CFP: Living Memory in Contemporary African Film and Literature (UK) (4/15/05; 5/8/05)

CFP: Living Memory in Contemporary African Film and Literature
(Cambridge University, UK)
Submission deadline: 04/15/05
Symposium date: 05/08/05

"The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against
forgetting."
 - Milan Kundera

         This academic symposium will be held at Cambridge University in
conjunction with the Fourth Cambridge African Film Festival, one of the
most high profile and exciting of the African events occurring in the UK as
part of the launch of Black World '05 and the Commission on Africa. The
symposium will seek to explore how an individual and collective memory is
activated through African cinema and literature, in order to challenge a
repressive historical record or to claim a space for personal recollection.
Amongst other issues, we would like to discuss the extent to which the
disruption of the tenuous fissure between past and present allows the
tracing of multiple trajectories of experience in opposition to dominant
meta-narratives which yield recycled or clichéd frameworks, and the
fluidity of identity in opposition to the often rigid categorisations
imposed through repression, ignorance, or apathy. We are also interested in
considering the problematic process by which individual and personal
identities are forged and in exploring the aesthetic forms of expression
which are being re-appropriated or created by contemporary African
filmmakers and writers to impede the official obscuration of traumatic past
events and/or to celebrate a fertile recollection process.

         Ken Wiwa, author of In the Shadow of a Saint (Random House, 2000),
a personal memoir about his relationship with his father, Nigerian
political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, will be the keynote speaker at the
symposium. As such, the remembrance of Saro-Wiwa's tragic death a decade
ago will be the backdrop to the conference. Participants in the symposium
will also have the chance to attend screenings of the best contemporary
African films as well as talks with the directors of these films.

        We particularly invite papers on the following topics:

• Memory and amnesia as thematic and structural aspects of contemporary
African literature and/or cinema. • The evocation of trauma and/or the
celebration of tradition through personal and collective memory. • Whether
buried memories and alternate histories can be represented through dominant
forms of artistic expression, or whether entirely new aesthetic frameworks
are necessary, or possible, to fulfill this task. • The tension between
political and aesthetic issues and the perceived responsibility on the
contemporary artist to voice the concerns of repressed and silenced groups.
• The implications of a literature and cinema of ‘living memory’ for the
future of African filmmaking, writing, and identity politics.

This list is not exhaustive and we will consider a broad range of
proposals. Please note, however, that we are only in need of a small number
of papers to complete the programme.

         Each proposal should be approximately 250 words in length. Please
also attach a curriculum vitae and email to ALL of the following addresses:
        
         Lindiwe Dovey (ld257_at_cam.ac.uk)
        Matilda Mroz (mm570_at_cam.ac.uk)
        Paula Beegan (pb283_at_cam.ac.uk)
        

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Received on Sun Apr 03 2005 - 15:43:26 EDT