Archeology of the Future: African Cinema and Imaginary
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@uni-bayreuth.de and Viviane Azarian: Viviane.azarian@uni-bayreuth.de
