LUMIAR CITÉ

Manthia Diawara

WOLE SOYINKA E LÉOPOLD SENGHOR
- UM DIÁLOGO SOBRE A NEGRITUDE
26.09 - 08.11.2015

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Exhibition View

© Manthia Diawara

In co-production with Goethe-Institut Portugal and kʼa Yéléma Productions (Paris) and in partnership with AFRICA.CONT/Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lumiar Cité exhibition space presents the film “Wole Soyinka and Léopold Senghor – A Dialogue on Negritude” by Manthia Diawara.

Based on archive material, Manthia Diawara organizes an imagined dialogue between Léopold Senghor, one of the founders of the concept of Negritude, and Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. According to Manthia Diawara, “the film probes the current relevance of the concept of Negritude, against the views of its many critics, not only to the decolonization and independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s, but also to an understanding of the contemporary artistic and political scenes of nationalism, religious intolerance, multiculturalism, the exodus of Africans and other populations from the South, and xenophobic migration policies in the West.”

After its preview at Cinema Ideal, the film becomes the centrepiece of the exhibition opening at the Lumiar Cité exhibition space, turning the upper floor of the gallery into a temporary cinema, where the film is shown for six weeks in fixed daily sessions. The opening of the exhibition coincides with a conference with Manthia Diawara, Salah M. Hassan (Cornell University, USA) and Manuela Ribeiro Sanches (CEC / FLUL), moderated by José António Fernandes Dias (AFRICA.CONT) and organised in collaboration with AFRICA.CONT / CML and the Centro for Comparative Studies of the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon University.

The film is the first result of a series of conferences organised by Maumaus and the Goethe- Institut in partnership with AFRICA.CONT / CML, New York University (USA), the Akademie der Künste (Berlin, Germany) and the Institute for Comparative Modernities / Cornell University (Ithaca, USA), which have been held since 2011 in Lisbon, Dakar (“Modernities in the Making”) and Berlin (“Rethinking Cosmopolitanism”). (http://www.maumaus.org/Maumaus/Modernities_in_the_Making.html) (http://www.maumaus.org/Maumaus/Rethinking_Cosmopolitanism.html)

In 2016, the project will continue in Lisbon, with the launch of two publications that bring together essays of the participants at the conferences.

Manthia Diawara (Mali) lives and works in New York, where he is Director of the Institute of African American Affairs at New York University. As a filmmaker, he has directed “Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation” (2009), “Maison Tropicale” (Maumaus production, 2008), “Whoʼs Afraid of Ngugi?” (2006), “Bamako Sigi-kan” (2002), “Conakry Kas” (2003), “Diaspora Conversations: from Gorée to Dogon” (2000), “In Search of Africa” (1997), “Rouch in Reverse” (1995) and, together with Ngugi wa Thiongʼo, “Sembène: The Making of African Cinema” (1994), among others. His publications include “African Cinema - New Aesthetic Forms and Policies” (with Lydie Diakhate, 2011), “We Will not Budge: An African Exile in the World” (2003) “Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and spectatorship” (1993), “African Cinema: Politics and Culture” (1992) and “In Search of Africa” (1998), in addition to many essays produced about film and literature of the African diaspora.