Franke Lectures in the Humanities

One of the important developments in contemporary African screen media is the significant increase in new forms of seriality, frequently produced and circulated outside publicly supported legacy television and radio. Although African indie-style feature films tend to attract more critical attention than any other kind of African screen media among publics outside the African continent, locally produced and or inspired serial shows generate more audience engagement among African and African diasporic audiences. The potential upsides and drawbacks of this massive growth in privately sponsored forms of seriality for the autonomy of contemporary African screen media will be discussed.

Moradewun Adejunmobi is a professor in the African American and African Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. She holds courtesy appointments in the French and Comparative Literature departments and is a former chair of the Performance Studies Graduate Group at UC Davis. She focuses on the interactions between digital, print, and live performances of both popular and “high” culture texts in selected countries of West Africa. Her current research examines the intersection between commerce, critical reception, and local autonomy in the Nigeran film/television industry, popularly known as Nollywood. Her publications on African literature and media have appeared in Popular Communication, Cultural Critique, Comparative Literature, Politique africaine, Black Camera, PMLA, and Cinema Journal among others. She is the author of two monographs: JJ Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar, and Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa. She is also a coeditor (with Carli Coetzee) of the Routledge Handbook of African Literature and was a guest editor for the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (2016) special issue on African science fiction.

Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski lived into his ninety-seventh year, embodying the complex contradictions of the entire twentieth century. Having been witness to both Russian Revolutions of 1917 as well as the fall of communism seventy-two years later, he lived a life darkened by events but illuminated by his unquenchable appetite for the visual world. This talk will consider Czapski as civilian and soldier, as prisoner-of-war in the Gulag, but will focus primarily on the life of a painter, richly illustrated with images he drew and painted to sustain himself over many decades.

Writer, translator, and painter Eric Karpeles observes and describes the relationship between the visual and the verbal. He is the author of Paintings in Proust and a trio of books inspired by Józef Czapski: Lost Time, a series of lectures; Almost Nothing, a critical biography; and An Apprenticeship of Looking, an artist’s monograph. His translations include Proust’s Overcoat from the Italian and Czapski’s Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Camp from the French. A fellow of the Czeslaw Milosz Institute at the Claremont Colleges, Karpeles has given the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin and spoken on Proust at Berkeley and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He studied at the Art Students League of New York as a boy and was awarded a residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris as a young man.