Lecture on
“Filming the Future of Detroit/Filming the Future from Berlin: African Perspectives”

by Damani J. Partridge
(Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2003)
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan

Saturday | 31 March 2018 | 11.00 pm – 12.30 pm

Organised by The International Centre Goa

Entry Free & Open to All

Filming the Future of Detroit/Filming the Future from Berlin: African Perspectives
This project shows the ways in which Berlin and Detroit are global from the perspectives of African immigration, and African imaginations of global futures. Berlin helps to elucidate what is distinctive about Detroit and vise versa. These films picture the distinctions between how African futures can be imagined in Europe versus the U.S., in Detroit versus Berlin. They reveal how race, citizenship, and humanitarian projects work in relation to African immigration in these two cities. They ask: What difference do the approaches to urban planning, districting, education, and social versus capital networks make? What kinds of communities can be formed? How do “Africans’’ relate to “Blackness’’ versus “foreignness’’ in both cities? What difference does it make to live in the city when one is a noncitizen?

Damani J. Partridge (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2003) is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He is also an affiliate of the Department of German Languages and Literatures. As a researcher, he has published broadly on questions of citizenship, sexuality, post-Cold War ‘freedom’, Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, ‘Blackness’ and embodiment, the production of noncitizens, the culture and politics of ‘fair trade’, and the Obama moment in Berlin. He has also made and worked on documentaries for private and public broadcasters in the US and Canada, and currently directs the Mellon Foundation/Humanities Without Walls funded Filming Future Cities Project in Detroit and Berlin (see filmingfuturecities.org). In 2012, he published Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany and is currently preparing his manuscript, “Articulating ‘Blackness’ as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, European Enlightenment, and Noncitizen Futures,” for publication. In addition to the Mellon Foundation, his research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the School for Advanced Research, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.