New Spring Course: African Cinema

In Spring 2018, Frieda will teach a new undergraduate seminar titled African Cinema. The course is numbered Afroamerican and African Studies 440 and is cross listed with Screen Arts and Culture 440:

This course will concentrate on images produced on the concept of global blackness. We will first define what we mean by ‘Global Blackness’ and then analyze how filmmakers use images and narratives to challenge and change the spectator’s positioning as it concerns the possibilities of understanding blackness around the world. We will problematize questions of national identity through contemporary issues such as race, racism, ethnicity, sexuality along with class and gender. At one level, we will concentrate on cinema as a language, an ideological discourse that aims to provide a critical exploration. At another level, we will analyze how cinema produced by blacks is rooted in the ongoing struggle for the need to be part of national discourses, and how black cinema offers images that are consistently different from those presented mainstream cinema around the world.

Please join us for the world premier of Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters, a film by Frieda Ekotto and Marthe Djilo Kamga.

This is a 90-minute documentary film that highlights the creative achievements of six Sub-Saharan African women in various intellectual and artistic fields, elaborating a visual archive of unprecedented quality and scope. The film reflects on the complex nature of contemporary Sub-Saharan African cultural production by women, prompting the audience to better understand and theorize the new paradigms and voices it highlights. Followed by a panel discussion with the five women profiled in the film, including:

Marthe Djilo Kamga

Frieda Ekotto

Koyo Kouoh

Zolan N’Gono

Marie Sabal-Lecco (Ajomo)

There will be three screenings:

Tuesday October 10th at 4pm (Followed by a panel) at Rackham Ampitheatre // 915 E. Washington St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Wednesday October 11th from 6pm-8pm at The Neutral Zone // 310 E. Washington St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Thursday October 12th at 3pm at The Residential College Keane Theater East Quadrangle // 701 E. University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Vibrancy of Silence Facebook

Digital Destiny

DIGITAL DESTINY presents 20 sculptures in metal and found materials created over the past five years by Cameroonian artist Dieudonné Fokou. Fokou experiments continuously with new media, as he explores different modes of creation int he plastic arts. His work is nourished by themes of justice and the search for peace and liberty, as well as by his travels, problems inherent to society as well as his hopes and dreams for a better world.

This exhibit was curated by Frieda Ekotto and Emily Goedde. The work was featured in Gallery DAAS from September 16-November 18, 2016, including an artist talk in the African American Studies Department.

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Archiving Dakar: The Work of El Hadji Sy by Frieda Ekotto and Marissa Gélinas

Frieda and her Comparative Literature doctoral student Melissa Gélinas are published in the first issue of Obieg! Quarterly, a publication produced in part by the Centre for Contemporary Art at the Ujazdowski Castle. Click the link above to read the full article.

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THE POETICS OF COLOR LINE / LA QUESTION RACIALE ET LA REPRÉSENTATION LGBT+

Frieda’s work is featured in Africultures online publication. This article was originally presented at the Massimadi LGBT+ Film Festival in Brussels, Belgium in May 2016. Click the link above to read the full text.

Comparative Literature doctoral student reviews Frieda’s work

Faire parler le silence à haute voix au sein des minorités : dans Portrait d’une jeune artiste de Bona Mbella de Frieda Ekotto

By Charles Gueboguo

The aim of this paper is to analyse Frieda Ekotto’s novel, Portrait… and to critically outline how she challenges sexual expressions spaces from the margin. Through a critical close reading, I argue that the author enables a dialectical alliance through her writing and the issue of women who love women in Africa. In her fictionnal world, writing from the socio-sexual margin is a means to focus on the vulnerability of social systems. And moreover, to rethink the emptiness of its prejudices vis-à-vis the performance of desire and sexual practices among women subject.

Frieda receives John H. D’Arms Faculty Awards for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities

Frieda receives John H. D’Arms Faculty Awards for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities. This award celebrates faculty who have contributed significantly to graduate student dissertations in the humanities. Frieda was nominated by one her current graduate students and selected by the committee her for creative scholarship and encouraging mentorship. Frieda is pictured here in the Department of Comparative Literature beside her book Rethinking African Cultural Production.

“New Directions in the Study of the Global South”

Frieda featured in Forum on Contemporary Theory Newsletter

FCT Newsletter March 2016

Informal Session with Frieda Ekotto

“New Directions in the Study of the Global South”

February 13, 2016

This interactive session discussed the significance of alternative narratives of the Global South, a novel perspective of realizing the other as affecting and shaping the self and vice versa. The importance of ‘Glocal’, the need to accommodate diverse alternative meanings of cultures and histories, the need to look at centrality of our concerns along with a peripheral vision, the need to broaden mental territories beyond the geographical, the rising local activism (women empowerment, education) carried out in Cameroon and its parallels in India, were some of the myriad topics explored.

Frieda Ekotto with Marthe Djilo Kamga

The necessity of looking at a subject ‘subjectively’, the importance of understanding diverse local realities using different techniques or methods to studying local cultures that have been undermined by the mainstream and similar imposing discourses, were the key concerns addressed. The discussions ranged from drawing parallels between the kinds of oppression in Indian subcontinent and Cameroon; recognizing the pertinent social issues affecting society, especially those affecting the lower echelons of the social order; and proposing ways and means to chart out innovative alternatives towards perceiving it. Glaring social depressions in society like lack of hygiene, absence of sanitary facilities, atrocities to women, gender-based biased practices, environmental concerns were part of the discussion. Frieda Ekotto gave her generous and valuable insights on the world of academia and the need to focus more on multiple intellectual engagements in understanding a ‘subject’ from various vantage points, i.e. addressing both the centrality as well as the periphery. This intended to look beyond the existing lenses of nativism and westernization and explore possibilities between the two or beyond them. In her words, “The necessity to practicing a conscious exercise of being centered and yet, widening ones mental territories, by reaffirming the notion of ‘a world elsewhere’” formed the crux of the interactive session.

Marthe Djilo Kamga

The occasional lecture and informal session was documented by Marthe Djilo Kamga from Cameroon. Currently the founder and director of the Massimadi festival, Marthe Djilo Kamga’s professional and personal paths have revolved around her interest in questions of vulnerability, identity, and equal opportunity. Through these trajectories, she has developed expertise with questions that relate to very different populations: migrants living with HIV/AIDS, the homeless, children of first-generation immigrants, and individuals who identify as LGBTQI who come from Africa or its diasporas. She acquired her knowledge and experience in socio-medical and socio-cultural sectors. Her attention to these thematics has not been limited to bringing projects into fruition, but has also included defining and implementing coherent public policies that are relevant to local realities and in dialogue with their stakeholders. Her interest in art and cultural production (film, performance, photography, etc.) support her reappropriation of images and public spaces for people in positions of invisibility.

“Reprendre: The Colonial Library and New Writing in the Global South”

Frieda featured in Forum on Contemporary Theory Newsletter

FCT Newsletter March 2016

“Reprendre: The Colonial Library and New Writing in the Global South”

by Frieda Ekotto
Professor of Afro-American and African Studies and Comparative Literature
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA February 12, 2016

What is the African modern subject? In this presentation Frieda Ekotto begins by sketching out a theoretical framework for African modernity, through an examination of various writers who have already theorized on this subject. Perhaps the most important theorist we would highlight here is V.Y. Mudimbe and his idea of “The Colonial Library” which connects or outlines how African modernity has been necessarily defined by the grids of historical oppression; in other words, that Africans have been defined by Western mythologies which continue to dominate their lives today. This “Colonial Library” is the archive of knowledge on Africa that is inevitably drawn from when any person speaks, writes or thinks about Africa today. It is also the central resource, Mudimbe argues, that Africans need to return to and to excavate ideologically in order to rearticulate epistemologies of Africa on their own terms.

In the Global South, it is possible to discuss a new generation of African women writers, in particular, which has reconfigured the landscape of contemporary African literature, especially redefining the terms “home” and “abroad.” Living and writing globally, their works are often marked by the occupation of multiple spaces. They have moved into regions of gender politics and construct emotional landscapes and global settings that match their writing styles.

In the arena of African philosophy, V.Y. Mudimbe’s primary contribution is concerned with how modern African thought seems to basically be a product of the West. In his seminal work, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, Mudimbe raises key questions problematizing the epistemology of the object of “Africa” and the African subject, such as: what does it mean to be an African, and where is the role of Africa within modernity? His concerns are in many ways methodologically similar to what Edward Said has done in Orientalism, except in an African rather than Middle Eastern context; in other words, Mudimbe shows through his work how the West has accumulated knowledge about Africa in what he calls the “Colonial Library” in which Africa appears as an imaginary landscape, invented and constructed by the West.

About the Speaker

Frieda Ekotto is Professor of Afro American and African Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, USA. She is a well-known African woman novelist and literary critic. Her novels engage with the issues of gender and sexuality in Sub-Saharan Africa. She is also known for her significant work on the writer Jean Genet, more for her political analysis of Genet’s prison writing, and Jean Genet’s influence as a race theorist in the Francophone world. Her research and teaching explore literature, film, race and law in the Francophone world, traversing across France, Africa, the Caribbean and the Maghreb.

John H. D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities

With the endorsement of her graduate students, Frieda receives a John H. D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities. This exciting honor recognizes Frieda’s dedication to her own creative scholarship as well as that of her many students.

“These awards were created in honor of John H. D’Arms, Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs (1985-1995), to recognize scholars and/or creative artists of extraordinary depth and breadth who have provided their students with the quality of support that only remarkable learning, coupled with boundless generosity of spirit, can bestow. Nominees for this award must be tenured faculty members in the humanities and have directed a substantial number of dissertations over the past several years. The John H. D’Arms Graduate Student Awards for Summer Research in the Humanities are given to students in the graduate programs of the faculty members who receive the D’Arms Awards.”

For more on the John H. D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities, click here.