ICM FILM SCREENING AND CONVERSATION
A screening of the film Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023) followed by a conversation with filmmaker Manthia Diawara and Salah M. Hassan.
Thursday, October 4, 2024 | Cornell Cinema, 104 Willard Straight Hall | 4:45 p.m.—7:00 p.m.
Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023) by Manthia Diawara reflects on the life and work of the North American activist Angela Davis. Diawara’s camera follows Davis as she walks through a forest of giant sequoias, works in the garden or walks her dog, while reflecting on myriad issues, including ideas of freedom, resistance, rebellion, remaking our world, political blackness, radical black thought, music, (inter)nationalism, (Global South) feminism, abolition, the industrial prison complex, generational shifts, dialectics, contradiction, Africa, sexuality, desire and also friendship. The film is neither a biography nor a fictional narrative. Instead, Diawara’s footage, which is interspersed with relevant archival material, presents itself as a poetic compendium of Davis’s critical thinking and an inspiration for new imaginaries and new relations within an emergent new world.
BIOS
Manthia Diawara is Professor in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. A native of Mali, Professor Diawara received his education in France and later traveled to the United States for his university studies. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (Basic Civitas Books, 2003), Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (ed. Routledge, 1993), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1992), and In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 1998). He has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Professor Diawara also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in making the documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema, and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse.
Salah M. Hassan is the Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Africana Studies and Research Center, and Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, and Director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM), Cornell University. He is also the Founding Director, The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE. Hassan is an art historian, art critic and curator. He is an editor and founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University Press) and served as consulting editor for African Arts. He currently serves as member of the editorial advisory board of Atlantica and Journal of Curatorial Studies. He authored, edited and co-edited several books including Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination (2021); Ibrahim El Salahi’s Prison Notebook (English Edition) (2018); Ibrahim El Salahi’s Prison Notebook (Arabic Edition) (2018); How to Liberate Marx from His Eurocentrism: Notes on Black/African Marxism (2012); Darfur and the Crisis of Governance: A Critical Reader (2009), and Diaspora, Memory, Place (2008); Unpacking Europe(2001); Authentic/Ex-Centric (2001); Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists (1997); and Art and Islamic Literacy among the Hausa of Northern Nigeria (1992).
Hassan guest edited a special issue of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, entitled African Modernism (2010), and co-edited a special issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Issue 49, November, 2021 titled Egyptian Surrealists in Global Contexts. His book Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist, published in 2012 in conjunction with the retrospective of the Sudanese artist, Ibrahim El Salahi, which was exhibited at the Tate Modern in London (2013) after premiering in the Sharjah Art Museum (2013) in Sharjah, UAE. He has contributed essays to journals, anthologies and exhibition catalogues of contemporary art. He has curated and co-curated several international exhibitions such as Authentic/Ex-Centric (49th Venice Biennale, 2001); Unpacking Europe (Rotterdam, 2001-02); and 3x3: Three Artists/Three: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z(Dak'Art, 2004); The Khartoum School: The Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan 1945–Present (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2014); When Art Becomes Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists 1938-1965 ( Palace of Arts, Cairo, Egypt, 2016, and Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, South Korea, 2017); and Kamala Ibrahim Ishag: States of Oneness. (Serpentine Galleries, London 2022) (a collaboration between Sharjah Art Foundation and the Serpentine Galleries). He is the recipient of the College Art Association (CAA) 2021 Distinguished Scholar Award, and several grants and fellowships, such as the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, as well as major grants from the Sharjah Art Foundation, Ford, Rockefeller, Andy Warhol and Prince Claus Fund foundations.
