Tsitsi Dangarembga

Intersecting hegemonic narratives in a globalised planet work to exclude African women’s presence from the domain of moving-image creation. This exclusion silences discourse like that of Ubuntu 2.0, thus thwarting the possible contribution of African women towards a more sustainable world, and to the global community in general. Moving-image screens then become a critical potential site for global decolonial interventions, which are particularly urgent in a situation where right-wing governments across the globe are increasingly dismantling diversity programmes in the moving-image sector in order to reinforce white male heteronormative domination of this most powerful medium. 

Tsitsi Dangarembga is a writer and filmmaker. Her work, which has been awarded international prizes such as PEN Printer Prize (2023) and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2021), captures the social heterogeneity of Africa from the feminist standpoint. In this session, that opens the 12th Iberian Congress of African Studies, she invites us to reflect on the ways in which African female creators are expanding decolonial imagination and how, in doing so, they can open up crucial spaces to contest globalised right-wing discourse and practice. Moderated by curator and reseracher Tania Adam.

This conversation takes places within the framework of Resident CCCB, an international residency program of the CCCB in collaboration with Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and supported by Fundació Privada MIR-PUIG.