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- Convenor:
-
Onookome Okome
(University of Alberta)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Onookome Okome
(University of Alberta)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Linguistic and visual (de)colonialisms
- Location:
- Room 1098
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Racial violence goes beyond acts of speech directed towards victims of racism. Franz Fanon argues that the racialized gaze depersonalizes and renders the black body less human. This panel addresses the concept of the racialized gaze in everyday encounters and in literary and cinematic texts.
Long Abstract:
Racist violence goes beyond and above acts of speech directed at victims. Indeed, acts of everyday racism are often so subtle that even victims of such abuses find it hard to express the anguish and pain they experience. However, the subtlety of everyday acts of racism is, as Franz Fanon points out, often in the theory of the look, the very act of the gaze between the perpetuator and the victim, which is experienced on the psychological level. In complicated ways, the procedure of depersonalization which this gaze invests in the look is also calls an imagined repertory of images of the depersonalized body that is gazed at. The gaze brings to life this broad spectrum of a pictorial landscape that remains in the subconscious of the perpetrator. This pictorial landscape has remained largely unchanged since the racial calibration of the African body in the 16th century. Fanon argues that it is this compound of blighted images that the perpetrator calls up when he or she gazes at the racial victim who is considered inferior human. This repertoire of images was generated during the meeting between Europe and Africa. It is alive and well today. Among other matters, this panel calls for panelists who seeks to problematize expressions of everyday racism and the toxicity of the relationships they create for both perpetrators and victims by examining Franz Fanon idea of the gaze. Everyday racism can be historical as it is contemporary. Panelist may work with textual archive that includes expressions of (1) everyday anti-racism against black bodies in global literary texts, especially the 21st century, (2) global cinema and (3) the vast archive of everyday experiences.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 June, 2022, -Rita Keresztesi (University of Oklahoma)
Paper short abstract:
Manthia Diawara’s memoir _We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World_ can be read as an intercultural translation of Black African culture. I juxtapose the memoir with his documentary film _Rouch in Reverse_ where Diawara turns the gaze on Eurocentric assumptions on Africa and Africans.
Paper long abstract:
Manthia Diawara's memoir _We Won’t Budge_ opens with an incident of mistaken identity where he is passing for an African American in Paris in the cab ride from the airport to his lodging. The charade of passing for comfort comes to a prompt end when the police stops the taxi on a routine check and Diawara is outed as an African in Paris. The experience inspires Diawara to spend his sabbatical year from NYU writing "a modern-day slave narrative set in Paris." Diawara, also a documentary filmmaker, decides with Salif Keita's protest song “Nous Pas Bouger” in mind "to do a reverse anthropology of the CRS and the Africans in Paris, the French intelligentsia, and its attitude toward multiculturalism." By reverse anthropology, he means to look at Paris as a field for anthropological research, and at Parisians as natives. The journey of self-discovery as a citizen of the world, also Black and African, guides the narrative. Diawara follows up the narrative with a visual journey. In _Rouch in Reverse_ Diawara responds to French ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch’s film _Petit à petit_. Diawara uses reverse anthropology, the method he employed to write his “book on African migration in France” and turns the camera on Rouch in his native Paris. The film becomes a commentary on the fluidity of identity but inexorability of racism, in Europe and America.
Elizabeth Olayiwola (University of Abuja)
Paper short abstract:
Colonial films were not only racist but chauvinist in both imagery and dialogue. This paper examines closely the representation of African womanhood in two colonial films; Sanders of the River (1935) and King Solomon’s Mines (1937) and questions the implication of such representation.
Paper long abstract:
It is a well-established fact that Africa has suffered greatly from misrepresentation as well as underrepresentation in colonial films. Contemporary media played and continue to play significant roles in ensuring the perpetuation of these images. While contemporary Africa has historically gone beyond the images created in these colonial films, the images remain largely the mental picture of Africa around the world. Colonial films have predominantly been created from the lens of race providing a rich discourse of race, class and gender of the African colonial other. The implications of the dehumanization of black womanhood in colonial films are still largely unaccounted for. Gender analysis can help generate some understanding of these distortions as well as trace the history of the misrepresentational practices of black womanhood on screen. This paper attempts a content analysis of the characters Lilongo in Sanders of the River (1935) and Gagool in King Solomon’s Mines (1937). Both characters typify not only the ‘racialized gaze’ as argued by Franz Fanon but also the ‘de-womanizing’ of the African woman. They also exemplify some of the demeaning representations of black womanhood. I argue that the screen choice of creating flat stereotypical and static characterization for female characters in the films is no coincidence. It is a tool to enforce silence and subjugation of black women.
Heba Hashim (New Valley University, Egypt)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents a reading of Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" in which the speaker affirms her determination to release herself and her fellow black people from the cage of racism and despotism. To gain inspiration, the speaker identifies herself with her ancestors' history and African past.
Paper long abstract:
The main aim of this paper is to present a reading of Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" in which the poet confidently resists oppression and affirms her determination to release herself and her fellow black people from the cage of racism and despotism."Still I Rise" is an inspiring poem about the struggle to stand against bigotry and domination. When read by the victims of oppression and wrongdoing, the poem turns into a kind of anthem, a glimpse of hope for the subjugated and downtrodden everywhere. For the theoretical framework of the paper, the researcher will draw on racism and the oppression of black people throughout history, together with highlighting the role played by Angelou as a civil rights activist. The speaker determinedly declares to her oppressor that despite his dishonest attempts to disfigure the history of her people and belittle her position as black woman, she will not give up. Quite the opposite, the oppressed victim will 'stil...rise' 'and rebel until she can reach the safe shores of liberty and can therefore express herself as a free bird singing for freedom and justice. Her state of rising, this time, is like 'air', something which the oppressor cannot 'shoot', 'cut, or 'kill', as Angelou states in the poem'. To gain empowerment and inspiration, the speaker in "Still I Rise" resorts to her African past, proudly identifying herself with her ancestors' history and tightly sticking to her African roots that generously provide her with pride, strength, and encouragement.
Peter Simatei (Moi University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reads Caryl Phillips’ explorations of Europe’s racialization of Black presence and how the cultural institutions that rationalize it limit Europe’s appreciation of an emergent new world order of cultural plurality imagined in the writings and presence of diasporic peoples.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reads Caryl Phillips’ explorations of Europe’s racialization of Black presence and how the cultural institutions that rationalize this racialization limit Europe’s appreciation of an emergent new world order of cultural plurality imagined in the writings and presence of diasporic peoples. I argue that in these essays—(auto)biographical and non-fiction—Phillips’ project entails not only a reversal of the colonialist European gaze at the ‘Other’ but more significantly the push to unsettle and reconstitute knowledges that prop relationships of domination. In this sense, this paper will explore the intersections of Phillips’ project with other current interventions—such as the decolonial project—that unearth and contest configurations of spaces of inequality, exclusion, and social injustice. I will refer to Caryl Phillips’ three non-fiction works, namely The European Tribe (1987), A New World Order (2001), and Colour Me English (2011).