Important Dates

This year's annual New Year's Lecture is titled "Polyrhythmic gestures: Relational Perspectives on/from verbal, audio/visual and performative arts across the African continent". With this lecture, the Cluster’s spokesperson Prof. Dr. Ute Fendler will engage with the key term of relationality by combining concepts from Glissant’s poetics of relation as well as from Deleuze’s polyrhythm, Benítez Rojo’s concept of "chaos" or Brathwaite’s “tidalectics”. All of them suggest ways of approaching multiple and complex ways of being in the world. The lecture puts them in dialogue with concepts suggested by Senghor on „rhythm“ in the new readings by Bachir Diagne and also by Babacar M. Diop. Furthermore, Ute Fendler will draw on Vilem Flusser’s "gestures" as symbolic gestures to discuss some examples from verbal, visual and performative art works that allow us to navigate the entanglements between theory and practice, like e.g. poem/songs by Raharimanana (Madagascar), music/films by Moussa Sène Absa (Senegal), and dance/calligraphy.

Ute Fendler, Vice-Dean of Internationalisation and Public Engagement of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence. She holds the chair of Romance and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Bayreuth. She is a specialist in Francophone literatures and film in West Africa and the Indian Ocean and has published extensively on relational aspects in intermedial phenomenon, along with the organization and curation of dance and music performances linked to lectures.

• For the poster of the event in PDF format, please click here.