Sheila Petty

Mapping the African 'I': Representations of Women in La noire de … and Histoire d'Orokia

Western feminism is regarded by African scholars with suspicion due to its undeniable links to western cultural imperialism. They argue against the western feminist tendency to intervene in and circumscribe female experience within narrow western constraints. Such arguments have serious ramifications for discussions of female representation in cinema which heavily relies on assumptions drawn from western feminism. This paper examines the articulation of issues on women representation in African cinema within the films La noire de... (Black Girl) and Histoire dOrokia focusing on the interaction between female characters and societal/cultural concerns. The film `Black Girl initiates inquiry into the price paid by Senegal and all of Africa for the continuing reliance on colonial aid. It is a powerful indictment of the systemic power inequities in neocolonial setting. On the other hand Histoire dOrokia reflects a different ideological climate which is a fictionalized account of an actual event that occurred in western Burkina Faso in the late 1960s. It portrays the theme of African womens issues and their struggle to establish rights within the context of traditional society and neocolonial values. Nevertheless both films offer representations of women that are the direct result of African historical and cultural imperatives.

The Archeology of Origin: Transnational Visions of Africa in a Borderless Cinema

Catalogue published in conjunction with a film series presented at Mount Saint Vincent University (Halifax) and the Dunlop Gallery (Regina). Petty’s interpretations of seven films and videos by black film and video makers working outside Africa, focus on how the concept of origin relates to black diasporic experience. Issues of migration, exile, slavery, racism, memory and healing are addressed. Includes a 46 list with brief descriptions of each film, as well as biographical notes on the artists. 8 bibl. ref.

Multiple representations of web content for effective knowledge utilization

The web, as a new medium for information and knowledge creation, storage, communication, and sharing, offers both opportunities and challenges. By applying the principles of granular computing, we argue that multiple representations and presentations of web content are essential to effective knowledge utilization through the web. The same web content should be represented in many versions and in multiple levels in each version to facilitate informative communication, personalized searches, web exploration, and tailored presentation of retrieval results.

Self-StylingIdentities: in Recent African Screen Media

It is often difficult to imagine Africa today as anything but a conflicted geographical space, ravaged by war and poverty. As Achille Mbembe argues, “to a great degree, what is called Africa is first and foremost a geographical accident” that is now imbricated with “a radical uncertainty” driven “by the omnipresence of death and the predominance of politics as the work of death (necropolitics).”1 It seems, therefore, that the “disjunctive flows” of “globalization” have produced “floating populations, transnational politics within national borders, and mobile configurations of technology and expertise.”2 This in turn creates “problems that manifest themselves in intensely local forms but have contexts that are anything but local.”3 As a result, African cultures--conceived in a maelstrom that includes “a broad range of colonial and decolonizing experiments, recent experiences of national sovereignty, vast discrepancies in natural resources, uneven border control, and examples of population mobility”--seem to be easy prey for the negative forces of globalization.4 Within this context, popular media plays a particular role in creating these “relations of disjuncture” by traveling “across national boundaries” and spreading “images of well-being that cannot be satisfied by national standards of living and consumer capabilities.”5 As OlokaOnyango argues, “many of the images portrayed through the Internet, on television, or via the radio can be demeaning and disempowering, even racist, thereby impugning the development of holistic notions of an African culture or of African womanhood.”6 Hence, there is a strong tendency to suggest that such incursions destroy “many of what were once concentrated, deeply rooted, and positive African cultural values.”7 In this sense, Africa becomes the helpless victim of a globalizing media seemingly bent on eradicating its many cultures. Yet, this may be selling the continent and its peoples short. By taking the position that African cultures can only be passive victims without agency within the auspices of globalization is to suggest that “the African subject cannot express himor herself in the world other than as a wounded and traumatized subject.”8 Despite the economic and political challenges facing Africa, African artists and theorists are creating spaces of transnational exchange in popular media that not only undermine the barriers facing them, but also write Africa on the face of globalization itself. Appadurai argues persuasively that “imagination” has the power to permit “people to consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration” and fuels “collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life.”9 In this vein, indigenous popular media products might appropriate western-inflected technologies and entertainment forms, but the way these are transformed to serve local needs and issues provides a counterpoint to such influences. Africa is often “defined by a sense of crisis” spurred on by failing economies and the ravages of war.10 The current focus on the seeming decay of African societies reflects a conception of Self-Styling identitieS in Recent African Screen Media

The influence of ubiquity on screen-based interfaces

This paper brings together the disciplines of media studies and software systems engineering and focuses on the challenge of finding methodologies to measure and test certain effects of ubiquitous computing. We draw on two examples: an interactive screen-based art installation and an interface for ubiquitous videogaming. We find that the second example demonstrates that the identification of a common framework for ubiquity enables one to adopt a set of subjective measurements that can then be aggregated into a qualitative appraisal of some aspects of screen ubiquity. Ultimately, however, we postulate that we need to merge the measurement system built on the engineering development principles illustrated in our second example with a humanistic and artistic approach, albeit analytical.

‘Authoring’ terrorism in Aziz Saâdallah’s Le Temps du terrorisme

Abstract This essay explores how the Moroccan film Le Temps du terrorisme uses the frame of the artistic/creative process to stage a study of religious fanaticism and its tragic consequences. Drawing on melorealism, the filmmaker uses tropes of comedy and farce already familiar to his theatre and television audiences, but he also layers his text with self-reflexive strategies of direct address and narrator as witness. These devices work to bridge the distance between fiction and reality, and author and audience. As filmmaker, Aziz Saâdallah forges a personal relationship between artist and viewer and carves out a space for a dialectics of the artistic process: demanding an active audience, posing questions and forcing the viewer to think. He thus seeks to raise debate across a wide range of spectators and poses complex questions of responsibility, tolerance and the role of artistic expression in the present-day times of terrorism.

Excavating Memory And History in the Turtles' Song, A Moroccan Revolution

Abstract This essay explores how Moroccan filmmaker Jawad Rhalib has used the documentary form for explorations of Moroccan history and culture, “giving voice” through cinematic expression to those who have been silenced by history and politics. Jawad Rhalibs feature documentary The Turtles’ Song, a Moroccan Revolution/Le Chant des Tortues, une révolution Marocaine (2013) is set against the backdrop of the Movement of February 20, 2011, when the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt had spread to Morocco. As a result, Moroccans protested for dignity, freedom of speech, social and political change, and an end to the culture of fear that had permeated the nation since, and especially during, the Lead Years (Années de Plomb) of King Hassan II. The essay examines the cinematic aesthetic and narrative structure of the film and its sociopolitical and historical thematic strategies for excavating memories, laying bare hidden histories, the inner workings of the Makhzen, and the struggle for democracy.

Interpretive Strategies for Screen-Based Creative Technologies

This paper brings together the disciplines of media and creative technologies studies and software systems engineering; it focuses on the challenge of finding methodologies to measure, test and decode meaning in digital cultural objects. Just as rough set theory is a mathematical tool to deal with vagueness and uncertainty in artificial intelligence, and approximation accuracy and knowledge granularity are approaches to uncertainty research, the authors argue that decoupage analytique is a possible method for decoding screen-based information. They draw on a variety of examples: interactive online digital art projects; an interactive, immersive screen-based art installation; re-mediated digital art installation; expanded cinema; a videogame; and a medical interface example, in order to determine if it is possible to map interpretive strategies that include a blending of old and new criteria, but ultimately promoting an equal partnership between artist and audience, and thus, a community of co-creators. Additionally, the authors present experimental evidence on the difference introduced by the screen size to further qualify the effectiveness of decoupage analytique in relation to the amount of screen real estate afforded.

Spaces in-Between: Exile, Emigration, and the Performance of Memory in Zahra’s Mother Tongue

In her 2011 documentary, La Langue de Zahra/Zahra’s Mother Tongue, Algerian/French filmmaker Fatima Sissani “gives voice” to her Kabyle mother, Zahra, who lived in France as an immigrant woman for years after Algerian independence without speaking French. Often considered uneducated and ignorant, these women act as archives of oral tradition, history, and poetry in a language their children often do not speak. In this paper, I will look at how this performative documentary film creates “spaces in-between” cultures through its uses of performance, orality, and cinematic space. A number of recent Maghrebi and sub-Saharan African documentaries have emerged that can be described as performative documentaries in which historical evocation and emotive connection to the subject matter is as important to the filmmaker as factual referencing. The filmmaker plays a self-reflexive role in the text, which often shapes the content. It is important to note that the film is not about being forced to choose between two geographical locations, and it does not seek to hybridize two cultures, but rather is concerned with other sorts of questions such as the nature of Berber culture and language, how it impacts not only the representation of Algeria’s post-Independence history (the troubled context of the 1990s, the history of Algerian migration to France), but also the practice and aesthetics of this contemporary documentary filmmaker. The film suggests possible new ways of looking at questions of minority language (Kabyle), culture, and identity that could potentially greatly contribute to the understanding of contemporary independent documentary film practices, discourses, and aesthetics.

Multidisciplinary approaches to computing

This paper summarizes the discussions at a panel on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Computing at CCECE 2013, showcasing multidisciplinary research at the University of Regina. The panellist were invited from Fine Arts, Arts, Science, and Engineering. They elaborated on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary views of computing, covering various topics such as agents, arts, knowledge engineering, granular computing, environment, mobile computing, multi-media, new media, scientistic computing, teaching, and Web-based support systems. The emerged theme of multidisciplinary computing brings new insights and in-depth understanding of computing.