Wole Soyinka & Manthia Diawara. Truth

About

What role does the truth play in the context of violence and human rights violations, of reconciliation and reparations? What forms of truth speaking are linked to personal freedom and what create new ostracizing power structures? Are there universal truths? And what truth is generated by fiction or documentaries? The Négritude movement and Glissant’s poetry of relation will be the starting point for Diawara and Soyinka’s examination of techniques of assertion and methods of truth production.

Followed by the film premiere of
Négritude – A Dialogue between Soyinka and Senghor
D: Manthia Diawara, D/F/P 2015, 59 min, original version with German and English subtitles
Based on archive material, Manthia Diawara organizes an imagined dialogue between Wole Soyinka and Léopold Senghor, one of the founders of the concept of Négritude. The film probes the current relevance of the concept of Négritude, against the views of its many critics, not only to the decolonization and independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s, but also to an understanding of the contemporary social and political scenes of nationalism, religious intolerance, multiculturalism, the exodus of Africans and other populations from the South, and xenophobic migration policies in the West.