African Studies Seminar: Anthropology as Vulnerology? Reading Possibility into the City's Sutures

Conveners: Sebabatso Manoeli and Thomas Hendriks

Speaker: Filip De Boeck, University of Leuven (Belgium)

The Belgian anthropologist Filip De Boeck (University of Leuven) will speak about some of the ideas underlying Suturing the City. Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds (2016), a book he made in collaboration with Congolese photographer Sammy Baloji, in an attempt to rethink the urban archive and constitute it in alternative ways. If the (Central African) urban landscape seems to refuse inhabitation and appears as a black hole that makes any clear assessment of it simply disappear in the force of its corrosive gravity, the authors explore various -textual and visual, or horizontal and vertical- ways to investigate the hole and illuminate its blackness.