection of orature as a literary form, or the creation of the field of ‘folklore’; the capture of African cultural expressions by sound and film technologies, the metadata this generated, and the subsequent prioritization of specific genres; the consequence of ethnological or ethnomusicological approaches to African works in academic and scholarly ontologies and their contribution to disciplinary knowledge; the monetising and commercialisation of African works by intellectual property law.

Secondly, the panel investigates methods for how to limit and even repeal the obscuring and devaluing effects of these colonial ontologies by exploring alternative ways of knowledge modelling for contemporary Linked Open Data. Amongst others, this includes multilingual cataloguing, indigenous knowledge ontologies, IP justice and restitution, and remediating technologies.

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