PRIMARY MATERIALS FOR October 22
RE-View the photograph: Seydou Keïta, Untitled (“Twin” portrait)
Research French Soudan/Mali, West Africa, l’Afrique occidentale française, and/or the colonial world in the 1950s; bring in 1 date/event to share
Read Bajorek, “At Least Two Histories of Liberation” (introduction) and “Ça bousculait” (Chapter 1) (from Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa)
Additional materials:
Diakhaté, Lydie, “Seydou Keïta: The Last Interview” (Diakhaté, a French scholar, writer, and filmmaker, published this interview that she did with Keïta in 2001 (the year he died) shortly after he died, and it became known as “the last interview” (optional additional material, NOT REQUIRED)
In addition to my research carried out with photographers and in photography archives in West Africa, I have also been involved in more activist collaborations, carried out with West African collection-keepers on site (that is, in collections located in West Africa), aiming to increase or enhance the available resources or to effect cultural policy changes in the region. Click on this link to go the page for one such project, the “3PA: West African Image Lab” workshop (and be sure to scroll through the photo album).
Bajorek, Jennifer, “Decolonizing the Archive: The View from West Africa” (essay written for a general public for the magazine Aperture about some practical and theoretical issues connected with the preservation of West African archives)