British Academy Research Fellowship awarded to Bea Gassman de Souza

Dreaming the African Renaissance: A Pan-African Friendship at the Black Artists Congress in Rome 1959

This project examines the idea of a unified and collective “African” identity during the historical foundation period of the African Union. The art and poetry of three befriended activist African artists, the South African exile Gerard Sekoto, the Nigerian Ben Enwonwu and the future Senegalese president Léopold Senghor records manifestations of traditional dance as resistance. Drawing on oral and performance traditions the artists translate dance into new African-centred pictorial and literary modes of Afro-Modernity, pitted against the dominance of colonial European ethnography and cultural appropriation. Between 1959 and 1966 this core group of the Paris based “Présence Africaine“ association convenes in Europe and reunites in Senegal for the Festival Mondial des Art Nègres (FESMAN) 1966.

The focus on dance reveals hitherto unknown historical perspectives of pre-Independence African-centred creativity, which is epitomised in the collective dream of an African Renaissance. The research centres on the archived correspondence between artists and foregrounds African scholarship in full recognition of the importance of continental African contributions to global modernity.

Bea will be based at SELCS under the mentorship of Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach.