[Commlist] Call for Draft Chapters - African Screen Worlds: An International Workshop

*Call for Draft Chapters*

*African Screen Worlds: An International Workshop *

SOAS, University of London, UK

September 2020

“A way of apprehending the world based on my experience, my education, 
my culture and my environment. /Mantisme /is a system of thought that we 
virtually assimilate to a language that is unique to each individual. A 
language that I permanently “negotiate” with the language of the “other” 
with whom I would share an experience, education, culture and a similar 
environment.”

(Jean-Pierre Bekolo, /Africa for the Future: sortir un nouveau monde du 
cinema /[2009], cited and translated by P. Julie Papaioannou, “‘Qu’elle 
aille explorer le possible!’ /Or African Cinema according to Jean-Pierre 
Bekolo/, in Harrow and Garritano, eds, /A Companion to African Cinema/, 
Wiley Blackwell, 2018, p.405)

In September 2020, a three-day, fully-funded workshop will be held at 
SOAS, University of London as part of the ERC-funded project “African 
Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies”. In the broadest 
sense, the workshop is designed to facilitate and inspire collaborative 
dialogue and work on creative African screen media texts and contexts 
among scholars working in this field in different parts of the world and 
– in particular – within Africa. To facilitate this, all transport, 
accommodation, visa, and meal costs will be fully covered for the 
selected participants, regardless of where they will be traveling from. 
In a more specific sense, the focus of the event will be collectively 
workshopping and developing pre-submitted chapters for publication in an 
edited volume titled /African Screen Worlds. /There will be several 
inspiring keynote presentations by leading African screen media 
scholars, practitioners and creative researchers.

All submissions will need to engage, in some way, with the concept of 
“screen worlds”, which we put forward as a heuristic device to encourage 
creative, provocative approaches and angles of analysis in relation to 
African screen media. Our reasons for suggesting this concept are 
twofold. First, we would like to put the emphasis on the importance of 
analysing screen cultures through the diverse “worldviews” of particular 
locations and individual artists, acknowledging that films are 
significantly influenced by the ways that filmmakers constantly 
negotiate their subjective experiences of the world with the contexts in 
which their films are conceptualised, made, circulated and viewed. 
Second, we wish to interrogate the possibilities and tensions that 
manifest themselves in the creation and circulation of diverse “screen 
worlds” in a variety of formats (feature fiction films, short films, 
creative documentaries, web series) in our era of digital flows as well 
as barriers, of mediated border-crossings as well as geo-blocking and 
censorship. For example, as mobile data becomes cheaper in Africa, the 
possibilities for streaming African-made content via phones could become 
transformative for people’s viewing experiences, and platforms such as 
iRoko, ShowMax, Sodere and Netflix are responding to these 
opportunities. And if African films are growing in popularity and 
accessibility, this perhaps means that even “arthouse” films might be 
able to break out of the international film festival circuit on which 
they have been dependent for so long, moving beyond the “world cinema” 
category to which they have often been consigned, for better or worse.

This workshop asks participants to consider these recent developments in 
African screen cultures and technology in relation to one or more of the 
following: specific “worldviews” (both on the African continent and in 
Africa’s diverse diasporas); contemporary, mainstream theorising around 
screen cultures and experiences (e.g. the work of Giuliana Bruno, 
William Uricchio, Haidee Wasson); the representational forms African 
films currently take and might take in the near future; and the ways in 
which African films are made, circulated and viewed. In each case we 
encourage authors to foreground something about their own identity, 
positionality and/or lived experience in relation to the subject matter 
(in line with Bekolo’s idea of “mantisme”). We wish to be clear that we 
hold no preconceived or fixed views on how the concept of “screen 
worlds” should be theorised; we suggest this concept as a prompt to see 
how different scholars of African screen media choose to 
theorise/translate/argue against/reject this concept in relation to 
particular cinematic texts and/or their contexts of production and 
consumption. We are particularly interested in chapters from 
Africa-based researchers grounded in local perspectives and experiences, 
and based on long-term research. We strongly encourage submissions from 
both established and early career researchers.

In addition to the issues raised above, chapters might address the 
following questions (although this list is by no means exhaustive):

-How do African filmmakers conceptualise screen content depending on 
whether they are targeting “big screen” or “small screen” cinema audiences?

-How are the melodramatic, low-production-value “screen worlds”//that 
are common across commercial film industries in Africa changing under 
new industrial conditions of film production, distribution and exhibition?

-How do audiences in diverse African and diasporic contexts experience 
the diegetic “screen worlds” of different African films?

-What are the relationships between film and television in African and 
diasporic contexts, particularly in relation to Moradewun Adejunmobi’s 
groundbreaking theorisation of the “televisual turn” in African screen 
media (2015), and the general global turn to television?

-How are video on demand platforms such as ShowMax, Sodere, and Netflix, 
as well as phone apps such as iRoko, changing the forms, modes and 
routes of African screen media?

-Are chasms developing or closing between “popular” cinema and “film 
festival” cinema in Africa and elsewhere because of the different kinds 
of screens on which these forms of cinema tend to be watched?

-What does the popularity of certain film genres across and beyond 
Africa, as well as the emergence of popular local film genres in 
specific African contexts, tell us about the local/global nature of 
“screen worlds”?

-What kind of new genres of filmmaking, and convergence of artistic 
forms beyond cinema, are evident in recent creative African screen media 
texts, both in the continent and beyond?

-Does “world cinema” remain an important category of analysis when it 
comes to contemporary African screen media and why/why not?

*Submissions need to include:*

i)a draft chapter ofbetween 6,000 – 8,000 words (word count includes 
footnotes but excludes bibliography)

ii)a chapter abstract of 300 words

iii)a biography of 300 words

Please use the Harvard style referencing system and UK rather than US 
spelling. If you quote something in an African language (which is 
encouraged), please make sure that you also provide an English translation.

Please note that the workshop will take place either directly before or 
after the 2020 African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) conference 
at Cardiff University, Wales, to make it easier for participants to 
potentially attend both events. We strongly encourage our participants 
to also submit abstract/panel proposals to this conference when the Call 
for Papers is published. Please note, however, that we cannot cover 
participants’ costs for attending ASAUK.

**

*Deadline:* 15^January 2020

*Submit to: *Dr**Lindiwe Dovey ((LD18 /at/ SOAS.AC.UK)) 
<mailto:(LD18 /at/ SOAS.AC.UK))> and Dr Michael W. Thomas ((MT97 /at/ SOAS.AC.UK) 
<mailto:(MT97 /at/ SOAS.AC.UK)>)

This project has received funding from the European Research Council 
(ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation 
programme (grant agreement No 819236).


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