“Framing Biopolitics: Jo Ramaka's Cinema of Power”

Monday, February 27, 2012
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
10th floor

Free and open to the public.

Contact
African Studies Center
(310) 825-3686
africa@international.ucla.edu

Preoccupation with power, the structural capability to exercise control and dispense violence across the social realm, is a defining feature of the work of Senegalese filmmaker, poet, and playwright, Joseph Gaï Ramaka. This lecture focuses on an important aspect of this work, namely, the challenges that the social poses… Show more to a poetic imagination, and how, in institutional terms, those challenges are intimately connected to the idea of censorship, both as the disciplinary response of the sovereign to art and as the effect of a process for which no one can be held accountable.

Looking at some of Ramaka’s films, especially Ainsi soit-Il (So Be It, 1997), in relation to biopolitical practices in West Africa, the lecture explores the social as the ground of the collusion of authoritarianism and neoliberal globalization, and censorship as their mutual, reactionary instrument in relation to art.

Lecture by Akin Adesokan, Indiana University.

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