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 GoetheInstitut
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.
Entrada actualizada el el 23 mar de 2016
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