Challenging the Visual, Taming the Gaze: African film in the Classroom Environment
Session type: Panel
Organized by: P. Julie Papaioannou
Send abstracts or inquiries to: julie.papaioannou@rochester.edu
African films have become an essential part of classroom experience. Viewed as carriers of cultural meaning, African films enhance the understanding of cultural difference with visual representation and artistic expression to dispel the notion of an exotic continent in perpetual conflict, disease, and poverty that has long been maintained by Western media. However, the realistic representation of African culture in film has long raised the question as to expectations about the cinematic representation of African life, and expression. In recent years, African filmmaking has also been negotiating artistic trends in the geo-economic sphere of globalized and mediatized world. This panel seeks to investigate the pedagogical, analytical, and critical interventions that assist the scholar to navigate and negotiate the mediacy of the cinematic lens and the immediacy of cultural difference vis-à-vis the student-viewer. How do current theoretical trends in African filmmaking affect our critical understanding and discussion of African films in a diverse classroom? What are the pedagogical and interdisciplinary approaches and practices to address topics of discussion, such as trauma, war, “slow violence,” body mutilation, human trafficking, immigration without falling into the conundrum of creating cultural stereotypes in the process of criticizing them?
Please submit abstracts by February 5, 2018