“(Inter)(in)animation, Dance, and the Archive: Onyeka Igwe and A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver)”
Abstract
After postcolonial feminist critiques of reparative impulses to “animate” those trapped in colonial archives, what non-ventriloquizing options remain, or emerge, for artists and scholars seeking to grapple carefully with this weaponized place of fabrication and storage? I don’t have the answer to this question. But to consider it in dialogue with you, I introduce “(inter)(in)animation,” a relational use of “animation” operating along a variable scale, foregrounding issues arising at the intersection of movement, “war” (what counts as war?) and the archive within the context of British-Nigerian artist Onyeka Igwe’s 2023 installation, A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver).
Speaker Biography
Karen Redrobe is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UPenn. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism and Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, and editor of Animating Film Theory. She has co-edited three volumes, including Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures with Jeff Scheible, winner of SCMS's Best Edited Collection Award. She is currently completing Undead: Animation and the Contemporary Art of War while collaborating with Kartik Nair on a co-edited volume: Required Readings: Film Scholars on Freedom and Discipline in the Classroom.
