22 Modalities in Life Writing

Chair: Livio Sansone

Over the last years, Africa has been experiencing an (auto) biographical wave as a way to rewrite national histories. In many ways, this has to do with the celebration of liberation and independence and the need to interrogate and problematize the national views of history. The process of reconstruction of these biographies is a privileged location of mediation for conflicting or converging narratives, as well as collective agendas in the field of public history. To what extent can (auto) biographical reconstruction be useful as an interpretative tool to better understand national histories and public agendas? Our panel focuses on the multiple medialities associated with the (auto)biographical reconstruction of lived experiences, especially biographies and published memories, but also other modalities of cultural production and (mass) communication (such as music, cinema and literature, visual culture at large, the printed and increasingly the digital press, as well as professional scholarship).

The panel wants to scrutinize this process in a thus far new and innovate fashion, by eliciting the gender question, the uses of literacies, the visual culture of independence and the several entanglements that have been so far mostly silenced (between the local and the global, highbrow and popular culture, cosmopolitanism and the politics of ethnicity and race, the South-South connections). An examination of "life writing” reveals a tension between the archetypical biographies of "ordinary" heroes and the more traditional "life and times" approach to the personal stories of "great men" (usually) and now, increasingly, great women, as well as a tension between more and less conventional media – printed books versus, for instance, use of icons in popular culture (in film, music, art etc.) or digital media and publishing. Even though over the last two decades the biographies of personalities who fought for independence and built the new nations have received an increasing amount of attention from scholars in and outside the African continent (see, a. o., the very popular Ohio Short Histories of Africa Series) most of these studies have been written from a national and sometimes even nationalistic framework stressing local boundaries and circumscribed within the domain of history. This is even more evident when considering the reality of Portuguese speaking African countries, and more generally African countries known as countries of “second decolonization” (as, for instance, the Lusophone countries, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Eritrea). On the basis of relatively recent developments in the study of such biographies and trajectories, and of a mediality perspective, our aim is twofold: A. to highlight connected histories and to change the approach by focusing on three interdependent lines: heritage, aesthetics, gender and intersectionality. B. to reflect on the way writings about the liberation heroes are mediated and represented. What are the challenges of working with the different media through which liberation war heroes are represented? What are the sources and what questions do they (not) address?

Two presenters will elicit the biography of an individual (Mugabe by Msindo and Keniatta by Simatei), Fendler will focus on a specific media, cinema, while Gomes will focus on the gender issue at the interplay of life writing and the liberation struggle.

The panel introduces and explores the topic and the challenges of the international Symposium “Biographies & Liberation” scheduled for October 31-November 2, 2022 at the Eduardo Mondlane University

Format: The panel will last for 100 minutes and will be hosted at Rhodes University, where Msindo and Sansone will be present. The other contributors will participate online. Each contributor and the discussant will have 15 minutes, leaving 25 minutes for Q/A and discussion.

Presenters:Enocent Msindo (Rhodes University)Patricia Godinho Gomes (Federal University of Bahia)Peter Simatei (Moi University)Ute Fendler (University Bayreuth)

Discussant:Livio Sansone (Federal University of Bahia)