Workshop at the University of Sussex, April 16 2012
Flyers
African Popular Cultures - Main flyer [PDF 1.68MB] African Popular Cultures - TRIOMF film flyer [PDF 219.63KB]
Programme
2 – 6pm. Fulton 103.
With Dr Chris Warnes (Cambridge), and Assistant Professor Jesse Weaver Shipley (Haverford, US).
With drinks to follow in Arts B274.
All welcome.
PLUS an exclusive session for Sussex students and staff in the morning,
with internationally acclaimed Director Michael Raeburn.
11am-1pm. Bramber House 255.
‘Talking about TRIOMF’ (Winner Best South African Film at the Durban International Film Festival 2008).
(For those who can make it, there will be a full advance screening of TRIOMF on Friday April 13, in Fulton 214 at 3pm.)
2-6pm. Fulton 103.
Chris Warnes, Faculty of English, St John’s College, Cambridge:
‘Reading the South African Romance: Allegories of Empowerment’.
Jesse Weaver Shipley, anthropologist, filmmaker, and artist, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and coordinator of Africana Studies at Haverford College:
‘Race, Travel, and the Aesthetics of Exaggeration in African Popular Culture’.
WITH screening and Q&A of Shipley’s new film, a ficto-documentary entitled Is It Sweet: Tales of an African Superstar in New York (2012).
Organised by Professor Steph Newell and Katie Reid.
Further information and links below.
All are welcome. Both ‘Talking about TRIOMF’ and ‘African Popular Cultures’ are free: there is no need to register but please email in advance, indicating which sessions you would like to attend, to k.e.reid@sussex.ac.uk.
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Exclusive session for Sussex members.
Bramber House 255.
11am-1pm. ‘Talking about TRIOMF’.
Michael Raeburn, internationally acclaimed African Director, script writer and novelist, will be speaking about his award winning film TRIOMF (2008). Set in March 1994 South Africa, on the eve of the country's first democratic election, TRIOMF details the routines of the dysfunctional, poor white Afrikaner family, the Benades, and their lives in the Johannesburg suburb Triomf (Afrikaans for ‘triumph’), a white working class neighbourhood erected over the rubble of the black township Sophiatown, from which hundreds of black families were forcibly removed by apartheid social engineers in the fifties. In this hilariously horrendous tragi-comedy, as a new world is born, two members of the wild, crazy and destitute family are destined to die.
Written by Raeburn, with Malcolm Kohll, TRIOMF is adapted from the extraordinary, landmark novel by Marlene van Niekerk, originally published in Afrikaans in 1994 (winner of the M-Net Prize, CNA Prize, and the Noma Award for African Literature; English translation Leon de Kock).
Citation for TRIOMF - Winner of Best South African Film at the Durban International Film Festival 2008: << by immersing itself into the often sordid world where poverty, and the educational gaps that attend it, meet an arrogant sense of entitlement, Triomf exposes a series of universal truths. The dirty secrets of capitalism, of racism, of manipulative politics, of the human heart are mirrored in the secrets of one family, whose disastrous disintegration reminds us that a nation’s history is written by individuals>> Junaid Ahmed.
http://www.triomf-movie.com/
Fulton 103.
2-3pm: Reading the South African Romance: Allegories of Empowerment
Chris Warnes’s recent work focuses on texts from South African publishers and imprints responding to the increasing need in South Africa for ‘purely commercial women’s fiction’: Sapphire Press – a romance imprint of the NB group’s Kwela Books, with the slogan WHERE TRUE LOVE REIGNS, associated with the True Love Book Club – whose romances capture South African stories of women who are ‘financially sussed, ready for love, and not prepared to compromise!’; and Nollybooks, established by publisher Moky Makura, and based on the popularity of the Nollywood film industry: in the form of ‘bookazines,’ with word puzzles and a glossary, Makura describes a Nollybook as “a little bit of Sex in the City meets Mills and Boon". Like Sapphire’s romances, Nollybooks notably feature South African characters and situations, written by South Africans, targeted at young, black women, with the explicit aim of re-popularising reading.
CNN interview with Makura Nollybooks Sapphire Press
3-4pm: Race, Travel, and the Aesthetics of Exaggeration in African Popular Culture
Screening: Is It Sweet: Tales of an African Superstar in New York (2012)
Jesse Weaver Shipley’s presentations examine issues of African diasporic movements in contemporary eras, transnationalism, and new technologies. ‘Race, Travel, and the Aesthetics of Exaggeration’, explores fictional stories of international travel from a variety of popular media in Ghana as well as real tales of artists who travel, or aspire to travel, illustrating how the sagas of leaving home and of returning are central to understandings of place and belonging in contemporary urban Africa.
4.30-6pm: Screening and Q&A. Shipley’s feature film Is it Sweet follows Reggie Rockstone Ossei, a celebrity in Ghana and considered the founder of hiplife music, in his move to the Bronx, NY, as he meets new fans, collaborators, and old friends, exploring what it is like to be Ghanaian in urban America. Reggie’s humor and irreverence shape this film’s intimate, and sometimes dystopic, story of an African superstar in New York.
Trailer for Shipley’s previous feature Living the Hiplife, starring Reggie Rockstone Ossei.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV3a4FKyTFk
DRINKS RECEPTION IN ARTS B274 FROM 6pm.
Please RSVP to k.e.reid@sussex.ac.uk.
Abstracts and film treatment – African Popular Cultures
2-3pm: ‘Reading the South African Romance: Allegories of Empowerment’, Dr Chris Warnes (Cambridge).
In 2010 two new publishing enterprises appeared in South Africa: Sapphire Press and Nollybooks. Between them, in the course of their first two years, these publishers brought out 27 romance novels, all aimed explicitly at a black, female readership, and written to a tightly prescriptive set of guidelines. They tell the story of feisty, attractive, young, black women, often from poor backgrounds, working their way up the ladder of professional success and falling in love with handsome, successful, older men, often their boss. The progress of the romance is bound up with the overcoming of work-related obstacles, and the ending of each novel harmonises the romantic and professional triumph of the heroine. These novels represent an entirely new departure in South African writing: the arrival in prose form of the mass-produced fantasy for black women. In this paper I show how these romances take as their defining quality the concept of empowerment, relating their narratives of individual empowerment, bound up as they are with conspicuous forms of consumption, to the various government policies that fall under the rubric of Black Economic Empowerment. These novels decode for their readers very real employment-related anxieties, projecting fantasies of ideal employers and harmonious workplaces, and imagining positive outcomes for current attempts to address black women's ongoing marginalisation. But they also betray a deep unease with the pace and nature of change in South Africa, with Black Economic Empowerment, and with the ANC's quixotic attempts to reconcile a redistribution of wealth and opportunity with an embrace of neoliberal economic policy. Ultimately, I show how these mass-produced fantasies are caught on the horns of a contradiction similar to that identified in a different context by Janice Radway: 'despite the utopian force of the romance's projection, that projection actually leaves unchallenged the very system of social relations whose faults and imperfections gave rise to the romance and which the romance is trying to perfect.' (Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Verso, 1987) p. 215).
3-4pm: ‘Race, Travel, and the Aesthetics of Exaggeration in African Popular Culture’, Assistant Professor Jesse Weaver Shipley (Haverford)
Stories of international travel permeate the Ghanaian popular imagination and dominate the lives of many Accra denizens who hustle and dedicate all their resources to leaving the country. Stories of traveling abroad are common in many West African popular genres from oral storytelling traditions to video-film scripts to hip-hop lyrics. Some tell of fabulous wealth acquired in Europe and America. Others describe horrific tragedy and failed hopes. Most relate overseas experiences to the transformations and stabilities of life at home. In contrast, scholarship on contemporary African diasporas usually examines African mobility from the perspective of where people land, what work they do, how they are treated, and how long they stay. This paper explores fictional stories of international travel from a variety of popular media in Ghana as well as real tales of artists who travel, or aspire to travel. I argue that foreign travel is a form of symbolic exchange that produces potential wealth and value, but involves great risk of failure and loss. Tropes of travel are forms of extra-ordinary value transformation that permeate ordinary, daily life, linking rural, urban, and international spaces, as well as various political, economic, popular and religious realms. I show how the sagas of leaving home and of returning are central to understandings of place and belonging in contemporary urban Africa.
4-4.30pm: Tea break
4.30-6pm: Film screening and Q&A with Jesse Weaver Shipley: Is It Sweet: Tales of an African Superstar in New York (2012)
Is it Sweet follows Reggie Rockstone Ossei, a celebrity in Ghana, and considered the founder of hiplife music – combining rap with local highlife popular music – in his move to the Bronx, NY. Rockstone draws huge crowds at concerts and attracts attention everywhere he goes in Ghana but is not well known outside of his country. He inspired a young generation of musicians with hit songs of 10 years ago though has not made much of a musical impact recently. When he performs for Ghanaians living in the United States, he is not sure what to expect. Is it Sweet follows his journey as he meets new fans, collaborators, and old friends. He explores what it is like to be Ghanaian in urban America. Music enacts a form of community as he works with young struggling musicians and shoots music videos. His former manager and producer have both relocated to the United States after living in Ghana. Their divergent paths guide disagreements about politics, race, and money. Reggie’s humor and irreverence shape this film’s intimate, and sometimes dystopic, story of an African superstar in New York.
DRINKS in ARTS B274 FROM 6pm.
RSVP: k.e.reid@sussex.ac.uk.
With thanks –
Professor Steph Newell and Katie Reid.