About

Dakar’s diverse art, architecture, urban planning, and film have played primary roles in the shaping an understanding of the city. Exploring Ousmane Sembène’s Borom Sarret (1963) and Black Girl (1966) as well as Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Contras’ City (1968), this discussion explores the filmmakers’ use of architecture and urban space both to meditate on a city constituted in large part through the collision of hybrid constituencies and to critique Senegalese authority as well as the politics of decolonisation. Steven Nelson Steven Nelson is Director of the African Studies Center and Professor of African and African American Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University in 1998. In addition to his award-winning book 'From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture in and out of Africa' (2007), he has published widely on the arts, architecture and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas, African American art history, and queer studies. He is currently completing two books titled, 'On the Underground Railroad' and 'Structural Adjustment: Mapping, Geography, and the Visual Cultures of Blackness.'