[Kunst Afrikas] Research colloquium for the Arts of Africa | JACKQUELINE FROST: ‘Cuban Nuclearity in Wifredo Lam and Ghérasim Luca's Apostrophe'Apocalypse’ (6.6.2023, 18:15-19:45, online via Webex)

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Dear students, colleagues and friends of the Colloquium for the Arts of Africa,

The next session of our colloquium for the Arts of Africa will take place online on Tuesday, June 6, 2023 from 18:15-19:45. We look forward to welcome there the art historian Jackqueline Frost. We cordially invite you and interested guests to the lecture. Everybody is welcome!

JACKQUELINE FROST
‘Cuban Nuclearity in Wifredo Lam and Ghérasim Luca's Apostrophe'Apocalypse’

June 6, 2023 at 18.15
Online via Webex: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=maffcb7144105d2dfdeb571bfcfff013c (Meeting-Kennnummer: 2734 842 7671, Über Videosystem beitreten: Wählen Sie 27348427671@fu-berlin.webex.com<mailto:27348427671@fu-berlin.webex.com>; Über Telefon beitreten: +49-619-6781-9736 Germany Toll, +49-89-95467578 Germany Toll 2, Zugriffscode: 2734 842 7671)

Between 1964 and 1967, Afro-Cuban painter, Wifredo Lam and Franco-Romanian poet, Ghérasim Luca, combined engraved images and experimental text into a single collaborative work entitled, Apostroph’Apocalypse. Considered one of the great masterpieces of the artist’s book genre, the political origins of the project in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 have never been deeply explored in scholarship. This talk will investigate Lam and Luca’s collaboration as an intervention into the cultural politics of nuclear imperialism. To do so, I will engage Third-Worldist perspectives on nuclear armament as well as other anti-nuclear culture of the period, namely Chris Marker’s 1962 short film, La Jetée. Such a move will allow me to reconstruct the often-obscured historical links between global anti-imperialism and the European-made cultural artifacts that sought to imagine the end of the world by nuclear means. By reframing works like Apostroph’Apocalypse and La Jetée as “anti-imperialist objects of the ended Earth,” I will suggest these works reveal connections between post-war decolonization, Third-World socialist revolution and the Cold War nuclear regimes created to thwart their emancipatory potential.

Dr. Jackqueline Frost is an intellectual historian of transatlantic culture and politics.
She is a member of the Aimé Césaire research group at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (CNRS-ENS) and teaches international politics at the University of London Institute in Paris. Her work focuses on leftwing intellectuals, writers and artists moving between the Caribbean and Europe from the rise of fascism to the end of formal decolonization.

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About the Colloquium for the Arts of Africa:
The colloquium invites researchers, artists, curators, and activists to present different critical approaches to cross-cultural knowledge transfer in the arts at this very moment in history to our student body and teaching staff. The colloquium is an (online) forum to debate current research and work in progress that is sensitive to hegemony and power relations in artistic and academic networks. https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/khi/schwerpunkte/abteilung_afrika/Kolloquium/index.html

With kind regards,
Celia Schmidt

Freie Universität Berlin
FB Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften
Kunsthistorisches Institut
Abteilung Kunst Afrikas
Sekretariat: Celia Schmidt, M.A.
Koserstr. 20 (A 3.08), 14195 Berlin
Telefon: +49-(0)30-838-55286, Fax: +49-(0)30-838-4-55286
kunstafrikas@zedat.fu-berlin.de<mailto:kunstafrikas@zedat.fu-berlin.de>