INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BAYREUTH, NOVEMBER
2011 :ARCHEOLOGY OF THE FUTURE: AFRICAN CINEMA AND IMAGINARY
Call for papers: until 12.02.2011
Since its beginnings cinema has been connected with history and this
in a double respect: in a retrospective perspective appropriating
the past by remembering or in a prospective perspective which
anticipates the future. Thus the creation of movies in Africa is
situated between archeology, history and remembrance on the one hand
and future and utopia on the other hand.
Patrice Ngnanang talks about - even if it is in the context of
African literatures - the rise of a ?République de
l'imagination" (republic of imagination), which is to be a chamber
in which the echo of the present rushes like a dream factory which
produces a future for Africa. From this perspective we wish to
understand cinema as a "dream factory" which does not only create
representations a posteriori, but a factory of transmission and
transfiguration. Therefore, one aim is to focus on the prospective
dimension of African movie worlds, their ability to react to the
important questions of its times as well as to anticipate them. This
is based on the idea of a time continuum which emerges at the
cinematographic frontiers between past, present and future in two
kinds, the actual and the virtual. African cinema opens up a space
of remembrance and at the same time of utopia. It opens up in
diverse forms which often are hybrid and which lead from remembrance
to dream as Gilles Deleuze so nicely put it in Cinéma 2, Image-temps.
Possible axis of research:
To which extent do African movies renew the emancipatory worlds of
imagination which Simon Gikandi mentions? How do movies (cinemas)
take on the past? Does dealing with the past open up a vision for
the future? Is there a continuity discernible in the political and
creative imagination? Are new worlds of imagination formed? How does
the subversive power of cinema manifest itself?
African movies and referentiality (fictional, documentary, hybrid
forms; African cinema and remembrance/memory; revolutionary cinema,
engaged cinema; African cinema and preview: cinematic utopias, SF
Please hand in abstracts until 12.02.2011:
Ute Fendler: (ute.fendler /at/ uni-bayreuth.de) and
Viviane Azarian: (Viviane.azarian /at/ uni-bayreuth.de)
