Visions of Life Symposium: Utopian Dreams, Revolutionary Filmmaking and the Politics of the Film Archive in Africa
Over the last century, politics across the world have been remade through the visual technology of screens. From early Soviet cinema trains and ‘agit steamers’ to YouTube videos today, revolutionaries have believed that film, as an easily reproducible and mobile medium of dramatic narratives, offers a powerful way of impressing new political visions onto the emotional indexes of diverse groups of people.

The era of decolonization, in the 1950s and 1960s, was a key moment in the global rise of screen culture. The first generation of many nationalist leaders in the Global South, such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Gamal Abel Nasser in Egypt, and Jawaharlal Nehru in India, saw in film a revolutionary potential to inspire ‘freedom dreams’, overturn colonial hierarchies and reshape international and social orders, modern citizenship, and people’s sense of their own agency. Yet the significance of this era of African filmmaking and the broader effects it had on politics and societies, has often been obscured from scholarly attention, in part because of complex difficulties in accessing and using African film archives that have often suffered significant neglect.

This two-day interdisciplinary conference will bring together anthropologists, archivists, cinema scholars, filmmakers, and historians to explore the intellectual, political and methodological issues raised by this complex history.

Access the full programme at bit.ly/Visions_programme

To attend IN PERSON please register at www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/visions-of-life-symposium-in-person-tickets-303636152907
To attend ONLINE please register at www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/visions-of-life-symposium-online-tickets-303966771797
Date: 31 March 2022, 9:00 (Thursday, 11th week, Hilary 2022)
Venue: Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road OX1 3TB
Venue Details: Seminar Room 3 and online
Speaker: Various Speakers
Organising department: Oxford Department of International Development
Organiser contact email address: jo.boyce@qeh.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?: Required
Audience: Public
Editor: Jo Boyce