Entangled Panafrica: Four Festivals and an Archive- Zamrsena Panafrika: Cetiri festivala I jedna arhiva / Dominique Malaquais; Cedric Vincent

The imbrication of the Dakar festival in the global Cold War web and the way in which this is echoed by the presence of the CIA at the Algiers, Kinshasa, and Lagos festivals provide still another example of ways in which ideas, objects and people moved back and forth between the events under consideration. The story of these four pivotal moments is one of complex entanglement. This entanglement, in turn, mirrors the extraordinary complexity of a time when, casting off the chains of colonialism, African nations were seeking to construct themselves in relation to (and at times in opposition to) one another, while simultaneously imagining the possibilities of a continent united beyond national boundaries. Synergies and contradictions abound, crisscrossing one another and, in so doing, speaking to a history infinitely more complex than is allowed for by mainstream accounts. The gaze proposed here, with its focus on entanglement, marks a distinctive break with normative approaches to the Dakar, Algiers, Kinshasa, and Lagos festivals. When scholars move beyond the monographic stance referenced earlier on to think in more holistic terms about the events under consideration, they tend to favor teleological readings: narrative schemes that see in the four festivals a relatively clear and linear progression. FESMAN is perceived as the starting point of this teleology, followed by PANAF, which (as previously noted) is read almost exclusively as a counter-FESMAN.16 Then comes FESTAC, understood as a synthesis of the two prior festivals. Zaïre 74 is rarely mentioned, though, as we have seen, there exist undeniable links between this event and the other three.

English; Serbian