Welcome to the final week of the course on African Cultural Expressions and Artistic Creativity!

This week focuses on ‘Everyday Cultural Expressions’ and African Screen Media!

The thematic focus of this final week starts with ‘Everyday Cultural Expressions’. For this lecture/seminar you will be led by Prof. Sten Hagberg. You have met Prof. Sten Hagberg before: he is a professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology. He has worked extensively in Burkina Faso and Mali.

The last two lecture/seminars focus on Africa screen media, and the teachers will be Dani Kouyaté and Dr. Oulia Makkonen. Dani Kouyaté is a filmmaker, storyteller, musician, director, and teacher. In March this year, he was awarded the prestigious Golden Stallion of Yennenga at the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) for Katanga: The Dance of the Scorpions. He is a long-term partner of the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, and is affiliated to Forum for Africa Studies Uppsala. And, Dr Makkonen is a Post Doc at the Department of English Uppsala University. She is specialized in African film. The abstract of her thesis They Will Call Me the Black God: Imagining Christianity and the Bible in African Film can be accessed here.

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Prof. Sten Hagberg Dr. Oulia Makkonen Dani Kouyaté

Lecture-Seminar

Read the assigned literature, and watch the movies/film clips before the Lectures-Seminars. During the sessions, the teacher will contextualize the course literature and bring out important themes from the texts. During the seminar part, you will discuss and react to the lectures and readings of the week.

Assignment

By the end of the week, you are asked to submit a reaction paper where you respond and react to the readings and lectures of the week. Make sure to read the instructions. Submit your paper here.

Schedule

Tuesday 22 April

14:15 -16:00, 1-0062, Engelska parken

Lecture-seminar: Joking cultures in Africa

Teacher: Sten Hagberg

In this lecture, Prof. Hagberg will explore the politics of joking relationships. Drawing on his extensive research in Burkina Faso, Hagberg will discuss how jokes form part of the political everyday as well as national political culture.

Readings
Hagberg, S: 2006. The Politics of Joking Relationships in Burkina Faso. Zeitschrift für EthnologieLinks to an external site. 131(2), 197-214.

Ottenberg, S. Humorous Masks and Serious Politics among the Afikpo Igbo. In In R.R. GrinkerLinks to an external site., S.C. LubkemannLinks to an external site. & C. SteinerLinks to an external site. (red.) 2010. Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 335-347. Download PDF

Thursday 24 April

09:15 - 12:00, 1-0062, Engelska parken

Lecture-seminar: Film screening and discussion: Sia, le Rêve du Python / Sia, the dream of the python

Teacher: Dani Kouyaté

Friday 25 April

11:15-13:00, 3-2028, Engelska parken

Lecture-seminar: An introduction to African Screen Media

Teacher: Oulia Makkonen

Blurb: In this lecture we will get a glimpse of what African Screen Media is. The inception of the term and field relates to developments at the intersection of formal and informal forms of media, viewership, and film scholarship and criticism. We will trace the evolution of the screen on the continent, from colonial reels to Nollywood melodramas.

In the watchlist provided below, you can find available films/series to watch in preparation for the lecture. It is enough to pick one out of the lot. You can also bring your own. You do not need to prepare anything, but we will discuss some of these screen media together in class, so it might be helpful to have a couple of images in mind.

Readings

Harrow, K.W. and Garritano, C. (eds) 2019. Introduction. In Harrow, K.W. and Garritano, C. (eds) 2019. A Companion to African Cinema. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp.1-12.

Sawadogo, B. 2019. Critical Reading Lenses in the study of African Cinema. In Sawadogo, B. 2019 African Film Studies: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 105-125.

Petty, S. 2011 Self-Styling Identities, Critical Interventions, 5:1, 27-37. DOI: 10.1080/19301944.2011.10781398

Examples to watch

From Fear to Faith (1946)

http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/212

Borrom Sarret (1963)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U59BefqjjtE

Manthia Diawara on Borrom Sarret

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBaawhUQ9cI

Afronauts (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb3pu5jXWHU

Diabolo (1989)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t75Z8xqiM2I

Ogun Ola : War is Coming ( A short film by The Critics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpxXmK4TC04

Jenifa’s diary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1h0Hs27nMQ

Additional, non-mandatory readings:

Barlet, O. 2000. African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze, London; New York: Zed Books (Part 3, Chapters 1 and 2)

Ukadike, N.F. 1995. Black African Cinema. University of California Press (Chapter 1: Africa and the Cinema)

Diawara, M. 2010. African film: New Forms of Aesthetics and Politics, Munich; New York: Prestel.

Ukadike, N. F. & Gabriel, T. 2002 Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [online] Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv6tx [Accessed 15 September 2020].

Assignments

On Friday this week (25 April) you are asked to submit a reaction paper where you respond and react to the readings and lectures of the week. Make sure to read the instructions. Submit your paper here.

The home exam is published the same day - April 25 (13:00-13:30). The exam is due on 02 May by 17:00.