13th Annual Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture: Felwine Sarr

GERBRANDS LECTURE EVENTS | October 25 & 26, 2024 | Wereldmuseum Leiden

The 13th annual Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture laureate is Professor Felwine Sarr. The jury has nominated Professor Sarr to receive the award in 2024. Professor Sarr is the Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Duke University. Sarr has research interests that span from economics to literature. In 2018, Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy were asked by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, to investigate collections of African art and artefacts in French state-owned museums. Their ''Sarr-Savoy Report'' on the restitution of African cultural heritage was published in November 2018, and is now being used by museums and other institutions around the world to reconsidering how they present (or, in some cases, return) material collected through the legacy of colonialism.

Please join use at any and all of these upcoming series of events:

Friday morning/afternoon, October 25th - Ring di Alarm: On Restitution, Lingering Colonial Histories and Other Diseases at Wereldmuseum Leiden.
Friday afternoon/evening, October 25th - Gerbrands Lecture/Dialogue: Knowledge on/in African societies: re-opening the paths at Wereldmuseum Leiden.
Saturday, October 26th - Film screening/conversation with Felwine Sarr and Vamba Sherif at LAB111 Amsterdam for the Imagine Film Festival.

image credit: Wereldmuseum Leiden

Friday October 25, 10.00 - 15.30 - Ring di Alarm: On Restitution, Lingering Colonial Histories and Other Diseases

Ring di Alarm is part of the collaborative research chapter of the multi-locational and multi-year research and artistic project Sustaining the Otherwise, initiated by curators and researchers Selene Wendt and Amal Alhaag. Sustaining the Otherwise takes an active approach to engaging with the topic of restitution by attempting to dismantle the hierarchical institutional status quo and focusing on artistic, design, research, and spatial practices that activate decoloniality in different sites and multiple temporalities.

Professor Felwine Sarr will participate as a respondent on the final panel discussion of the program: Conversation III - Listening to Everyday Histories.

More information and registration can be found here: Ring di Alarm: On Restitution, Lingering Colonial Histories and Other Diseases | Research Center for Material Culture

Ring di Alarm

Friday October 25, 16.30-19.00 - Knowledge on/in African societies: re-opening the paths

Please note that doors open at 16.10 - Lecture starts at 16.30.

During this dialogue, Gerbrands laureate Professor Felwine Sarr will present his lecture: Knowledge on/in African societies: re-opening the paths. During this presentation Professor Sarr will engage with epistemological questions such as What types of knowledge? How are they produced? For which purposes? These questions are fundamental to Africans in their struggle for political, cultural and economic emancipation. In order to imagine and construct different presents and futures, it is necessary to interrogate the enunciation of knowledge paradigms, because knowledge production sustains and reproduces a political, economic and social order.

Deconstructing the colonial library and establishing African social sciences are important steps towards the liberation of African discourse (philosophical, and scientific). But more urgently, there is a necessity for Africans to engage in an epistemic shift by widening the vision of what knowledge is and by reactivating resources of knowing embodied in their cultures. More specifically, by producing new knowledges that will be useful for African societies and for the world in general. For that purpose, it is necessary to establish an African ecology of knowledges.

16.10 - 16.30	Doors open / entry into grote zaal of Wereldmuseum Leiden
16:30	Welcome words by Wayne Modest
16.40	Introduction by Mark Westmoreland of the 2024 Gerbrands Laureate Professor Felwine Sarr
16.50	Lecture by Professor Felwine Sarr
17:20	Moderated discussion with Professor Sarr and Wayne Modest
17.40	Open Q&A
18.00	End of program
18.00	Celebratory reception with refreshments and bites
19.00	Exit the museum

Location: Grote Zaal, Museum Volkenkunde
Steenstraat 1
Leiden
There is no livestream available. The lecture will be recorded and made available online.

Accessibility: Entry to the museum buildings is possible via either stairs or an elevator/ramp. Within the museum building there is another elevator, which allows you to access the basement and the first floor. On these two floors you can find female, male and accessible toilets, in the basement there is also a gender neutral toilet.

Saturday 26 October, 13.30 - 15.20 - Film screening and conversation with Professor Felwine Sarr

Afrotopia program: filmscreening Crumbs (Miguel Llansó, 2015, Ethiopia, 68 minutes) followed by a conversation between Felwine Sarr and Vamba Sherif.

Tickets: Tickets | LAB111

About the film: In a post-apocalyptic Ethiopia, bait seeker Candy embarks on a strange journey to a spaceship in the desert, which has suddenly become active again. Along the way, he meets witches, Santa Claus, and Nazi knights, and collects pop culture relics in the bizarre landscape in hopes of being reunited with his beloved.Crumbs is a unique, creative and visually stunning film that transports the viewer to post-apocalyptic Ethiopia. You've probably never seen the country like this before. Crumbs embraces Afrofuturism, mixing science fiction with romance and adventure. The film is notable for its inventive use of pop culture artifacts, from Michael Jackson records to Ninja Turtles toys, as sacred relics of a decaying civilization. Director Miguel Llansó, whose new film Infinite Summer is also screening at Imagine and who is coming to the festival himself, creates a bizarre and fascinating universe full of eccentric characters. With its lo-fi charms, beautiful scenery and magical storytelling style, Crumbs is an original, highly entertaining and in-depth cinematic experience.

About Vamba Sherif: Sherif is a novelist foremost, but has also written stories and journalistic work for The New York Times, The French magazine Long Cours, the German magazine Kultur Aaustauch, and for various Dutch newspapers and magazines like Trouw, De Volkskrant, One World, and many others.

Location: LAB111 Cinema 1, Amsterdam.

Crumbs

About the Adriaan Gerbrands Laureate

Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese academic and writer. He is Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University in North Carolina, after teaching at the Université Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal, where he is Professeur Titulaire des Universités and agrégé in economics. His academic work focuses on economics, the ecology of knowledge, contemporary African philosophy, economic policy, epistemology, economic anthropology and the history of religious ideas.

He has published Dahij (Gallimard 2009), 105 Rue Carnot (Mémoire d'Encrier 2011), Méditations Africaines (Mémoire d'Encrier 2012), Afrotopia (Philippe Rey, 2016), Ishindenshin (Mémoire d'Encrier, 2017), Habiter le Monde (Mémoire d'Encrier, 2017), Ecrire l'Afrique-monde (collective work co-edited with Achille Mbembe, Philippe Rey/Jimsaan, 2017), Restituer le patrimoine Africain (Philippe Rey/Seuil, 2018) with Bénédicte Savoy, Politique des Temps (co-edited with Achille Mbembe, Philippe Rey/Jimsaan 2019), La Saveur des derniers mètres (Philippe Rey, 2021), Traces (Actes Sud, 2021, translation into Wolof Watit, 2023, éditions EJO), l'Économie à venir (Les liens qui Libèrent, 2021) with Gaël Giraud, Les Lieux qu'Habitent mes Rêves (Gallimard, 2022) and Le Bouddhisme est né á Colobane (Philippe Rey /Jimsaan, 2024).

Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture

The annual Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture is a joint initiative of the Fund for Ethnology Leiden, the National Museum for Ethnology (Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde), the Beeld voor Beeld Documentary Film Festival and the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Leiden University). The lecture intends to promote academic and popular interest in research combining material culture studies, the anthropology of art, and visual anthropology. As early as the 1960s, Gerbrands pointed out the theoretical and practical challenges emerging from the overlap between these fields. Gerbrands (1917-1997) held a chair at the Leiden Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, was deputy director of the National Museum of Ethnology, and an early advocate of ethnographic film in the Netherlands.

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