'Images of Africa' Conference

A conference titled “Images and Empires: Visual Representations in and of Africa” will take place Feb. 14-16 in the Luce Hall auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Ave. The event is free and open to the public.

Twenty scholars from Africa, North America and Europe will join Yale faculty members from the departments of African and African-American studies, anthropology, history, political science and the Yale University Art Gallery for the three-day meeting. Participants will discuss visual representation as a mode of communication both within Africa and between Africa and the world at large.

Conference organizers Deborah Kaspin, assistant professor of anthropology; and Paul Landau, assistant professor of history, note: “Representations convey messages between subalterns and superiors, the colonized and the settler, and the bureaucrat and the citizen. Here images are to be treated not as emblems of art-historical aesthetic frameworks, although they are that too, nor as propaganda for controlling the colonized, though they were that too, but as shared and contested modes of communication and domination.”

The conference features five panels:

Friday, Feb. 14: 9:30 a.m., “Representation and Possession in Central Africa”; 2:30 p.m., “Official and Unofficial Imaging in Southern Africa.”

Saturday, Feb. 15: 9:30 a.m., “Intercalating Colonial and Colonized in West Africa”; 2:30 p.m., “Icons and Prisms in South Africa.

Sunday, Feb. 16: 9:30 a.m., “Public Culture and Compromised Spectacles.”

“Images and Empires” is sponsored by the Council on African Studies and the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, with support from the Kemp Fund.