Bettschen, Laura

Charles, Enrika

Siegenthaler, Fiona

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1/2016 Swi5s. Soci•t·t far Afriun S1udi• Sc;c-i~~ ~ IS!ill!' d "i!':ud@'5 i!lfl"l(i!l iDl!!I Si::hwc1~~1xtiie: Gc:::;~Lkic.l"iM't m1Ar · imt1Jdi""11 Swiss Society for African Studies Societe suisse d'etudes africaines Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Afrikastudien SSEA - SGAS ISSN 1019-9276 Impressum: Redaction • Redaktion: Mohomodou Houssouba, Veit Arlt, Pascal Schmid Mise en page • Layout: Veit Arlt, Pascal Schmid Relecture • Korrekturlesen: Veit Arlt, Mohomodou Houssouba, Pascal Schmid, Natalie Tarr Site web • Webseite: www.sagw.ch/africa Abonnement List-serv • Abonnierung List-serv: veit.arlt@unibas.ch La newsletter de la SSEA est publiee avec le concours de l'Academie suisse des sciences humaines et sociales. Les articles et informations publies, taut comme les opinions qui y sont exprimees, sont saus l'entiere responsabilite de leurs auteurs, et ne sauraient etre consideres comme refletant l'opinion de la SSEA. Der Publikationsbeitrag der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissen-schaften sei dankend erwähnt. Die Verantwortung für die Inhalte der veröffentlichten Beiträge und Informationen liegt bei deren Autoren. Die darin enthaltenen Standpunkte decken sich nicht immer mit jenen der SGAS. Cover: A troop of Indians won the war against the Cowboys in Madagascar. This work by Nicholas Henry is among the award winning pictures of POPCAP '16, the piclet.org Prize for Contemporary African Photography. The pictures of the five winners will be on display in Basel from 3 to 17 Sep-tember 2016 in Basel in combination with a workshop on photographic practice in Area Studies (see page 21). Societe suisse d'etudes africaines 2 Newsletter 1 /2016 Schweizerische Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften Academie suisse des sciences humaines et sociales Accademia svizzera di scienze umane e sociali Academia svizra da scienzas umanas e socialas Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Afrikastudien TABLE DES MATll~RES • INHALTSVERZEICHNIS• TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL • EDITORIAL 4 RECHERCHE • FORSCHUNG • RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS • MITTEILUNGEN Living Rights in Translation. An lnterdisciplinary Approach of Working Chil- 30 dren's Rights Assemblee generale •Mitgliederversammlung • General Assembly 5 Making the City: Agency, Urbanity and Urbanisation in Ordinary Cities 33 Portail Cultures et Societes • Fachportal Kulturen und Gesellschaften 7 Karany et Malgaches : au-dela des propos essentialisants construits en miroir 34 Obituary Patrick Harries 8 A propos des mains negatives du Wadi $0ra 38 Photo Studios in Africa - Research in African Visual History and Practices 42 EVENEMENTS • VERANSTALTUNGEN • EVENTS JEUNES CHERCHEURS • NACHWUCHS • YOUNG SCHOLAR$ ANNONCES • ANKÜNDIGUNGEN • ANNOUNCEMENTS Les strategies d'adaptation et de competitivite du studio photo Focus Im- 44 L'Afrique emergente. Dynamiques politiques de la croissance et du devel- 9 ages a Yaounde, Cameroun, face aux defis actuels du marche de la photog-oppement (Geneve, 22.-23.9.2016) raphie en Afrique de l'Ouest Urban Africa - Urban Africans: New Encounters of the Rural and the Urban 12 Zeiten ändern sich - Studiofotografie in Kamerun 47 (ECAS 2017, Basel, 29.6.-1.7.2017) Swiss Researching Africa Days (Berne, 4.-5.11.2016) 13 PUBLICATIONS • PUBLIKATIONEN Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe (Zurich, 1.-3.12.2016) 18 Does Religion Make a Difference? Discourses and Activities of Religious 19 Malaika Wa Azania: Born Free (Elisa Fuchs) 50 Development NGOs (Basel, 9.-11.11.2016) Jürg von Ins: Papa Tabou (Sylvie Duthil) 52 Making a Living from Old Shoes. Tanzanian Street Vendors as Urban 20 Jennifer Hays: Owners of Learning 54 Experts (Zurich, 27 .5.-25.09.2016) Corinne Lüthy et al.: Kaboom! Afrikanische Comics im Fokus 55 Image Afrique '16 - Bilder von Afrika (Basel, 1.-17 .9.2016) 21 Caro van Leeuwen: Registratur PA.25, Hans und Trudi Jenny 55 RAPPORTS • BERICHTE • REPORTS RENCONTRES • BEGEGNUNGEN • ENCOUNTERS Quand les langues africaines changent de lieu (Bäle, 24.6.2016) 22 Morten Jerven, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) & Norwegian University 56 Re-lmagining African Cities: The Arts and Urban Politics (Basel, 11-12.3.2016) 27 of Life Sciences 3 Societe suisse d'etudes africaines Newsletter 1 /2016 Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Afrikastudien Report: Re-lmagining African Cities. The Arts and Urban Politics (Basel, 11-12.3.2016) • FIONA SIEGENTHALER, LAURA BETTSCHEN, ENRIKA CHARLES In recent years, African art scholarship has experienced remarkable changes interna-tionally. Two trends are particularly significant. Firstly, research is increasingly interested in contemporary urban art practices and their socio-political contexts. This results in interdisciplinary studies that include research questions and methods ranging from history, anthropology, sociology, urban geography and architecture to art theory. This recent development is reflected in the projected new interdisciplinary Master program on Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel where African arts, architecture and urban anthropology constitute a significant share of the courses. Secondly, scholars working in this field have increasingly sought exchange beyond their national or con-tinental research traditions and associations. To give an example, on the occasion of the last European Conference on African Studies held in Paris in June 2015, the AEGIS collaborative research group Visual and Expressive Cultures was established with an explicit aim to promote collaboration between specialists in African art within Europe, and between European and African institutions as weil as the long-standing US-based Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA). These new developments triggered the planning for a first workshop focusing on African cities as a place and subject of the visual and expressive arts - a topic that has been a research field at the Basel Institute of Social Anthropology for more than ten years. In collaboration with the Centre for African Studies, the projected Programme on Criti-cal Urbanisms (both at the University of Basel), and the AEGIS collaborative research group Visual and Expressive Cultures, the Institute for Social Anthropology organized the workshop Re-lmagining African Cities: The Arts and Urban Politics. The workshop brought together internationally established and junior experts in the field who pre-sented their current research on arts and urban politics in African cities. The idea was to go beyond the usual conference format and create a two-day intensive workshop with a generous amount of time dedicated to the discussion of the individual papers and the workshop theme in general. After an introduction to the workshop theme on Friday morning, Till Förster (University of Basel) introduced the keynote presentation by Dominique Malaquais (Institut des Mondes Africaines, Paris) who injected a sophisticated reflection on the meaning of failure in a collaborative art project that took place between a Congolese and a French artist. Time and Space in Ouestion: Reinventing Cities offered a range of entry points that would re-appear regularly in the course of the workshop. At the same time, this presentation was unique in outlining the field of arts, urbanity and politics by starting with failure - something art scholarship tends to exclude in its often affirmative ap-proach, although it is a crucial aspect of transnationally shaped urban artists' experi-ences like Mikilisme. Her presentation was followed by Heike Becker's (University of the Western Cape) discussion of Public Art Interventions in Cape Town that challenge hegemonic power relations in South Africa by relating recent events like the Marikana massacre and the Rhodes Must Fall movement to the right to the city, often with interventions typical of activist street art. Joanna Grabski (Denison University, USA) used the examples of the Dak'art Biennale and the urban politics of former president Abdoulaye Wade to dem-onstrate how Dakar emerges as an Art World City through the politicization of the city's and the nation's past, present and future. After a joint lunch, Amy Schwartzott (North Carolina A & T State University, USA) discussed artists in Maputo who use urban Detri-tus as Media and mode of disarmament in the aftermath of civil war. This was followed by lolanda Pensa (Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana SUPSI) and Marilyn Douala Bell (doual'Art, Cameroon) who presented a collaborative study on Pub-lic Art as a Driver of Urban Transformation in Douala, pointing to the importance of the Societe suisse d'etudes africaines 27 Newsletter 1 /2016 Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Afrikastudien The workshop Re-/magining African Cities: The Arts and Urban Po/itics offerred BA, MA and doctoral students, postdocs and professors an opportunity for exchange and discussion (image: Fiona Siegenthaler 2016). actual production process of art in public space for its local reception. In a presenta-tion involving photography and acoustic recordings of Lagos, Carol Magee (University of North Carolina) reflected on how art situates a city like Lagos beyond its physical position by establishing, reaffirming and reshaping it globally within transnational artistic and audience networks. The day was concluded by Till Förster's presentation on The Unbearable Lightness of African Cities, which offered a conceptual layout of existing and possible future approaches to the study of artistic practices in African cities and their imagination in scholarly thought. Saturday morning was dedicated to performative practices. In lnclusion/Exclusion: Mo-bilizing Urban Masquerades from the (Socio-Political) Margins of Freetown, Amanda Maples (University of California Santa Cruz) showed how Ode-Lay performance prac-tices emerged among urban youth and developed from a clandestine practice to a publicly recognized cultural emblem with particularly urban aesthetics and a socio-po-litical role. Similarly, in their presentation Ragtag Wars: Children's Fancy Dress Parades as a Carnivalesque Suspension of Adultism in the Historical City of Winneba, Ghana, De-Valera Botchway and Awo Amoa Sarpong (University of the Cape Coast, Ghana) showed how the adult monopoly of Fancy Dress spectacles is appropriated, reinter-preted and mobilized by children as a stage for urban self-expression. Malcolm Corrigall's (School of Oriental and African Studies, London) presentation Re-framing Johannesburg's Urban Politics through the Lens of the Chinese Camera Club of South Africa gave an insight into photo practices of the Club during apartheid and the role urban architecture and infrastructure played for both staging civic and cosmo-politan belonging and subverting segregation politics. In her presentation The Strug-gle for Audiences and Resources in the City, Fiona Siegenthaler (University of Basel) discussed strategies of artists in Uganda to address urban elites as potential patrons by tapping into their social spaces in Kampala, Uganda. Dominik Davies (University of Oxford, UK) presented his PhD project on Urban Africomix: Collaboration, Production, Resistance in which comics are understood as both a product of and a platform for critical socio-political reflection on urban life in Africa. Ayala Levin (Hebrew University in Jerusalem) in turn offered in Popular Art and the Semiotics of Citizenship an analysis of Julian Beinart's meticulous documentation and celebration of fagades of the stand-ardized government housing units that were decorated by their users in the Western Native Township of Johannesburg in the 1960s. The concluding discussion summarized topics that had re-emerged and proven impor-tant in the course of the workshop. Four main points came up repeatedly throughout Societe suisse d'etudes africaines 28 Newsletter 1 /2016 Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Afrikastudien the papers and the discussions. The first is the question of how artists tend to look at cities in Africa and how this can be made productive for urban theory. Another impor-tant point of reflection is the significance of audiences. How do different artistic prac-tices support the formation of audiences? How do artistic articulations create social space? And how accessible is the social space in which art audiences emerge? Third, we need to ask how the practice and theorisation of image and imagination relates to performance and representation respectively. Lastly, experience as an aesthetic and sensual formative process gained momentum. lf we experience something with our ears, does it actually change the way we see something? Do certain discursive and aesthetic practices change our perception of the urban? In summary, artistic practices intricately interweave with other discursive forces and so-cial practices in urban contexts. This in turn raises theoretical questions that find vary-ing answers in the empirical study of particular case studies. For instance, art seems to shape discursive formations as much as it is shaped by them, and therefore power politics always are at play, albeit in varying ways. Secondly, almost all presentations made clear that art does not only take place in African cities, but that it purposefully or unwittingly relates to them in aesthetic, political, symbolic and practice-relevant ways. Aesthetic and social practices thereby sometimes overlap while at times they clearly diverge, opposing art as a metaphoric practice to the everyday and thus modulating the latter. The keynote presentation and ensuing discussions also showed that while art is a place in which urban imaginations are expressed, it is also the place where the realization of urban imaginations can fail. The speakers and their audience - BA, MA and doctoral students, postdocs and pro-fessors - had an inspired exchange during and beyond the sessions. The workshop was conceived as an initiating event for further scholarly exchange and discussion about art and urban politics in African cities. The prospects with regard to future activi-ties are promising. A selection of the presented papers is being published, and future collaboration is envisaged in the framework of international conferences in the com-ing years. The Swiss-African Research Cooperation (SARECO), as a sponsor of our colleagues coming from Cameroon and Ghana, crucially helped kick-starting this ex-change, while the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft (FAG) generously contributed to the travel expenses of our overseas and European colleagues. Fiona Siegenthaler is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Univer-sity of Basel, Switzerland. With a background in art history (MA) and social anthropol-ogy (PhD) her interest lies in the intersection of social sciences and the humanities, and contemporary visual and performative arts in particular. Contact: fiona.siegenthaler@ unibas.ch. Laura Bettsehen studies for an MA in English and Anthropology at the University of Basel. She holds a BA in English Languages and Literatures and Social Anthropology from the University of Bern. Contact: laura.bettschen@stud.unibas.ch. Contact: laura. bettschen@stud. unibas. eh. Enrika Charles is just completing her MA in African Studies at the University of Basel. She holds a BA in the History of Art and an MA in the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas from the University of East Anglia. Contact: enrika.charles@stud.unibas.ch. Societe suisse d'etudes africaines 29 Newsletter 1 /2016 Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Afrikastudien 

Report: Re-imagining African cities: The arts and urban politics (Basel, 11.-12.03.2016)

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Report: Re-imagining African cities: The arts and urban politics (Basel, 11.-12.03.2016)

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