The WOC Research Center Digital Diaspora is pleased to invite you to a lecture by Dr. Polo B. Moji (HU Berlin & University of Cape Town) entitled "Cecile Emeke’s “Strolling” as a Digital Space of Afroeuropean Community" on April 22, 2024 from 18:15 to 19:45 in GW2 B 2.880.
This lecture focuses on the examination of black fugitivity as a practice of creating digital spaces, specifically through Cecile Emeke's documentary-style web series "Strolling" (2014-2015). The concept of "black fugitivity," as articulated by Tina Camps, refers to the creation of spaces that engage with the micro-struggles of racialised subjects. The lecture will explore how episodes of the web series reproduce embodied spatial negotiations that address the specificities of the black everyday experience in Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Additionally, it analyses how the paradoxical public/intimate and virtual/lived elements of the "Strolling" web series' audiovisual dialogic components can be interpreted as a "safe space" for the Afro-diasporic community, drawing insights from the comments section of the web series.
Dr. Polo B. Moji earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle in France. Her research and teaching interests encompass Afro-Europe, intersectional feminism, critical race studies, and Afro-digital spaces. She has held an academic position at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town and a DAAD Visting Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the Institut für Asien und Afrika Wissenschaften at the Humbold University of Berlin. Dr. Moji is the author of numerous articles on Afroeuropeans, African cinema, transnationalism, belonging, and Afro-diasporic subjectivity. Her book, "Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary Afro French Narratives" (2022), offers a comprehensive exploration of the spatial negotiation of black women in France through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis.
