Documentary and the Legacies of Colonialism:
Images, Institutions, and Economies
Organized by Joshua Malitsky and Marissa Moorman
MARISSA MOORMAN
SEMINAR ORGANIZER
Marissa Moorman is an Associate Professor in Indiana University's Department of History. She is a historian of southern Africa, and her research focuses on the intersection between politics and culture in colonial and independent Angola. She is interested in the ways that cultural practice is productive of politics and not just derivative of it. Much of her evidence comes from interviews with musicians and consumers of music, and she explores how memory, experience and pleasure shape politics and history.
LEE GRIEVESON
GUEST SPEAKER
Lee Grieveson is Reader in Film Studies and Director of the Graduate Programme in Film Studies at University College London. Grieveson’s work has examined the correlative rise of cinema and the city in the early twentieth century; the regulatory discourses and practices that regulated cinema and its place in cities; and also the articulation of city space in particular in crime films and sociological discourse in the 1920s and 1930s. He was co-principal investigator, with Colin MacCabe, of a major UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project entitled "Colonial Cinema: Moving Images of the British Empire," a project which both aimed to digitally archive British colonial cinema spanning the twentieth- century and to organise scholarly gatherings to investigate these materials.
MICHAEL DODSON
PARTICIPANT
Michael Dodson is an Associate Professor in Indiana University's Department of History. He is a historian of British imperialism in South Asia, focusing particularly upon the intellectual and cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently editing a collection of nineteenth-century photographs and historical essays on the city of Varanasi; co-editing a book of essays on Asian modernity; and writing A History of South Asia: Culture, Politics, Society, and Architecture 1000-2000 for Oxford University Press.
MICHAEL MARTIN
PARTICIPANT
Michael Martin is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in Indiana University's Media School and is the Director of the Black Film Center / Archive. His research interests include diasporic and emigre cinematic formations; Latin, African, and Caribbean postcolonial cinemas; transnational migration; and documentary practice.
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JEAN-MARIE TENO
FILMMAKER
Jean-Marie Teno, Africa's preeminent documentary filmmaker, has been producing and directing films on the colonial and post-colonial history of Africa for over twenty years. Films by Jean-Marie Teno have been honored at festivals worldwide: Berlin, Toronto, Yamagata, Cinema du Reel, Visions du Reel, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Liepzig, San Francisco, London. In the U.S., many of his films including Africa, je te plumerai; A Trip to the Country; Clando; Chief!; Alex's Wedding; and The Colonial Misunderstanding, have been broadcast and featured at festivals across the country. Teno has been a guest of the Flaherty Seminar, an artist in residence at the Pacific Film Archive of the University of California, Berkeley, and has lectured at numerous universities. Most recently, he was a visiting artist at Amherst College as a 2007-08 Copeland Fellow.
JOSHUA MALITSKY
Director, Center for Documentary Research and Practice
Seminar Organizer
Joshua Malitsky is an Associate Professor in Indiana University's Media School. He works on a range of topics related to documentary and other nonfiction media genres. He has published a number of articles on documentary history and theory including topics such as: nonfiction film and nation-building, the relationship between documentary and science, the conceptual intersections between both documentary studies and science studies and between documentary studies and linguistic anthropology, and on the sports documentary.
PRIYA JAIKUMAR
GUEST SPEAKER
Priya Jaikumar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. A historian and theorist of colonial and postcolonial cinemas, she has written on comparative modernities and aesthetics in film, critical theories of film history, place and space in cinema, film and cultural geography, and transnational feminism.
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GREGORY WALLER
PARTICIPANT
Gregory Waller is a Provost Professor in Indiana University's Media School. His work covers a range of topics in film studies, including the history of exhibition and distribution, American popular movie genres, and New Zealand cinema. Waller is a film historian with a strong publication record and an international reputation. His books include the prize-winning Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930, as well as Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition.
AKIN ADESOKAN
PARTICIPANT
Akin Adesokan is an Associate Professor in Indiana University's Department of Comparative Literature. He is a Nigerian writer and scholar, and his first novel, Roots in the Sky (Festac Books), was published in 2004. His research interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first century African and African American/African Diaspora literatures and cultures, global postcoloniality, African cinema and contemporary global cinemas, postcolonial intellectual history, nonfictional prose, and literary and cultural theory.
SUSAN SEIZER
PARTICIPANT
Susan Seizer is an Associate Professor in Indiana University's Department of Anthropology. Her research interests include humor cross-culturally; management of social stigma; and performance in South Asia (live and mediated). Her first ethnographic research project focused on the lives of popular theater artists in Tamilnadu, South India. Her book, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama artists in South India (Duke University Press 2005) won the prestigious A.K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2007. Her current research turns an anthropological lens on the lives of road comics in the contemporary U.S.
PREXY NESBITT
ACTIVIST & EDUCATOR
Prexy Nesbitt is an activist and educator who has worked over the past four decades to connect freedom-loving peoples in Africa and North America to each other in order to strengthen progressive political and social movements on both continents. While Nesbitt has traveled extensively in Africa, Europe, and North America, Chicago remains his home and the primary locus of his work as an educator. He has taught at the high school and college levels as well as serving as a school administrator. He has also been a mentor, within and outside of formal educational structures, to scores of young people around the country, who, inspired by his example, have themselves become activists.
