The 7th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference
Conference Theme
Rethinking Decoloniality: African Decolonization and Epistemologies in the 21st Century
Format
Hybrid (In person, University of Lagos and Virtual) Date June 20-24, 2023
Abstract Deadline: December 1
Panel Organizer: Rosemary Popoola (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Can a subaltern be a celebrity? In 2020, Senegalese-born Italian TikToker Khaby Lame became a digital sensation, not by privileging dominant ways of expression through sound/voice, but by subverting them. He went against the common way of engaging the public by focusing on another mode of expression that has been marginalized in a world that privileges voice. Lame's approach reiterates a call that has emerged through the years to decenter dominant ideas and methods that marginalize, homogenize, and exhume coloniality in their preference for “conventional” methods of communication. If, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests, “the subaltern cannot speak”, is it because they have other modes of expression and representation that possibly have no requirement of audibility? While sound could be significant for audible expressivity, what can we learn from sign language and other non-verbal subalternized modes of expression? In addition, Oyeronke Oyewunmi, while distinguishing between the epistemological and cultural logics of western and Yoruba social thought and practices, posits that the former is deeply steamed in visuals (physicalities), and the latter combines diverse modes for comprehending realities. Can a move from visuality, which western thought privileges, to indigenous ways of knowing and apprehension be a form of decoloniality for African celebrity studies?
This panel seeks to move beyond dominant ideas of what it means to be famous. Although within the context of fame, we heed bell hooks’ timeless call to move from the center to the margins. This panel will engage marginality and subalternity from the following viewpoints. First, it explores fame through groups, people, and professionals who support famous people. Second, it focuses on famous people outside of the hegemonic understanding of fame because they do not have all the dominant, yet problematic paraphernalia of celebrities (digital media accounts, media hypervisibility, and others). Third, it tackles topics on the fringes of fame, from disabilities, sexualities, and prison to celebrities and mental health, trolls, digital begging, and charities. Lastly, it considers the circumstances under which African celebrities, across all regions and within the hierarchy of fame, may also be subalterns.
To participate in this panel, send a 250-word abstract and short bio to Rosemary Popoola (rpopoola@wisc.edu) by December 1, 2022.
References
hooks, b. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to center. Pluto Press.
Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender discourses. University of Minnesota Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1988), Can the Subaltern Speak? in Williams, P., & Chrisman, L. (2015) ed. Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: A reader. Routledge. p.67-110
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Call for Panelists
Policing Representation: Dissent, Decoloniality, and Censorship in Kannywood
The 7th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference
Conference Theme
Rethinking Decoloniality: African Decolonization and Epistemologies in the 21st Century
Format
Hybrid (In person, University of Lagos and Virtual) Date June 20-24, 2023
Abstract Deadline: December 1
Panel Organizer: Rukayat Banjo (Bayero University)
In the past two or three decades, decoloniality has been pigeonholed as a poststructural knowledge system that attempts a dis/placement of conventional thinking about the unending legacies of imperialism in Africa. As a framework of analysis, propositions and perspectives on decoloniality have been the basis of many verbal and actional stances. Decoloniality also involves the performance of real or imagined normality in contested private and public spaces. Theatre, particularly the cinema, gives decoloniality the intellectual legitimacy to challenge the binary denunciation the colonizer against the colonized and the urgency to expunge the remnant of colonial memory or trauma.
The persistence of coloniality in a decolonized 21st-century Nigeria is one of the problematics of the Hausa movie industry, popularly known as Kannywood. Currently, Kannywood is one of the most regulated film industries in the world. The industry has become a “colony” where select few clerics perpetuate self-styled interpretations of Islam to suppress the “dissenting” voices of filmmakers who are rendering filmic impressions of everyday life.
This panel calls for contributions that question the relationships between performance and decoloniality in Kannywood. It is interested in the following interrelated themes, among others: religion and the conflicting landscape of morality; censorship and mediation; power and resistance; honor and dissidence; objectified bodies and sexualized moralities. The panel is also opened to filmic representations of decoloniality; cancel culture and celebrities; and Kannywood futurities.
To participate in this session, send a 250-word abstract and short bio to Rukayat Banjo (brukaiyyah.tfs@buk.edu.ng) by December 1, 2022.
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Call for Panelists
Decolonizing Nollywood: Language, Accents, and Aesthetics
The 7th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference
Conference Theme
Rethinking Decoloniality: African Decolonization and Epistemologies in the 21st Century
Format
Hybrid (In person, University of Lagos and Virtual) Date June 20-24, 2023
Abstract Deadline: December 1
Panel Organizer: Olusegun Soetan (Pennsylvania State University)
What do films say about the social dynamics and cultures of their producers and places of production? Do movies reflect the ideologies of the filmmakers and national points of view? How does the way a film is put together communicate messages about the shared world views of Africans and sustain dialogic imaginations about cultural identities and the polemics of nationalism and hybrid culture? How do film styles, forms, and mode change? Is the desire to express the local while addressing the global a universal characteristic of film traditions, or is it unique to African cinema? Of what importance is indigenous language to the definition of African cinema? Like human languages, do film languages have accents?
In general, we are interested in the decolonial study of Nollywood to articulate paradigms, politics, and practices that have shaped the industry's growth via thematic preoccupation, stylistic idioms, and narrative techniques. In this panel, we want to take a provocative look at what constitutes cinematic aesthetics in the industry, the agency of indigenous languages, and the overarching idiosyncrasies of accented cinema. According to Hamid Naficy (2001), "all alternative cinemas are accented, but each is accented in certain specific ways that distinguish it" (22).
Consequently, Nollywood films are accented to the degree to which they derive their accents from the "artisanal, collective production modes, and the filmmakers' and audiences' deterritorialized locations. Lately, much of what we assume to be the preference of individual auteurs poignantly reflects the shift in the audience's reception and perception of film forms and styles, as well as engagement with more profound social and cultural milieus. Therefore, this panel seeks new ways of writing and thinking about Nollywood films, especially those that are adapted for the big screens, such as "Agesinkole (2022), Anikulapo (2022), and Ayinla (2022). How do these three films (Agesinkole, Anikulapo, and Ayinla) contextualize the decolonization of African film forms and narrative modes? How is cinematic aesthetics created and expanded in the three films? To what degree are these films accented if we agree that they are cultural materials that subsist on local artifacts and oral panegyrics?
To participate in this panel, send a 250-word abstract and short bio to Olusegun Soetan (Olusegun@psu.edu) by December 1, 2022.
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Call for Panelists
Filmic Decoloniality? Comedy, Digital Skits, and Popular Culture in Africa
The 7th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference
Conference Theme
Rethinking Decoloniality: African Decolonization and Epistemologies in the 21st Century
Format
Hybrid (In person, University of Lagos and Virtual) Date June 20-24, 2023
Abstract Deadline: December 1
Panel Organizer: Folakemi Owolabi (National Film Institute, Jos)
This panel continues the conversation on comedy and skit-making at the session I organized at the 6th Lagos Studies Association Conference in June 2022. Today, critics argue that skit-making has revolutionized the representation of African people, institutions, and practices from the perspective of liberalization of technology and the circumvention of the conventional path of filmmaking. Skit-making is disturbing the dominant idealization of filmmaking, directing, production, and circulation. The decolonial angle to skit-making, therefore, includes representation and the breaking of shackles of domination. But decolonization is more than a representation of “authentic” African culture or removal of remnants of imperialism to include rethinking elements of coloniality in decolonization projects.
This panel welcomes contributions that go beyond a scene-by-scene analysis of skits to include theoretically sound participation that place comedy skits within the broader social, political, and economic structures of 21st-century Nigeria. A contribution stating that skit creation is a response to youth unemployment would be inadequate for this panel, which seeks to build new and deep discursive analysis around the lived experience of the filmmakers, their communities, and the historicity of the narratives and visualities they produce within the frames of decoloniality. Misrepresentation, cultural ordering, un-Africaness, cosmopolitanism, sexualization of women, and violence, among other critiques of comedy skits, should be framed to problematize preexisting ones while showing the new dimensions they have taken.
To participate in this panel, send a 250-word abstract and short bio to Folakemi Owolabi (folakemiogungbe@gmail.com) by December 1, 2022.
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Call for Panelists
Black Europe and the African Diaspora
The 7th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference
Conference Theme
Rethinking Decoloniality: African Decolonization and Epistemologies in the 21st Century
Format
Hybrid (In person, University of Lagos and Virtual) Date June 20-24, 2023
Abstract Deadline: December 1, 2022
Panel Organizer: Chiedozie Michael Uhuegbu (Sewanee: The University of the South)
What relation does Europe have with the African continent? This question could be tackled from different angles looking back at the Berlin conference of 1884 under Otto von Bismarck—itself a historical turning point in European colonial politics. This meeting resulted in the scramble for and partition of Africa by European nations like France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain. The nineteenth century saw an explosion of adventurous trading enterprises that pushed Bismarck to start a more official, state-supported form of colonialism and ultimately to the Berlin Conference. Although history shows that Africans have been traveling to Europe before the arrival of the first European powers in Africa, this advent led to the transportation, deportation, and “willful” and “forceful” migration of Africans to Europe. Colonization has long ended in Africa, but Africans still migrate to Europe due to political and socio-economic reasons. This panel looks at the categorization of Black Europe, seeking papers that discuss ideas of Blackness in Europe, European history, and the Black Diaspora. How did Europe become a diasporic home for many Africans? What is the meaning of diaspora for Africans who migrated to or were born in Europe? How did Africans start migrating to Germany? Why did they migrate? How do we conceptualize the discourse surrounding the term Blackness in relation to Europe? While the panel seeks papers that are not limited to the examination of migrants of color and “Afropeans”— a term used by Johnny Pitts to identify Europeans with African ancestors—the panel is also interested in the discussion of the origins of Black Europe, migration and settlement of Africans in Europe, and the laws that regulate citizenship. We also invite discussions focusing on Europe’s relationship with Africa in literature, history, religion, art history, or culture.
To participate in this panel, send a 250-word abstract and short bio to Chiedozie Michael Uhuegbu (chuhuegb@sewanee.edu) by December 1, 2022.
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Call for Panelists
Of Streets and Streeters: New Horizons in African Urban Space Politics
The 7th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference
Conference Theme
Rethinking Decoloniality: African Decolonization and Epistemologies in the 21st Century
Format
Hybrid (In person, University of Lagos and Virtual) Date June 20-24, 2023
Abstract Deadline: December 1
Panel Organizer: Bankole Wright (Florida International University)
This panel seeks new ways of (re)conceptualizing African streets beyond their conventional framing as significant sites of political and economic power. It moves beyond the commonplace argument that the street is a microcosm of the broader state power that rewards, punishes, and distributes resources based on primordial, among other sentiments. It is interested in engaging with the African street from its practical, physical, and metaphoric dimensions, in time perspective, and within overlapping variables of class, race, gender, and ethnicity, among other dynamics. In intellectualizing the African street, the panel asks for innovative epistemological framings that center previously unknown actors and ideas or rethink existing ones.
To participate in this panel, send a 250-word abstract and short bio to Bankole Wright (bbank015@fiu.edu) by December 1, 2022.
US Secretariat
The Lagos Studies Association
African and African Diaspora Studies Program
Florida International University
Modesto A Maidique Campus
Labor Center, Room 304
11200 SW 8th Street
Miami, FL 33199
Website: lagosstudies.org
Email Address: lagosstudiesassociation@gmail.com
Nigeria Secretariat
The Lagos Studies Association
C\O Professor Yetunde Zaid
University of Lagos Library
P.M.B 1012
Akoka, Lagos
Nigeria
Email Address: lagosstudiesassociation@gmail.com
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