8-19 September 2022
12 Days • 3 Cities • A Kaleidoscopic Lens into Contemporary Senegal
Presentism Travel’s inaugural voyage to Senegal was curated around contextualizing the West African nation both within and beyond its relationship to the Transatlantic slave trade, Pan-African freedom struggles, and their codified after-lives.
The themes that anchored this voyage were: Technologies of Resistance, Négritude, and Sufism in West Africa and its Diasporas – each theme featured a corresponding micro-syllabus, available below.
Technologies of Resistance
What does it mean for a country that was pillaged during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade—the foundation of the extractive technology of racial capitalism—to have a current that features digital allegories such as “@” signs and a globe of Africa in which the water is depicted as binary code?
This thematic focus is guided by the scholarship of Dr. Ruha Benjamin, alongside the poetic prose of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M:Archive, and Manu Luksch’s 2021 film Algo-Rhythm.
Négritude and Its Afterlives
The anti-colonial concept of Négritude emerged as the product of the encounter, in Paris, in the late 1920s, of three black students coming from different French colonies: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) from Martinique, Léon Gontran Damas (1912–1978) from Guiana and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) from Senegal.
This micro-syllabus collages film, music, and historiographies to contextualize Senegal’s history of diasporic exchange in both theory and practice.
Sufism in West Africa and its Diasporas
The Grand Magal of Touba is a national holiday in Senegal observed this year on September 15th. This day sees the largest pilgrimage in West Africa as hundreds of thousands of Sufis make their way to the holy city of Touba, founded by Cheikh Amadou Bamba.
This micro-syllabus features documentary films, ethnographic research, and music on and about the Baye Fall Sufi brotherhood predominant in Senegal and West Africa at large.
Shot by Neema Githere and edited by Soof Light, this teaser video offers a glimpse into the sights and sounds of Senegal as experienced through Presentism Travel.
