Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

UF’s Center for African Studies is devoting its 17th Carter Conference to creating a critical public forum about new methods and politics in curation and text-image studies. Emphasizing juxtapositions, sequences, montage, friction, and postcolonial politics, it will problematize archival, field, and curatorial techniques in the global humanities. We aim to interrogate art, fables, lexicons, dreams, and disorder in everyday, artistic, research, and curatorial practices.

The conference celebrates the 2017 arrival of an extraordinary Vernacular Archive: one Congolese street artist’s personal collection of his comic art produced in Lingala, and generously acquired from Papa with special . Mfumu’eto produced comic zines for over 20 years in the megacity of Kinshasa; and the collection intertwines religious, popular, aesthetic, and political dimensions. The conference will enable a collaborative curatorial process as the very first solo exhibition of this eccentric artist, including one at the Harn Museum of Art, are conceptualized.

While over 15 Scholars, curators, & Artists from four continents will grapple with sequential art, creative writing, and vernacular archives from the Global South, the contemporary moment will be present: We live in a new era when African immigration is massive, global, and hotly contested in many quarters and milieus, and not only in America or Europe. Africans are on the move, with many not fugitives in flight. Challenging racialized friction and xenophobia as they migrate into and inhabit new worlds, some intervene and engage through art. We invite Gainesville’s publics to join in thinking about such text-image engagements and the contemporary.

See the full program, available at the Center for African Studies website.

For more information, please contact African Studies professors Nancy Rose Hunt (also History, nrhunt@ufl.edu) & Alioune Sow (also French; sow@ufl.edu) of African Studies
These events are sponsored by The Center for African Studies, George A. Smathers Libraries, Special & Area Studies Collections, the Dr. Madelyn M. Lockhart Library Endowment Fund in African Studies, Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, France Florida Research Institute; University of Florida International Center, Office of Research; College of the Arts; Office of the Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Center for European Studies, Department of History, Department of English, and Department of Anthropology. This event is also sponsored by public allies in the arts and humanities including the Sequential Artists Workshop, Gainesville, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, City of Gainesville’s Office of Parks, Recreation & Cultural Affairs.