Center for African Studies

Africa | COVID Time: Lockdown, Disquiet, Waiting, Masking.

April 22 | 9:30am-12:00pm EDT

April 23 | 10:30am-4:30pm EDT (with midday intermission)

Our reflections will be about COVID, but also about time and the pulse of events and the everyday, troubles and worries
(minds, health, care), policing powers, masking practices
(carceral and affective), the arts, and incursions and diversions of all kinds. Organized by the CAS Mixing Disciplines Workshop, this 2-day zoom-conference will include three thematic forums (with speakers and
discussion), and two detours: one to Lusophone Africa
with film and the arts, and one to Kenya with literary and
speech studies, and a concluding discussion. The
conference will happen through Zoom to facilitate
participation from the audience and to allow for a clearer
perception about attendance.

View the full program for the event here. 

For further information: barrocadaniel@gmail.com, karencoker@ufl.edu or Nancy Hunt nrhunt@ufl.edu

Attend on ZOOM (Meeting ID: 949 3115 6059 | Passcode: 775052).

Thursday 22 April

9am EDT | Welcome & Introductions
Daniel Barroca (Anthro), Karen Coker (Global Health), and Nancy Hunt (History)

9:30am-2pm EDT | Detour no. 1 to Lusophone Africa, with artistic incursions | Visual Arts & History 
Introductions & Moderation | Daniel Barroca (Anthropology) and Alvaro Dias Lima (Art History)

A Story from Africa (2018), a 32 min. Billy Woodberry film (world premiere Berlinale, 2019). After the 1884–85 Berlin Conference on Africa’s partition, the Portuguese army used a talented ensign to register effective occupation of the land of the Cuamato people in southern Angola. The film enlivens a rare photographic archive through this tragic tale of a Cuamato nobleman, essential to unfolding events in Portugal’s pacification campaign. Woodberry has made many films, including Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), influenced by Italian neo-realism and Third World filmmakers. He co-founded the L.A. Rebellion film movement, and has been faculty at the California Institute of the Arts since 1989.

Artist talk by Kiluanji Kia Henda, a self-taught artist exhibiting internationally. Creator of many mixed media works and installations including Icarus 13 (2007) and The Building Series (2014). From his bases in   Lisbon and Luanda, he makes art engaging with the Angolan civil war and Angola’s colonial past ironically so, challenging notions of identity, politics and modernity. CONVERSATION with the Dallas-born (1950), Lisbon-based, African American filmmaker, Billy Woodberry as well as Kiluanji Kia Henda, a contemporary artist born in Angola (1979).

12.30-2pm | TEXT & IMAGES. Mobilizing archives: history, ethnographic photography, and photo-elicitation in Angola | with Inês Ponte (Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) postdoctoral researcher and Ricardo Roque (ICS researcher, University of Lisbon), co-author of Luso-tropicalism and its discontents: the making and unmaking of racial exceptionalism). Discussant: Alioune Sow (French). Moderator: Daniel Barroca.

Connections between history, photography and anthropology in an Angolan context via Ponte’s Marie Curie-funded project, Mobilising Archives: photography in Southwest Angola, developed with Roque. The visual practices of three ethnographers in rural southern Angola – a missionary, official, and anthropologist – speak to the varied social lives of ethnographic images during and after Portuguese colonial rule. Based on archival and field research in Portugal and Angola as well as photo-elicitation with a rural Angolan community, the multimodal enquiry experimented with visual production, digital scholarship, history, and ethnography.

Friday 23 April

10.30am-12.30pm EDT | Detour no. 2 to Kenya and COVID speech
Apollo Amoko (English), moderator. DIALOGUE with Tom Odhiambo (Senior Lecturer, English, University of Nairobi and leading cultural critic); Keguro Macharia, (Nairobi-based independent literary scholar and cultural critic) and April Zhu (Nairobi-based freelance journalist and writer focusing on gender, urban inequality, and China-Kenya as seen from the margins; producer “Until Everyone Is Free,” a sheng’ podcast on the life of Kenyan socialist freedom fighter Pio Gama Pinto).

To be considered: the vexing intersection between public health and the security state in the postcolony with reference to Kenya’s experience with Coronavirus. Notwithstanding low, if unreliable rates of infection, the government’s violent, inept, and corrupt response revealed a conflation of public health and brutal enforcement measures, an enduring, destructive confusion harking back to the colonial era. Draconian polices provoked important conversations and aimed to suppress protests seeking to finally decolonize the Kenya police and decouple public health from the security state.

2:30-4:30 EDT | COVID Time Lived | Quick Stories & Reflections from/about many Africa(s)
Moderators: Deng Zheyuan and Karen Coker

W O R R I E S
Abdoulaye Kane (Anthropology)
Aurelie Maketa (History)
Mouhamed Fall, Sociology (joining from fieldwork in Senegal)
Mosunmola Ogunmolaji (History)
Renata Serra (African Studies | Sustainable Development)

I M P A T I E N C E
Daniel Barroca (Anthropology)
Emmanuel Opoku (Fine Arts – sculpture)
Fiona McLaughlin (Linguistics)
Megan Cogburn (Anthropology)

C O N F I N E M E N T S  &  M A S K I N G
Mustapha Mohammed (Anthropology)
Tara Wilfong (joining from Ethiopia)
Ampson Hagan (Anthropology, UNC)
Andia Akifuma (Sustainable Development)
Apollo Amoko (English)
Karen Coker (Global Health)
Mathew Pflaum (Geography)
Nancy Hunt (History)

4.30-5:30pm ET: Conclusion with Discussion: Apollo Amoko, Daniel Barroca, Nancy Hunt