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The African Studies Workshop at Harvard continues this year with a new and exciting schedule of presenters. The presenters' papers explore Africa’s changing place in the world - and the new economies, legalities, socialities, and cultural forms that have arisen there. We shall also interrogate the claim that the African present is a foreshadowing of processes beginning to occur elsewhere across the globe; that, therefore, it is a productive source of theory and analysis about current conditions worldwide. At each workshop, a scholar presents a paper on one facet of the rapidly changing position of Africa in the global political economy and the impact of that change on global distributions of wealth, well-being, and power. Then a discussant provides commentary followed by an open discussion, in which students are given the floor first, followed by anyone else in attendance. Workshop presenters are scholars of high international repute as well as up and coming Africanist intellectuals.
Presenting: Making Victory Visible in Idi Amin's Uganda with Derek Peterson.
Abstract: Idi Amin’s government went to war against a great number of imaginary enemies. Being at war—being on campaign—helped make abstractly bureaucratic questions into thrilling struggles that demanded constancy and self-sacrifice. Uganda’s government made its victories visible on cinematic film. Over the past several years colleagues and I have been working to rehabilitate and digitize the film, photographic and radio assets of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation. This essay focuses on two cinema films that have recently been brought to light. In the first, the 1972 film 'Uganda’s Economic War', producers made Idi Amin’s inhumane campaign against Uganda’s Asian community appear revolutionary. The second film, made in 1975, depicted the humiliation of Lord Chandos Blair, a British military officer who had been sent to Uganda to plead for the life of a condemned British author. In cinema film Amin’s regime sought to place Uganda—a landlocked place, far from the theater of struggle—on the front lines in the global war against racism and imperialism. But the making of revolutionary movies was always fraught, for revolutionary cinema could also look ridiculous. This essay brings the power and the comedy of anti-colonial cinema to light.
Derek Peterson teaches African history at the University of Michigan. He’s the author of _Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival_ (2012), which won ’best book’ prizes from the American Historical Association and the African Studies Association. In 2017 Peterson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his work in salvaging endangered government archives in eastern Africa. He’s currently writing a book about Idi Amin’s Uganda.
We encourage all of our friends in the Cambridge area to join us in-person in the CAS Seminar Room. For those who would like to join online, please register for the Zoom link.