Cecile Emeke's Strolling a Digital Space of Afroeuropean Community
- April 2025 um 18:15-19:45 Uhr
WOC Research Center lecture series #2 #
This talk examines Black fugitivity as a practice of creating a digital space through Cecile Emeke, documentary-style web series Strolling (2014–2015). While Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology (2019) argues that the “postracial packaging” of technology masks persistent “racial logics”, Emeke asserts that she was inspired by James Baldwin’s “The Devil Finds Work”, to create a space for diasporic inter-communal dialogue (Okeowo 2016) online. I draw on the notion of Tina Campt’s conception of Black fugitivity (2004), as a means of creating the space for engaging the micro-struggles of racialized subjects. I firstly examine how the selected episodes from three contexts —notably, Britain (Strolling, 2014), France (Flâner, 2015), and the Netherlands (Wandelen, 2015)— reproduce embodied spatial negotiations that speak to the specificities of the black everyday in these national contexts. I go on to consider how the online comments to the web series, produces a dialogic “fugitive” space for Black self/collective reflexivity, that transcends national and borders through shared solidarities based on everyday lived experience. This allows me to consider how the paradoxical public/intimate, virtual/ lived elements of the Strolling web series audio-visual and dialogic elements can be read as a “safe space” of Afro-diasporic community.
Polo B. Moji (PhD Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III) is an Associate Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. She is a literary scholar whose research interests range from intersectional feminisms, comparative anglophone / francophone African and Afrodiasporic literatures, as well as critical black geographies. Her co-edited special journal issues include: “Ghostly Border Crossings*: Europe in African and Afrodiasporic Narratives*” (Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, 2019) and “The Cinematic City: Desire, Form and the African Urban " (Journal of African Cinemas, 2019). She is also the co-editor of Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City (Routledge, 2023) and the forthcoming edited volume *Conversational Bridges: Building African Feminisms (*HSRC Press,2025). Moji’s monograph Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022) won the 2024 African Literature Association First Book Award.
To participate online, please write an email to: afroeuropecyberspace@uni-bremen.de