The Liverpool Film Seminar is a collaboration between the Departments of Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University and Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool that began in 2010.

Professor Erica Carter (King’s College, London) who will present a talk entitled “Locating Decolonisation: Kwame Nkrumah in Cold War Media Memory”

Here is a short abstract of the talk:

Drawing on the DAAD-funded German Screen Studies Network project Circulating Cinema, this lecture explores archival traces from the Global North of Ghana’s postwar transition to independence. Documentary film holdings in East German and British archives reveal independence as a fully mediatized process embedded in Cold War struggles for influence in postcolonial Africa. Bringing together films from both sides of Cold War European divides, the lecture considers the competing visions of African modernity that emerge from this documentary corpus.

Drawing on writing by Tina Campt and others on the black body, stillness and motion, the lecture explores the films’ location of the African body as a site of mutually antagonistic geopolitical temporalities. Particular attention will be paid to Ghana’s first Prime Minister and President, Kwame Nkrumah, as a media icon whose image becomes a proxy site of Cold War contestation between East and West. The lecture concludes by asking what new insights might emerge from a repurposing of this transnational archive for a decolonial history of West Africa’s Cold War.