Glimmering utopias: 50 years of African film

The history of African film began in the 1960s with the independence of the colonies. Despite all kinds of political and economic difficulties, numerous films have been made since then, featuring wide-ranging processes of consolidation, differentiation and transformation which were characteristic of post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. However, these feature films should not merely be viewed as back references to specifically African problems. The glimmering fictions are imagination spaces. They preserve ideas about how the post-colonial circumstances should be approached. Seen from this perspective, the history of African film may be studied as a history of African utopias. Die Geschichte des…

Exploring Sensory Memories

Lee Strasberg and other acting teachers developed sense memory exercises that teach an artistic re-enactment method to explore the interplay of sensory perception and emotional memory.
 Apparently, secondary sensory stimuli often trigger flashbacks for traumatised people. From my experience as an actress, I learned that the sense memory method is a controlled triggering of emotional memory that functions in the same way. Many anthropologists consider sensory experiences and emotions a relevant topic, but how can we teach students to deal with these phenomena?
 After looking at sense memory exercises against the backdrop of neuroscientific findings, I will consider why and how we s…

Kondo, Dorinne. Worldmaking: race, performance, and the work of creativity. xiv, 359 pp., illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2018. £21.99 (paper)

Mapping out an anthropology of defrauding and faking