Programme

Fri, 15 Jan.
15.00 Opening and Welcome
15.15 Opening Keynote Lecture: Frederick Cooper (New York University): Forgotten Futures: Federation, Confederation, and Community in French Africa at the Moment of Decolonization

16.30 Coffee/Tea Break

17.00 Panel 1: Celebrating Independence and Building the Nation

The first panel focuses on national celebrations that took place on the occasion of independence and the national days instituted and celebrated thereafter. It is concerned with official representations and the performative staging of the nation as well as the national symbols that served the nation-building process.

Keynote Lecture: Carola Lentz (Universitaet Mainz):
Independence Days: the politics and aesthetics of national commemoration in Africa

Contributors:
Marie-Christine Gabriel (Universitaet Mainz): Do national days create unity? Insights into the national day celebration in Burkina Faso
Harcourt Fuller (Georgia State University): ‘Work and Happiness’: Utopian Visions of a Modern Future in the Nationalist Symbols of Nkrumah’s Ghana
Konstanze N’guessan (Universitaet Mainz): Staging the nation: national day festivities in Côte d’Ivoire as scattered serial performances
Discussant: Odile Goerg (Université Paris Diderot)

Sat., 16 Jan
09.00 Panel 2: Representing Independence
The panel analyses images, popular reactions and emotions with regard to Independence and their representations in literature and personal memoirs. The panel also addresses the issue, raised by disillusioned writers, of the “confiscation” of national Independence by the ruling elites.

Contributors:
Katharina Fink (Universitaet Bayreuth): Radiant Independence - Mobilizing images of beauty in the context of Independence celebrations
Nadine Siegert (Universitaet Bayreuth): The Iconography of Militant Feminity in the context of African Independences

10.30 Panel 2 continued
Godwin Kornes (Universitaet Mainz): Performing the ‘dramatic narrative’: the commemorative calendar of national holidays in Namibia
Ute Fendler (Universitaet Bayreuth): Looking back forward: independence in Mozambican films of the 1980s (O tempo dos leopardos (1985) and O vento sopra de norte (1986))
Discussant for Panel 2: Drew Thompson (Bard College)

14.00 Panel 3: Dissenting Views of the Nation
This panel focuses on alternative voices from actors such as students or trade-unionists that dissented from the master narrative of the ruling elites in different post-colonial states. It explores how these groups contested the legitimacy of the elites and imagined different paths to Africa’s future.

Contributors:
Annalisa Urbano (Universitaet Bayreuth): Alternative ideas of future Somalia at the time of Independence
Melanie Torrent (Université Paris Diderot): International politics, network diplomacy and the failure of alternative ‘Reunifications’ in Cameroon
João Paulo Borges Coelho (Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo):
Mozambique: Independence and its margins
Discussant: Achim von Oppen (Universitaet Bayreuth)

16.30 Panel 4: Staging Independence Internationally
The panel examines how Independent Africa was staged and debated at international festivals. The panel examines images, politics, debates and the stakes of such international festivals against the background of national, African or foreign, political and cultural aspirations.

Contributors:
Constantin Katsakioris (Universitaet Bayreuth): The Cold War of Festivals: Africans in the Soviet Union, Soviets in Dakar
Éloi Ficquet (EHESS Paris): Pan-African Thought, Black Aesthetics, Real Politik and the Developmental State: The Roots of Senghor's Cultural Diplomacy and its Aftermath
Malika Rahal (Université Paris 7): Des Africains à Alger. Le Panaf de 1969: tiers-mondisme, révolution et panafricanisme
Discussant: [To be announced]

18.30 Concluding Discussion
Chair: Susanne Lachenicht (Universitaet Bayreuth)