UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER
Conference on: The Audience of Images: Visual Publics in Africa and Beyond, 11/02

Conference on: The Audience of Images: Visual Publics in Africa and Beyond, 11/02

(15 - 17 November 2002)

to be held at Iwalewa-House, African Studies Centre, University of Bayreuth, Germany

While the recent increase of studies in the realm of visual culture has led to new and exiting insights in the role of images as active agents in the political economy of desire and the shaping of social movements in colonial and postcolonial Africa, the issue of the audience of these images remains a vexing question. All too often respective statements with regard to the actual effect of images on a given public are based more on assumptions than on empirically grounded arguments.

Apart from methodological problems, one basic reason for this is the lack of an appropriate visual theory of the public. Steeped deeply in the cultural tradition of Western modernity, our notion of the public is primarily a verbal one. Modern institutional concepts like public law or public sphere for example, are not only a legacy of the enlightenment. They also reflect the exclusive reliance on language only. As such they concede the capacity of constituting a critical rational discourse for the legitimacy of power solely to words, leaving the realm of the visual associated with the stigma of suspicion and mistrust.

With respect to the rapidly changing visual landscape in contemporary Africa the workshop intends to counter this perspective by trying to develop and give substance to the concept of visual publics. Inviting theoretical as well empirical approaches, the case studies we have in mind are as heterogeneous as the new visual landscapes in Africa itself.

They may thus range from the emergence of video films as a new but already firmly established genre of African popular art, over the spread of charismatic Christianity and its extensive use of visual media, to new architectural forms in the suburbia and the increasing articulations between national art scenes and the global art world.

For further information contact: PD Dr. Peter Probst, Iwalewa House, African Studies Centre, University of Bayreuth, 95440 Bayreuth, e-mail: peter.probst@uni-bayreuth.de




Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar
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