Conversation,

Manthia Diawara and Brent Edwards

November 13, 2021, 3.30pm
Géza, 306 Maujer

After the premiere screening of Towards the New Baroque of Voices, Manthia Diawara’s new film-essay, writer and essayist Brent H. Edwards join the filmmaker in a conversation about this archival documentary. They delve into the different ideas and contexts portrayed by the artists, activists, and philosophers in Diawara’s new film-essay, such as: Maryse Condé, Fatou Diome, Danny Glover, David Hammons, Sembène Ousmane, Jean Rouch, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Aminata Traoré. The discussion pivots on poet and writer Édouard Glissant’s notions of relational identity and mondialité, analyzing the affinities and discrepancies of the different speakers to propose new correspondences between Black intellectuals from Africa and from the African diaspora.

This talk is free, but space is limited.

About the speakers

Brent H. Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is also the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. His most recent books include his translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa(2017) and Edwards’s own Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017), which was awarded the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Music Criticism and the 2019 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Edwards was a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2020 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born in Mali’s capital Bamako in 1953, Manthia Diawara spent his youth in Guinea until 1964, when his family was expelled from the country. He went to study literature in France and subsequently moved to the United States, where he completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1985. Manthia Diawara is a distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Film at New York University. His essays on art, cinema and politics have appeared in Artforum, Libération, Los Angeles Times, Mediapart, and The New York Times. He is the author of two acclaimed memoirs: In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 2000) and We Won’t Budge: An African in the World (Basic Books, 2008). Diawara’s recent films include:  Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (2010), Negritude: A Dialogue between Soyinka and Senghor (2016), Opera of the World (2017), and Towards the New Baroque of Voices (2021).

Series

First Person, Third Person, Same Person

First Person, Third Person, Same Person focuses on the cinematic work of Grada Kilomba, Manthia Diawara, Dora García, Olivia Plender and Clara Ianni. The films’ stories have in common the assembling of news, testimonials, memories, documents, diaries, books whose multifaceted collage-like view of historical facts resonate with contemporary circumstances.

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Study Line

Hearing Voices

Our Study Lines are the connective tissue between our events, collaborations with artists, publications, and our conversations with our community. We pursue open-ended insights that challenge understandings of art, art-making, and art’s impact in the world at large. We currently focus on Hearing Voices and Love Expanded Love Extended.

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Related Exhibition/Screening

Part of First Person, Third Person, Same Person
November 20 – January 30, 2022