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Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence Annual Conference 2022

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10 Augmented Island Topographies: Performing Alternative Imaginaries

Chair: Ute Fendler, Clarissa Vierke

Emphasizing the oceans, the Atlantic and the Indian ocean, to highlight transcontinental connected histories, including side-lined histories of slavery and colonialism, has entailed to put an emphasis on islands as multiple contact zones. However, as Gupta already highlighted more than ten years ago with regard to the Indian Ocean, the ways islands have been conceptualized, as e.g. places of exile and trauma, colonial outposts at the crossroads of several empires, lost or newly longed for paradises and utopian laboratory, have hardly been studied. We would like to shed light on these zones from a perspective of medialities, focusing on the connection between island-ocean and body-space to foster the embodiment of memory in the specific contexts of the islands.In this panel, we would like to take up the question about islands’ imagined topographies from a comparative angle which combines views on the Indian and the Atlantic Ocean and with a particular focus on embodied imaginaries. How does the body work as a medium? Rainy Demerson not only foregrounds the notion of “entanglement” suggested by A. Mbembe that would describe the “post-colony as an age that “encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, interstitias, and swings that overlay one another” (105, quoting Mbembe, 2001:14), but suggests to shift the focus towards “African somaesthetics” as the body in contemporary dance “exemplifies entanglement as a time/space to reconfigure complex social identities” (2021:106). A somaesthetic perspective can particularly play an important role in unearthing an alternative archive of the African diasporas often dispersed by force on the islands. How does the (dancing) body work as a medium through which new as well as suppressed sensations, fantasies and histories emerge which question dominant narratives of space and time? How does the dancing body relate to the islands’ natural and cultural topographies? This panel suggests to examine the medialities of time/space/body entanglement in the sense of Mbembe that manifest, express, take form via different som/aesthetic processes and productions. Lectures, artworks and performance will be combined.

While Marvin Rodriguez, a photographer from Cuba, will speak about his work as a photographer who accompanies and captures time/space snapshots of the relation between body and space in a context of post-colonial topographies in Cuba, Jean Anamah, a choreographer and dancer from Mauritius, links drawing and choreography to the question of entanglements and topographies proposing dance as a somaesthetic thinking on space/body in a post-colonial context. In conversation with scholars, who have advanced critical thinking on oceanic topographies, whom we would like to invite to comment on the artworks, we want to put the artists’ works into a larger perspective.

Participants in the panel: the conveners: Ute Fendler and Clarissa Vierke, Marvin Rodrigues, Jean-Renat Anamah, Smriti Srinivas (online).

The panel takes place at the Iwalewahaus as a performance followed by discussion

  • Marvin Rodrigues (Santiago de Cuba): exhibition of photographies and clips
  • Jean-Renat Anamah (Port-Louis, Mauritius) : dance performance

abstract of contributions


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