Taking up the ASA’s call for contributions that “enlarge our understanding of what counts as ‘African intellectual traditions,’ archives, and modes of knowledge production . . .”, this panel considers how we might examine works of comics and animation, both digital and hand-drawn, as modes of archiving the past and theorizing the future of African locations.
Comics and animation are critical sites to explore and retrieve African intellectual legacies given their ability to adapt orality, folktales, and myth into new and gripping visual stories. These texts are created in the style of historical fantasy, adventure, and superhero narratives that connect different temporalities. They also lend themselves to surrealism and spiritualism. At the same time, we observe a trend in the adaptation of comics into animation. The movement from the flat images to moving images on screen represents a crossing from one medium to the next. This trend calls for inquiry into what is specific to each medium. In addition to treating comics and animation as distinct texts, this panel seeks to occupy the gap between both types of texts to apprehend adaptation as a form of crossing.
The media houses and publishers that curate and disseminate these works might further be seen as producing archives, both physical and digital. What conceptions of “Africa,” and specifically African futures and pasts, are produced by archives housed within publishing and animation companies? For example, Kugali Media, based in London and Lagos, publishes digital and print anthologies of works associated with diverse locations including Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Senegal. Other examples include New African Books, the South African publisher of the Kwezi series, and Etan Comics, which publishes in both English and Amharic. Existing in both print and digital spaces, access to these works can be limited by the fates of the companies that house them. Websites can be taken down, or artists can decide to post their work somewhere else. We want to attend to the precarious nature of such locations, considering why some forms of creation and curation remain while others do not, questions raised in Karin Barber’s A History of African Popular Culture (2018) that continue to be pertinent.
This panel seeks contributions that examine comics or animation from any African region.
Please send 200-word abstracts to mrofheart@ggc.edu and oshindoro@wisc.edu by March 15. Please include the title of your abstract, your institutional affiliation, and a brief bio.
