Transnational Surrealism - Tropiques, Wifredo Lam and Aime Cesaire

Back in April 2011, Prof Dawn Ades (Oxford U/ Dept of History) 53 mins lecture on the 1941 collaboration between the Cesaires and the Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam, who had met in Martinique in April 1941.

 7:00 mins in:

Surrealism became a scapegoat for the primitivizing fantasies of the West. Muscera denounced, and I quote, a certain exoticism, typical of the astonished Western vision, particularly among the Surrealists, which extends to everything primitive. It aesthesizes mystery, magic, night, dark, the fantastic, etc. The assumption that surrealism is an aesthesizing, even anesthetizing, influence in the complex story of modern art outside the Western centers, ignores the political commitments of this movement whose anticolonial stance differentiates it from the earlier avant-garde which fed simply on the form and inventiveness of African art - Slade Lectures 7: Transnational Surrealism: Tropiques and the role of the little magazine | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures 

Also in April, France honoured Aimé Césaire at the Panthéon. See Jen Bouchard's piece on 'Representing Negritude in Surrealist Imagery and Text: The Césaires and Wifredo Lam.

Africa & Aid in 2060

Africa in 50 Years’ Time – The Road towards Inclusive Growth, prepared by the AfDB (2011). Page 23:

By 2060, aid will have decreased in importance as a driver of Africa’s development. There will be new players in the aid industry (international NGOs, private businesses, non-DAC donors) bringing new approaches. However, the total volume of aid to Africa is likely to diminish. Analysis of recent patters in aid flows - distribution between debt relief and new flows, volatility and predictability, and progress on donor alignment and harmonisation - suggests that, while there has been improvements in the efficiency of aid, there has been little increase in its volume or predictability. The promises made at the Gleneagles G8 summit to scale up aid may never materialise. Furthermore, it is argued that by 2060 memories of the colonial era in Europe will have passed. One implication of fading memories is that the constituency for aid to Africa in Europe is likely to have diminished.

In addition, absolute poverty in Africa and the relative income differential between Africa and Europe will have declined. Both of these will further weaken the case for aid. While it is possible that Europe will be replaced by other donors, this is unlikely. The USA has no history of substantial aid, and the emerging market economies - including China - may see little reason to provide Africa with significant aid. The prospects for improved aid effectiveness appear equally dim. Today, the global aid system is at a crossroads: 2010 was the target year for implementation of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, a commitment by the international aid community to reform the way it delivers aid to developing countries. Despite progress in some areas, and renewed pledges made in Accra in 2008, most of the targets set under the Declaration have not been met.

Imperialism and Modernity - The Colonial Film Online Catalogue

Above still from 1961 technicolor film - Three Roads to Tomorrow. It traces the journeys of 3 Nigerian students to the university of Ibadan. The film shows scenes of their homes in the old country and how a modern network of communications - all dependent on oil and petrol - has opened up what was not so long ago inaccessible territory.'

The catalogue is history documentary crack. Be warned. For example, check out this historic parade of the first Nigerian women police force at the Southern Police ground in Ikeja, Lagos, from 26 April 1956:

This website holds detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Over 150 films are available for viewing online. You can search or browse for films by country, date, topic, or keyword. Over 350 of the most important films in the catalogue are presented with extensive critical notes written by our academic research team. The Colonial Film project united universities (Birkbeck and University College London) and archives (British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum) to create a new catalogue of films relating to the British Empire. The ambition of this website is to allow both colonizers and colonized to understand better the truths of Empire.

FSFF points out two freely accessible book chapters by those involved in the project: Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film (BFI/Palgrave, 2011) and 32 sample pages; and Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (BFI/Palgrave, 2011) and 25 sample pages.

3bute.com

A social experiment @emmaiduma and I have been working on. Click on the dots for context. Share links/more context with us at 3bute.com, so we can add more dots for future readers. You can embed the pages anywhere. Let us know what you think: @threebute.

thanks.