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Popular Culture and the Arts in Africa
Organizers
Lynn Thomas (African Studies) Project Overview
This speaker, workshop, and film series will build on the research and teaching interests of a number of Africanist faculty and graduate students at the University of Washington, and will introduce African material and perspectives into campus and community conversation on contemporary music, visual media, and graphic arts. It will include five events: a panel discussion a lecture by the Nigerian painter Obiora Udechukwu; a library exhibit and workshop on African comics and graphic novels with Okwui Enzewor; a workshop on popular culture in Africa with Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbemb; and a year-long film series. African Studies Program Website  Artwork by Yadesa Bojia Events
Seminar The seminar reading will be made available to registered participants. Achille Mbembe (Institute for Social & Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand; English and Cultural Anthropology, Duke University) is widely recognized as one of the foremost theorists of postcolonial studies today. He is the author of the seminal On the Postcolony, as well as many other books and articles. This seminar engages Mbembe’s groundbreaking work in history, politics, and postcolonial theory by revisiting his article “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa” (Public Culture, 2000). How has globalization–viewed through the three intertwined concepts of boundaries, territoriality, and sovereignty–shifted in the decade since the article was written? Which elements of Mbembe’s analysis have been amplified and which have been muted in the post-9/11 world? What are the implications for our future understandings of globalization and postcolonial theory? Walker-Ames Lecture Workshop To attend, RSVP by November 14 Join faculty and graduate students for a roundtable discussion of their own research and writing on the workings of culture in Africa and its diasporas in relation to Sarah Nuttall’s books, Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (2006) and Entanglement (forthcoming). Presenters will include Stephanie M.H. Camp (History, Rice University), Laura Chrisman (English, UW Seattle), Susan Harewood (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell), Ron Krabill (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell), Georgia Roberts (English, UW Seattle), and Lynn M. Thomas (History, UW Seattle). Registered participants will receive lunch and workshop readings. Keynote Lecture Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet few efforts have been made to insert South Africa's largest city into urban and cultural theory on its own terms. In this lecture, Sarah Nuttall will attempt to define the city's metropolitan modernity, drawing it in to a set of global conversations about cities. She will focus on notions of the surface and the underneath of the city in its historic, psychic, and aesthetic invocations. Sarah Nuttall is Senior Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a cutting-edge scholar and theorist of cultural studies scholarship emanating from Africa. She is co-editor of Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature, and History in South Africa and Australia (1996), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (1998), Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies (2000), and a special issue of Public Culture titled Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2004). Most recently, she edited Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics (2006). Her monograph, Entanglement, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Obiora Udechukwu (Fine Arts, St. Lawrence University), "If You Call Your Plate a Potsherd...' The Postcolonial Artist and Tradition" "Highly Opinionated Hot Picks in Contemporary African Art" Forum Join Isolde Brielmaier and Trevor Schoonmaker, two compelling thinkers, who actively contribute to new definitions of African visual expression, as they take the temperature of contemporary African art. This program is co-presented by the African Studies Program, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, and the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington together with the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) Public Programs Department and the SAM African Arts Council. Shaheen Ariefdien, "Cape Flats Up-Rocking: On Race, Resistance and Rap in South Africa." African Comics Workshop
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