Ayo Coly

African Boats and Scenes of Mourning in the Postcolonial Black Atlantic

In this presentation, I query the trope of the African migrant boat in recent African cinemas. The trope has emerged in response to the phenomenon of the so-called “death-boats” that attempt to smuggle African migrants and refugees across the Atlantic to Europe. My presentation reads the trope in conversation with scholarship on the Black Atlantic and on modalities of mourning in the wake of the Middle Passage. 

Ayo A. Coly holds the Class of 1925 Chair at Dartmouth College where she is a Professor of Comparative Literature and African and African American Studies.

Film: The Pirogue, Moussa Toure, Artmattan Productions, Senegal 2013, 87 min.

Part of the series: Black Atlantic Cinema

“Seeing oneself through the eyes … of a nation that looked back in contempt”: This is how W.E.B. DuBois described the “double consciousness” which marks the life of subordinated groups in oppressive societies. Moving beyond the frame of the nation state and national cinemas, the concept of “Black Atlantic Cinema” considers a practice of film which spans the space of three continents and a history of several centuries. In the Lecture & Film series “Black Atlantic Cinema” scholars, curators and artists approach the ways in which filmmakers deal with the challenge of double consciousness across the Black Atlantic, from Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean to (post)colonial Europe.

The series is curated by Didi Cheeka, Daniel Fairfax and Vinzenz Hediger with support from Feven Haile

Organized by the Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft of Goethe Universtät and DFF in cooperation with ConTrust – Trust and Conflict in Political Life and supported by the Hessische Film- und Medienakademie, Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Afrika Studien der Goethe Universität and Georg Foster Forum of Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz.

All talks in English. All events at Kino im Deutschen Filmmuseum, Schaumainkai 41, 60596 Frankfurt am Main