The Politics of Place: Dakar in 1960's Sengalese Film

Visiting Professor Steven Nelson (University of California, Los Angeles)

  • Friday 17 August 2018, 6:15pm – 8:30pm
  • GOMA Cinema B, Gallery of Modern Art, Southbank
  • 6:15pm film screening: Black Girl 1966
  • 7:25pm lecture (1 hour)

Dakar’s diverse art, architecture, urban planning, and film have played primary roles in the shaping an understanding of the city. Exploring Ousmane Sembène’s Borom Sarret (1963) and Black Girl (1966) as well as Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Contras’ City (1968), this lecture explores the filmmakers’ use of architecture and urban space both to meditate on a city constituted in large part through the collision of hybrid constituencies and to critique Senegalese authority as well as the politics of decolonisation. The lecture is preceded by a free screening of Ousmane Sembène’s classic 1966 film Black Girl (1966) at 6:15pm in GOMA Cinema B.

https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/whats-on/cinema/programs/film-talk-the-politics-of-place

Professor Steven Nelson is Director of the African Studies Center and Professor of African and African American Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University in 1998. In addition to his award-winning book 'From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture in and out of Africa' (2007), he has published widely on the arts, architecture and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas, African American art history, and queer studies. He is currently completing two books titled, 'On the Underground Railroad' and 'Structural Adjustment: Mapping, Geography, and the Visual Cultures of Blackness.'


Supported by the Keir Foundation, Sydney; the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Queensland; and GoMA.

Venue

GOMA Cinema B, Gallery of Modern Art, Southbank