Yeah. Mm, yeah. Mhm. Good morning
. Thank you so much for coming today to the
first event of our Women and Gender and International Development
Discussion series for this semester. I'm Brianna after I'm
one of the Graduate Assistance for the Women and Gender
Development Program, along with Isabella Sereno and our undergraduate
assistant, Rian and Hausner. Um, we'll be
passing around the clipboards today. That sign in is
very important if you want to be added to the
list serve. And it also gives us an idea
of who is attending these seminars from the university.
Today, we will be hearing from Dr Ali,
not. Dr Nap is an anthropologist, writer and
media maker whose work arcs through an early involvement with
the Bay Area creative community through her current engaged ethnographic
projects with media practitioners in the Global South, particularly
with young people and women. These span both academic
and public projects, including award winning digital documentary work
, a book on hip hop in Mississippi and contributions
to discourses on cultural pedagogy and research methods. Hi
. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
I see some friends in the audience. Some of
my students from last semester who I'm very pleased to
see some of my colleagues. Um, so thank
you for coming. I never know what kind of
audience I'm going to get the kind of work I
do, because officially, an interdisciplinary and meaning that
I use methods from anthropology, theoretical perspectives from communication
studies and media media studies. And I even draw
from my background in folklore, my own musical practice
and filmmaking in my work. Um, and of
course, Islamic studies is a huge part of what
I do as well. So it looks like I've
got a really great crowd of people I know from
all different corners of the university, which makes me
really happy. I hope that I'll be able to
speak to all of you today. And if there
are questions that I can answer to bring this work
closer to your field or your interests, let me
know, because we'll have plenty of time for questions
after my talk, which has lots of media and
pictures and bells and whistles and fun things to look
at. Um, so you won't just be getting
my voice today. In fact, you'll be hearing
the voices of some of the women I worked with
during my 2.5 years of melon, a CLS fieldwork
in Dakar, Senegal, which is the capital of
Senegal. A beautiful, brilliant, messy, chaotic
, awesome, emergent, extremely creative urban center on
the west coast of Africa. And its placement along
that coast has a lot to do with the ways
in which Senegal has always been a cosmopolitan society.
And it speaks to the broader African cosmopolitanism that you'll
see underlining a lot of the creativity that I'm highlighting
in my talk today. What brought me there,
um, was the question of how African women use
their voices to activate change in the world around them
. More specifically, how African Senegalese women who've been
steeped in age old traditions of eloquent speech, traditions
of eloquence, particularly women's ritual traditions of eloquence,
how contemporary young women and girls in Senegal are using
these traditions to transform not only the city that surrounds
them in their neighborhoods not only national discourses that have
heavy political weight but also the broader world. What
are they putting out there from these little, dusty
neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city that can in
many ways transform the world and part of my research
was to pay very close attention, repeated times at
repeated events and pay very close attention to the movement
of materials at those events that involves Nice um,
that involves, uh, looking at the ways in
which people are taking recordings of events that are going
on around them. It involves ways that people are
trading recordings, trading those recordings over tea in the
afternoon, paying attention to money as it gets exchanged
and spend a different retailers. Um, during a
woman's ritual event, um, and other kinds of
materiality. And one of the materiality that was most
important to me was digital material. It ease.
I really wanted to pay attention to how the voices
of Senegalese women intersect with amplify and even animate meaning
. They get inside and push out digital technologies in
ways that we may not have thought about before.
The overall objective is to recognize and resource those uses
uses of digital media to say, Wait a minute
, Yes, maybe these global youth are not designing
websites, but in so many other ways, they
are making the important stuff that makes the digital world
go around. Um, I am hoping to this
didn't quite work out this semester, but I'm hoping
to in subsequent semesters teaches amazing course. I was
able to offer, um with the help of Virginia
Tech called Digital Africa Digital Blackness. And it's looking
at topics including digital economic justice, black digital innovation
, digital futures, African women, online, black
arts and cultures Online. All of these things intersect
in the question of digital Africa. What do we
mean by Africa? Contemporary Africa today, right?
How do we imagine it in conversation with things like
the Twitter revolution? How do we imagine it in
conversation with things like global NGOs and develop? Um
, so I encourage you to keep an eye out
. Um, and I also teach other classes on
digital underground emerging digital movements, aesthetics and digital culture
and other kinds of media Women in media. Um
, so I want to start off, um,
by thinking about how the ethnic traditions, local values
, aesthetic practices and rituals economy intersect with the possibility
of digital futures. Right? So there are a
lot of languages by which we imagine what digital globalization
might look like. Rarely do those overarching, um
, sort of looking for sort of mainstream ways of
talking about digital futures take into account ethnicity or difference
or religion or specificity or belief, right? Although
their work is often overlooked in conventional conversations about digital
digital invention, African women engage digital technologies, from
the hip hop recording studio to religious media to pop
videos and perhaps most importantly, social media in ways
that contribute to their global social empowerment. So I
will detail some of those today, Um, but
what I want to start with are a couple of
contemporary representations of Africans that we might find online today
in the Web. Two point. Oh, I'm
sure most of you are familiar with that term,
this sort of new version of the Internet that is
driven by images, right, often moving images.
It's driven by recordings, media and lifelike representations of
humans. And we saw just as the Web two
point Oh, it's really taking hold. What's fascinating
is that visual representations of Africa spiked at this time
. All of a sudden we were seeing things like
Kony 2012, right? This is 2012. So
this is once Web two point oh really took hold
and YouTube is really, really taking hold as the
primary and entertainment and educational. Medium right. 22,012
. How many of you have heard about 22,012?
Okay, It was a non profit, um,
initiative on the part of some young American people to
help depose an African warlord, as they put it
, uh, Joseph Kony from heading up sort of
non governmental troops in Uganda region. Um, but
what was interesting about it was the ways ultimately,
for those of you who don't know, lots of
wonderful people got involved in the campaign and got really
wrapped up in the idea that we could do something
by lending our attention and our funds and our activist
instincts to this cause. But what was ultimately disappointing
about it was that there were lots of media made
and those media were heart wrenching, but nothing actually
changed. And a lot of those funds were not
spent in many ways that would initiate any kind of
change. Right, So this is But this is
happening. It's activated by and enabled by this web
2.0. Why is it okay in here? A
couple of other examples, tinder. Yes, tinder
, I have no idea that I'm sure some of
our undergraduates have seen it. Um, there is
. I actually had an undergraduate do a great project
called humanitarians of tinder. Have you heard of this
? There is a group of people called the humanitarians
of tinder. For those of you who don't know
, it's a dating application where you swipe according to
how attractive with the person in the photo is,
um, where there are groups of people who actually
trade and sort of advertise themselves as potential dates right
, by taking pictures of themselves with people who are
visually other. And this represents their humanitarianism, we
don't actually know. Here's an example of 26.
Um, this is we don't actually know what Robbie
was doing in this place or whether he belonged there
, how long he was. Therefore, whether he's
a humanitarian or not, this could very well be
in the US who knows right what the context of
this photo is. But in this quick flash of
an image, we are judging the probability that Robby
has some sort of school related or humanitarian related project
in a place that is foreign to American XIII somewhere
in Africa, right? Really problematic again, the
richness of African life is collapsed into this quick,
digestible symbol for something something that doesn't really seem to
result in any resources for the people of the photo
. Right? And then we have the vuvuzelas really
wonderful, um, World Cup imagery. Nothing wrong
with the vuvuzela, right? I mean, we
all we all like. But the problem is that
sometimes what all we get to see our representations of
African exuberance, where African pathos, pathos, being
suffering, sort of suffering. That is part of
one's Constitution, Right? So we're seeing one or
the other. But rarely are we seeing the richness
and the complexity of African lives. And then we
have Tom's shoes. I know we have Tom's shoes
in the room today. No offense to anyone who
has Toms shoes. They're not doing anything evil whatsoever
. But I do think it's interesting that the Toms
campaign really came to rise with the rise of Web
two point out the notion of young African people in
African youth getting very colorful, very beautiful, very
nice shoes, um, to make a very quick
image that we, when we consume that we have
the idea that whoever is taking the picture or whoever
the product represents is a good person who's doing humanitarian
work again. It doesn't tell us much about the
story of what Tom's do on the ground, quite
literally on the ground, I think for a lot
of Africans to receive the shoes, they didn't quite
work for a couple of different reasons for economic reasons
and for environmental reasons. Um, but the notion
that that is that represents what the lives of these
youths are like. They probably needed something. We
offered them shoes. They're now happy, right?
Done and done. And I want to take a
look at these are small smaller than I expected them
to be, um, and a little bit triggering
. But some photos of the African other right that
comes from traditional visual representations of African others, particularly
African women, that are very concerning to me,
as an anthropologist who comes from a background that trades
in this. So we've got a picture of a
woman in the Congo, right by a Belgian colonizer
, right in this sort of sexy pose, knowing
of the great immense, I mean heartbreaking violence that
was occurring during this time and and afterwards, before
we have a picture of a woman and her child
in a German ZEW human zoo. Um, these
persisted up until the 19 eighties. You see the
fence behind the people in the bowler hats kind of
hanging on the fence and watching these are set up
until that time. But we can also think about
all kinds of practices of displaying the other that persists
today in ways that may not involve live action human
humans in a cage, but do involve that Gays
right, that was engaged. And then we've got
, um, Saartjie Baartman. Um, the Venus
Hottentot is called the Venus Hottentot, a song woman
who was taken from her home and her family,
um in southeastern Africa and paraded around the world as
this example of the feminine African other. Um,
if you're interested in those discourses, look around,
Go ahead. And Google the Venus Hottentot. There's
been a lot of really interesting logging. A lot
of interesting discourse is happening around her recently, um
, another picture from an anthropological study in Polynesia.
And I did this just to think about this isn't
just happening in Africa. This is happening worldwide to
people in the region. I call the Global south
. The global south, which can include the American
South, are places in the northern part of the
U. S. Where Southern people have lived or
places in the northern US that have economies that resonate
with the South. But the global South is any
economy, any culture that has been deeply marked by
, uh uh, Colonial. Okay, so and
this can happen in all kinds. And then here's
another song. Skull, that was kind of put
forward is different. But of course, establishing whose
skull is the normal school and whose skull is the
weird skull is very political. Um, so now
what do we mean by Africa? And what do
we mean by blackness, right? What can it
be now in Web two point? Oh, we
are seeing other possibilities emerge for representation. They all
can be problematic. They can all be problematic.
But I see in each of these the possibility of
amplifying something else, something more exciting and something more
empowering, um, to Africans here. Patrice Lumumba
. Excuse me? Lumumba. Um, an image
from African independence, right? From 1960. Very
political image. We do see a lot of imagery
from the pan African movement as sort of a positive
representation of African nous, and this is wonderful and
important. The politics are wonderful and important. They
may not bear upon our contemporary situation the way we
like them to. So I ask questions about what
kind of nostalgia is attached to the imagery of black
leaders, African leaders at the time of the pan
African movement, Right? What kinds of wonderful things
can they represent? What kind of problematic, particularly
gender problematic, scan they right on the idea of
contemporary art? Openings are displays involving Picasso and primitivism
. Write a fashion and primitivism. On one hand
, we're celebrating this idea of the African aesthetics and
the immense discourses and knowledge is and diagnoses as we
stay kind of knowledge that are often marginalized that go
into African aesthetic practices. On one hand, we
revere them, and we draw from them. On
the other hand, we cast them as something magical
from the past, instead of thinking of them as
emergent and in conversation with contemporary circumstances. Right,
so possibilities for change and also problematic. And that's
what cultural critics do. We get excited about the
possibilities we try to amp those up and kind of
tamp down the problematic. And then, of course
, we have an image of a young African woman
speaking out on a microphone. This is always very
exciting to see, and we're seeing more of this
lately, which I find very encouraging. Um,
but again, representations of African youth politics are very
exciting and are a really important place to think about
intervention and empowerment. At the same time, politics
don't always happen in front of a microphone. They
don't always happen at a political rally. They don't
always happen in public spaces, right? They often
happen in private spaces, ritual spaces, domestic spaces
. Right, so interpersonal communication. So we want
to represent those kinds of politics as well. Okay
, so the digital divide, How many of you
have heard about the digital divide? A couple of
us. Great. I see enthusiastic hands in the
air, which is always good. Um, this
is the global Internet infrastructure. This is just one
of a gazillion ways to show that in terms of
digital infrastructure, Africa is criminally undeveloped. Underdeveloped,
right? So where do we even begin to talk
about Digital Africa when africanus and blackness right when africanus
has so much purchase when people are on Web two
point and they're flipping through images and all of a
sudden they see this image of the African other.
It's very exciting. They want to click on it
. They want to find out more. It makes
them feel like there's something. There's some sort of
global exchange occurring right at the same time. That's
not answered with resources being directed towards African self representation
. So how do we change that, right?
So we want to get away from those narratives that
are either about African pathos. Well, there's something
about Africa that just can't develop. What is the
problem? Its wars. It's this. It's that
it's disorganization. It's a different way of life,
right? We know those to be stereotypes. So
knowing that those are wrong, right and also getting
away from those stereotypes of exuberance, right, there's
just there's not enough planning. There's not enough infrastructure
. There's not enough thinking out what needs to happen
. There's just this attempt to dive into the contemporary
economy that's wrongheaded. Neither of these are going to
help, so the digital divide means that Internet networks
are not in place. So much of Africa.
We see images of Africa. I thought these were
very interesting as a digital dumping ground, and I
saw this in Senegal all of the time. It
was amazing. I took photos of it. Just
keyboards everywhere from the late nineties. Just computer screens
everywhere that were completely on the beach, stacks of
computer screens holding the land back from erosion. Oh
, yes, it was bizarre, so I'd have
my drum lessons out on the beach and the wrestlers
would be out there practicing. People be lifting weights
and running in the morning, and I'll be playing
drums sitting on a mound of computers, right?
Completely defunct. How did they get there? These
are interesting questions, right? When we give money
to organizations to send technologies to Africa, what are
they getting right? Often these technologies are part of
a good deed that an NGO is doing as part
of their mission. But they're coming into a place
where they have no infrastructure. The stuff is already
outdated. Nobody's trained on how to use them,
and it's essentially just garbage without the space staff and
stuff. To paraphrase Paul Farmer, the medical anthropologist
, space staff and stuff to actually hang on to
those technologies and make something of them. So it's
really probably this is everywhere. And then we have
these images that we see all of the time.
We see them sometimes in very strong ways, like
we do here and here. Sometimes we see them
in lesser ways, the idea that echoes that anthropological
imagery that echoes the shoes right. But there is
some. There are some groups of people who have
been untouched by globalization, which is absolutely untrue.
Such things the anthropologist, and that when they encounter
a computer for the first time, they will be
amazed everything's going to change. There will be some
sort of a revolution, putting them in contrast to
those contemporary digital technologies. Okay, it's just a
picture, and it looks really cool, and it
will probably bring some extra funds to your organization,
depending on whose money are trying to court, Um
, but at the same time, I argue that
those representations are very damaging, more damaging than if
you had just not helped out at all, even
even more damaging than that, and creating negative representations
of African possibilities and African futures in re um,
repeating stereotypes that have been put forward about African life
for a very long time. So this is why
ethnographic work is important. There are other kinds of
media practices that are unseen, unacknowledged and un resourced
in the hidden practices and hidden practitioners that are the
basis of my ethnographic work with women, women,
media producers and urban Senegal on finding all kinds of
possibilities. Right? This is why f o.
So now I want to talk about a few different
modes by which African women are using technologies to perform
different modes of self representation. If one of the
major problems here is self representation and how can we
empower alternative modes of representation? Right. I think
there are tons of possibilities. And I'm really excited
about some of those possibilities here at Virginia Tech.
In fact, um, one of my wonderful students
, um, is here from last semester. Lena
, who made a film about the jobs here at
Virginia Tech. That is like one of the most
amazing things I've ever seen. 10 minute short film
, um, that practices those modes of self representation
for women in hijab at Virginia Tech, talking about
who they are, and one of the most brilliant
things about Lena, and it's on YouTube. But
one of the most brilliant things about Lena's short film
is that it's not a string of women just talk
in hijab, talking about my job, saying Hey
, hey, jobs aren't like this. Hey,
jobs aren't like that. It substitutes right that responsiveness
for And I see other women who are in the
film and, um, that responsible for women representing
themselves. Hey, I go to the gym or
I don't go to the gym. Hey, I
really like Drake. This is what my life is
really like. I'm actually really happy person. This
is my story, and what I chose that self
representation is incredibly powerful in the digital age, right
? Because Web two point oh gives the opportunity for
stereotypes to become re entrenched otherwise, and I argue
that those resources are available to us those resources of
self presentation. There just needs to be some good
folks out there making those resources available, and it
requires space staff and stuff. So when it comes
to media dance writing, invoice, women's media practices
may look different in the global context. It might
not look like somebody walking out and saying, Okay
, here's the story of Joseph Kony and why he
is a problem, right? We don't actually have
an African introducing that problem. We don't actually have
an African woman hanging on her experience with that.
At the same time, the media practices are there
, There there, they just don't necessarily look the
same. So I want to highlight a couple of
different African media practices, African women's media practices that
are very important to the lives of women and girls
and young people inside at all. Today, um
, the first is a Johnny a form of I
don't know what I don't know where I got this
image from, but I'm not sure if it's just
me now that I look at it, um,
join me a form of religious writing in Senegal,
which is a 96% Sufi society. Incredible, right
? So not only is it 96% Islamic, nearly
all Muslims in Senegal who are of the ethnic groups
who are considered cynical, these our Sufi, which
is very interesting and so there's a lot of devotional
poetry and a lot of devotional voicing that's very beautiful
. That goes back 5, 600 years in the
region. So there are devotional poems written to a
lot, Um, and written to religious leaders in
the role of language or in the Polish language,
which has been translated into an Arabic Ortho graffiti.
So it's Arabic lettering. But it's the wolf language
, which is very different from Arabic and then written
down on these capers and distribute it that way.
Really fascinating. This is a motive, media,
because these were copied by scribes and there were many
copies of them all put out today. If you
go to religious service, everybody gets a copy of
one of these, Um, and the copies themselves
can carry a bark A or a baraka blessing with
them, and they have the special poetry and everyone
chance them together. So when it comes to media
, all right, Marshal Nicollin says a medium is
any technology by which a body affects other bodies,
which a body extends itself to affect other bodies.
How does the body of the writer right of the
Ajami extend him or herself? And there were many
women writing these actually to Allah, right? How
does the body of the writer extend herself to groups
of people who are then going to recite her work
. Isn't this a little bit like social media?
Tiny bit. Just a tiny bit. I know
it's a little bit of a reach, but social
A T and using media like the voice and like
writing and like dance to communicate with other groups of
people and to have them pass that along. That's
as old as humanity is the fact that my proceeded
, Um so the anthropologist again, here's another kind
of. Here's another medium that we often overlook and
one that women often not always but often have special
purchase on which is dance the medium of dance.
What does dance do so we can watch a dance
and say, What does it say? That's all
fine and good. Very fascinating. We can interpret
it and put something together and sort of make a
text out of it, or we can just watch
dance and see what it does. How does it
affect the bodies of the onlookers and my work in
Senegal? I won't have a chance to show this
today, but I often show this often we think
about drummers and musicians as playing the music and women
dancers as responding in Senegal. I discovered in my
field work, but it's often the women dancing,
and the drummers have to play whatever they're dancing,
and that's not acknowledged. So it's the women at
the space of generation, right? We call that
mentality following an aren't the idea that creativity comes from
places we don't see. We can't see private space
right and then becomes public. So in Senegal they
have a circle of dancers at a ritual called the
Sabah, which has both sort of secular ritual,
I should say pre Islamic ritual and Islamic ritual valances
. You'll hear a little bit more about that in
the next 10 or 15. Finish my talk,
but it is a circle of women. The only
men aloud are the drummers, and one by one
, women stand in the middle of the circle.
This is a picture from my fieldwork, actually.
So this is my neighborhood about three o'clock in the
morning. Yes, it's really wonderful. Very loud
and fantastic, and this is every night in Senegal
, unless it's Ramadan every night, everything middle of
the night. There are no such thing as noise
permits, Um, and the woman in the center
dances and what she does when she dances. She
wasn't just go in there just for the heck of
it. She goes in there to gain prestige,
to show that she knows the hottest song that's come
out the hottest video Diggins that goes along with it
. Because that's how pop music works in Senegal.
She can not only do this dance, and she
can not only show her own ancestral dance that shows
her neighborhood and shows what ethnic group her family is
from. Right shows all of these things that dance
last between 30 seconds and two minutes, and it's
always improvisatory, Um, and then she also shows
that she can come up with a box or a
particular rhythm or contortion or movement all her own right
in that moment of the dance is called to say
, when you get very excited and heated. So
you had, um, death of tongue. Your
body's hot, and that's when you really create right
? And then thirdly, there is a medium that
I'm particularly interested in those traditions of elements I was
talking about before the voice. So what you're about
to see here is a piece of my footage from
my field work. I'm actually working on a film
about this right now with Saudia Rice, who is
my graduate assistant. She's fabulous, and we are
putting some of this footage together to make a film
. But, um, this is a woman who
had a baby a week before. This is the
naming ceremony for the baby. The baby got this
wonderful, very well liked Islamic name, Bomba,
and the baby is being sung to by Agrio,
a woman brio, a woman grow, meaning a
praise singer who's hired for the occasion. And the
louder and the more eloquent she gets, the more
money they stuff in her hand. In that act
of singing this woman, right, the celebrant celebrate
. And in the act of singing the woman who
had the baby, she is actually lending prestige to
the woman and that prestige becomes like money in the
bank in Senegal. Knowing that one of the best
degrees in the neighborhood has come and said these kinds
of things to you and use this particular rhythm in
this particular song is a big deal. Having it
on film is even better, so, of course
, everybody got copies of this footage. But I
want you to hear how the system now this is
just like the sub are. It's done in a
circle, but only men there. There are a
couple of men. They're hanging out, there's a
cameraman and there's a drummer, but largely it's for
women. Some Children, um, and I will
tell you what the Rio is saying as we listen
. It's also called Tatsu, an early form of
wrapping That's a different project. Just saying something along
the lines of You were so great. Your mother
is so great. She moved money to this person
in my family, and when we were in need
, your grandfather gave a cow to this marriage boot
because he was so generous. Everyone in the neighborhood
knows that you are good people, right? And
as she does this, she is getting money in
her hand. Your aunt and uncle are great people
. That's money, and people in the background are
yelling. Yes, it's true. It's true.
All these wonderful things you're saying are true. To
be publicly sung by agree like that lends you huge
prestige in your family, especially when it's done that
well and that impassioned. And this is part of
a ceremony that lasted three days. And the women
themselves are of the grill cast, which is 10%
of the Senegalese population. So all of their friends
are also agree, Eos And needless to say,
I have tons of really great footage. It was
really fun. Um, but thinking about this as
a medium if, as we see in this footage
, the voice and what it carries, yes,
the words, but even more so, the impassioned
tone of the voice is like money in the hand
. Then what are some of the other media practices
we can imagine? Right coming out of this model
for communication, right? Without needing any sort of
organized corporation or business? Um, there have been
some movements lately kind of through the slide. And
but I did wanna bring up There have been some
movements lately about recognizing women as media producers, as
content providers as media creators. Um, what's strange
is that it's 2016, and this is only starting
to take hold. We're only starting to have discourses
about women as media producers, because although we are
on the ground making stuff all of the time and
mediating all of the time and organizing and communicating and
coming up with new dances and new slang and new
modes of communication and new modes of fashion. Rarely
do we make it to the level of production where
we are recognized and credited as producers. And that's
often because we're missing one fundamental step, which is
getting our hands on the stuff even more so than
the training getting our hands on this stuff. All
we gotta do is get our hands on it and
be empowered to use it. So what do we
mean by African futures? The notion of an African
future is highly contested and full of possibility. Um
, and many discourses were generated out of, um
, the political media around the Twitter revolution in the
Middle East and North Africa. How many of you
remember that? Okay, since 10 4011, particularly
when African policy, North African polities and Middle Eastern
policies leadership is changing. Um, the official reports
at the time were saying that this is because youth
in these places Egypt, Morocco, etcetera, Syria
have gotten their hands on social media Twitter, Facebook
. And that's how these revolutions were, um enabled
and that is true. These did become media for
political change. But at the same time they were
heavily mediated media, meaning that they didn't always do
exactly what the user's intended them to do and that
there were other people enforces involved, who are also
influencing what those media were doing. And so it
becomes very complicated to try to figure out exactly what
kinds of African futures the youth involved in that movement
we're imagining versus what? Let's say, other global
forces. Imagine those African futures looking like it's really
complicated, but I just wanted to give you a
sense of this is not a place yet. Um
, but this is a Chinese architect. Drew this
vision of one of the outer neighbourhoods of Johannesburg,
which is, you know, is very poor and
underdeveloped. But this is a site of major development
right now, um, so imagining an African future
that has this influence of the Picasso sort of primitive
ist influence. Um, on one hand, it's
very beautiful, but on the other hand, doesn't
represent what Africans need. I don't know enough about
the context of this particular project, or you see
a lot of architecture that looks like this being built
by the Chinese, particularly North Koreans, Um,
throughout Africa. Um, and in Senegal, then
we have something like this. The idea of a
afrofuturism. There is a growing afrofuturism movement that is
being fueled by the imaginations of young black people in
the US, globally throughout the African diaspora and particularly
young people in urban Africa where they are imagining an
alternative future. And there are all kinds of I
wish I had all day just to hang out with
, like, a whole class to teach on this
. So come take a look. Um, but
there are all kinds of great Afro futurist films being
produced right now by young African, particularly out of
Nollywood in Nigeria that are just phenomenal. So afrofuturism
an alternative African future or something a little bit more
tangible. Young African people, young African women and
girls and humans with ideas that can represent themselves.
I love photography, where Africans are actually looking back
at the photographer, right instead of being snapped from
afar, where you can see that they are having
a chance to compose themselves and represent themselves in the
photos. Okay, so a couple of places where
knowing that I've got about five minutes left. I'll
just run you through. Of course, I never
have enough time to do all this stuff. I'll
just run, run you through a couple of possibilities
for development in the future. Um, this is
a picture of a Sufi pricing or a woman may
soften Madiba. This particular strain of Sufism has a
lot of women praise singers and send it all,
and you'll see that she's holding in her hand and
also in the poster for this talk, which is
wonderful. Thank you for that, um, that
she's actually holding 10, sometimes 20 different little phones
, microphones, my field recorder, all kinds of
stuff in her hands at once. What she's doing
is when she sings praises to Allah and it really
is transcendent and beautiful. I may have. Well
, this is what it sounds like. Her voice
is being broadcast by loudspeakers throughout the city. So
when I lived in Senegal, she's actually since passed
away, and she was a dear friend. So
it's sad. What What's reassuring to me is that
I can hear her voice anytime because when I was
in Senegal for those 2.5 years she was really coming
into her own as a praise singer. I could
either hear her having a ceremony and go find it
, which happened regularly. She did it five nights
a week, or I could I knew that I
would be able to hear a recording of these because
people were recording her on their cell phones, then
swapping their SIM cards out of their cell phones over
tea and trading the MP three s or the small
um, audio recordings that way, which became decayed
over time sometimes. So sometimes the recordings you would
get her fifth generation or 10th generation. But when
she sings, her voice goes out in a million
directions. Right to think. Not only is it
being broadcast live throughout the city, it's also being
filmed. A lot of these things have surfaced on
YouTube in the last two years since her death.
Um, and a lot of these recordings are still
being dug up and put online and made available,
and people are linking to them from their Facebook pages
. So thinking about feminine creativity in Senegal, particularly
that inspired by Allah right ritual creativity as something that
has material weight and extends beyond right? The boundaries
that we think of traditional vocal performance or communication as
extending Can we develop a social media model based on
that kind of thinking? Wouldn't that be cool?
Right. I'm gonna skip over some of this.
Here is from one of my films about kind of
the same thing. And I focused on sound equipment
and sonic practices, and it shows the rich Sufi
ritual circle and the importance of women. There we
go. Right. Okay. So I kind of
skipped through these. And then, of course,
a lot of these Sufi women pray. Singers become
the basis for the Senegalese cassette industry, which is
now transformed fully into an empty three industry. Pretty
much when I was there a few years ago,
all the taxi drivers have gotten new taxes from Iran
. It was some sort of deal, and they
all had cassette players. And so there was a
huge booming market for the praise singers on cassette.
Just get through that. Secondly, we have the
recording studio. So, uh, this is a
rapper I worked with. Her name is Tusa,
and she I first saw her performing a rap at
a high school talent show in 2000 and nine.
When I first came to Senegal and thought she was
so phenomenal, she held her own. There were
20 boys rapping in her, and she was so
phenomenal. Then I asked her if I could work
with her, and I spent the next 2.5 years
kind of following her around. And then she's been
out to the US twice for too long trips and
stayed with me. She was able to visit my
students at William and Mary. She's really phenomenal.
And through all of this work, she's managed to
start the first all women's recording studio run by women
and for women just by getting her hands on a
laptop. We had a dance party raise some money
, bought her laptop, got her lots of tutorials
in the French language he could use to learn to
use the equipment and all the peripherals and equipment she
needed. And she started. The studio has been
phenomenally popular. Here's her in a circle of rappers
from the middle of my research, and here's her
. Now, with her new mixtape coming out from
her new studio. I think you'll like it thing
so we can just watch the whole thing, But
But when Tusa stayed with me and when I continue
to work with her, I find she's completely constantly
plugged into social media. I would say 90% of
her work as an artist is about promotion on social
media. So she's got a meme maker, right
? Somebody who makes sort of online digital, um
, flyers for her. She gets a new one
every day, right? So she's got a meme
maker. She's got videos that she's constantly putting up
online. Basically, all she did when she was
in, um, Colonial Williamsburg with me has asked
me to make films for her and upload them 2
to 3. Did tons of that selfies, etcetera
. Her online promotion is the core of getting the
prestige that she needs. Not only does that draw
from the contemporary model of hip hop promotion, it
also draws from the immensely important model of prestige and
praise singing that the Senegalese already had in place.
Another really good one. And then I'll split to
the end of the top is digital film. I'm
working on an article about this really slowly, very
slowly right now, so one day you'll be able
to read about this, but I do have a
document open, um, about SELFIES and Senegalese culture
. Senegalese women have often been touted as the most
fashionable women in the world. I don't know if
that's fair, but, boy, they are really
good at dressing, um, and clothing and cloth
wealth. Well, that's represented by how much clothing
you have are the foundation of the cynically feminine political
economy. Beth and Bugenhagen has a great book out
about that. If you want to talk about,
um, when as students photography was introduced in Senegal
, women sort of hijacked it from being this sort
of anthropological thing that was supposed to show village life
and made it into self representations of themselves in their
best clothes. And so today, when you go
to someone's house to visit them to do is sexy
, which means spending the afternoon and having tea with
them. The first thing they do is take their
album that's like this big that are stacks of photos
that they get at each of these sabar events.
At each of the Sufi praise ritual events. At
all of these events, there's a photographer who runs
around takes a picture of every single person there runs
back to the studio prints all of the pictures that
are usually very high quality and nice. And they
usually use film. I don't know how they do
it so quickly runs back to the event and charges
about a dollar, which is a lot of money
, um, charges about a dollar for a nice
print of it. So if you're feeling especially cute
, you're gonna pay for it. You can choose
to pay for it or not. If you don't
like it, If they don't do a good job
, don't pay for it. The atomic It's really
fascinating. So I'd love to just have piles of
the unknown bought ones, but, um, yeah
, so then you've got a chronicle of your life
. So both you've both got the clock that you
own in your closet and you've got a chronicle of
all the outfits that you've worn. Prestige, prestige
. So the selfie is a way of showing one's
access to the finest things, meaning that someone has
bought this for you. You have gotten the best
coach here. You've got an excellent Taylor. You
have a great sense of style. You represent your
chosen meaning your traditional culture that you have respect for
your elders and that you chosen flowing. That's both
fashionable in two Europeans and that engages your own ethnic
culture. And so these selfies have been the thing
instead of for a very long time. So you
still see it today? Extremely popular. How does
that work on? Oh, boy, this did
not work out. Well, let me see if
I can blow it up for you. Um,
here's an example of Tusa doing the same thing.
How do people use Facebook and send it all?
Today? They put up a picture of themselves and
they tag right. Instead of going out into the
public square, the young people put up a photo
of themselves and they tag like 51 50 to 80
people in it and it appears on everybody's Facebook wall
. So anybody who's my Facebook friend, Of course
, I don't Facebook friend. My students would know
, but knows that I'm constantly like taking down.
I get 5 10 pictures tagged because I have a
lot of Facebook friends a day because you put you
tag the people who have the most friends on your
list. Of course, it's really broadcast your image
to everyone practices of self representation, right? And
then there's film I'm gonna skip right through this.
Films about the poor women in Senegal have become maids
to middle class urban Senegalese, and their plights is
not only the object of the subject of books being
written by Senegalese women authors, which is a huge
thing in Senegal. In fact, there are tons
and tons of very successful women novelists throughout Africa,
um, who have grown up in circumstances where there
are very good at storytelling, right and to have
managed to write novels. They're also becoming filmmakers,
and when they couldn't afford film technologies, they are
getting access to digital technologies. And so we're seeing
this explosion of young women filmmakers right now. So
the film becomes, um, a an opportunity for
young women to influence national discourses on how poor young
women are treated when they're brought from the countryside to
work for these families. And there have been new
laws enacted because of the music video. I was
just starting to show you from sister Angina, who's
one of the artists I was able to work with
And then there's the Sufi Web, where and YouTube
, Um, where the Web Web design itself is
being used in what I call off label ways.
You're making these Web designs that seem very kind of
crazy to people who are used to Western Web design
. But you use the website in such a way
that it's infused with media that can give you the
sensation of being in a Sufi ritual. Why is
that important for Sufis, who use the voice and
sensation and embodiment and dance to have communion with Allah
? Right, you have a path to Allah that
can be your voice. That can be your devotion
. That can be your plan for life. It
can also be the act of being in Allah,
right in a worshipful space for the Senegalese and diaspora
who are unable to go to these weekly nightly frequent
Sufi rituals. They can experience some dimension of this
by keeping up to date with their diet website,
so their group at home in Senegal, right?
It's constantly updating their page with the latest chance that
they've done. I've done a little bit of ethnographic
work on this with Senegalese women, Senegalese migrants in
the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia and North Carolina as
well, where they actually broadcast their home diet as
chance on their big TVs. And they borrow big
sound system and fill the Section eight housing with the
sound of these beautiful Sufi chants for the entire evening
. And it's phenomenal. So taking a space that
is so foreign and so not yours and transforming it
through the medium of sound right, it's really remarkable
. How does all of this add up in closing
? We think about prestige, political communication, aesthetic
storytelling, religious experience and economic, business and educational
networks. Is all potential sites for African digital creativity
, particularly that which can empower African women? Let's
do it. Let's do it. I can think
of all kinds of different ways that some of the
people in this room who recognize and some of the
people on campus whose names are beginning to recognize can
contribute to this. We change discourses and we change
the representations, and we talk about how these are
possible ways to activate this. And lastly, where
can we resources kind of empowerment keep a current research
program and ethnographic partnerships in place? In order for
me to know the things I told you about today
. I needed to do extended engaged in depth collaborative
research for six years in the wool off language where
I have my body in domestic spaces and in private
spaces in ritual spaces. So I even knew what
in the heck is going on in the first place
? But it's a whole lot more detailed than those
Web to buy. No representations we talked about before
equipment and programs exclusively for women and girls. So
it's great to do youth programs, and it's really
important. There is a special intervention to be made
for African women and girls, right? There must
be a safe sovereign space for them to do their
work where it is just women and girls because of
the politics of that education and using software, troubleshooting
hardware, programming and coding, space staff and stuff
, as Paul Farmer says, infrastructure for equipment sharing
and upkeep. That is one of the reasons that
these wonderful African cities become dumping grounds for unusable digital
stuff and finally, cultural, responsive networking and prompt
and programming. What if Facebook were transposed into a
Senegalese sensitive media network? That was all about tagging
your friends. And that could work in a way
that, actually, um empowers that and doesn't get
people caught and reprimanded and cut off from their Facebook
access. So let's think about that. Let's keep
talking about that. I'm around. I'm happy to
get coffee with you anytime and thank you. Right
. Okay. Mhm.