Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom
ICM FILM SCREENING AND CONVERSATION
Oct 3, 2024 - 4:45 – 7:00 pm - Cornell Cinema
A screening of the film Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023) followed by a conversation with filmmaker Manthia Diawara and Salah M. Hassan.
Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023) by Manthia Diawara reflects on the life and work of the North American activist Angela Davis. Diawara’s camera follows Davis as she walks through a forest of giant sequoias, works in the garden or walks her dog, while reflecting on myriad issues, including ideas of freedom, resistance, rebellion, remaking our world, political blackness, radical black thought, music, (inter)nationalism, (Global South) feminism, abolition, the industrial prison complex, generational shifts, dialectics, contradiction, Africa, sexuality, desire and also friendship. The film is neither a biography nor a fictional narrative. Instead, Diawara’s footage, which is interspersed with relevant archival material, presents itself as a poetic compendium of Davis’s critical thinking and an inspiration for new imaginaries and new relations within an emergent new world.
Manthia Diawara is Professor in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He is the author of We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (Basic Civitas Books, 2003), Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (ed. Routledge, 1993), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1992), and In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 1998). He has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Professor Diawara also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in making the documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema, and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse.
Salah M. Hassan is the Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Africana Studies and Research Center, and Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, and Director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM), Cornell University. He is also the Founding Director, The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE. Hassan is an art historian, art critic and curator. He is an editor and founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. He authored, edited and co-edited several books including Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination (2021); Ibrahim El Salahi’s Prison Notebook (2018); How to Liberate Marx from His Eurocentrism: Notes on Black/African Marxism (2012); Darfur and the Crisis of Governance: A Critical Reader (2009), and Diaspora, Memory, Place (2008); Unpacking Europe(2001). He is the recipient of the College Art Association (CAA) 2021 Distinguished Scholar Award.
Co-sponsored:
Africana Studies & Research Center
Department of History of Art
Department of Comparative Literature
