Artistry@Work Series  

by Maison des Sciences de l’Homme–Université Clermont Auvergne, in collaboration with the RAI

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Tuesday, 06 May 2025,  4:00-6:00pm BST

Livelihoods of West African Performers

 

Speaker: Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach, University College London

Discussant: TBC

 

Abstract:

In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the scholarship on the performing arts celebrated the new insights afforded by the transnationalism paradigm and the ‘mobilities’ turn. There was both enthusiasm and concern about the intensified global circulation of people, things, ideas and capital, as well as art forms. New research questioned whether these ‘mobilities’ reinforced the postcolonial world order, or whether they had the potential to make more visible previously marginalized artistic forms. Since then, there has been growing recognition that a focus on mobility in its multiple forms risked obscuring important aspects of the ‘social life’ of art worlds. There is a need to reconsider the relationship between mobility and immobility, between moving and ‘staying put’ at different stages of artistic lives. How have migration regimes, which have increasingly aimed at keeping people from the Global South away from the Global North, shaped what performing artists do? How have West African dancers and choreographers in particular addressed the migration issue? Do we need to rethink the temporality of our studies? Drawing on ongoing research with performing artists in West Africa and in migration contexts since 2002, this presentation interrogates the longer-term strategies deployed by performing artists to navigate a world in which their work is valued, but from which their bodies are often excluded.

 

Biographical note:

Dr. Hélène Neveu Kringelbach is an Associate professor of African Anthropology at University College London (UCL). She teaches in both SELCS (the School of European Languages, Culture and Society) and the Anthropology department. In 2019-22, she served as Vice-Dean EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) for the Arts & Humanities Faculty. She is the author of the monograph ‘Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal’, winner of the RAI’s 2013 Amaury Talbot Prize in African Anthropology. Her current book project focuses on ‘mixed’ marriage and transnational family relationships between Senegal and Europe, exploring, in particular, how these relationships are shaped by colonial histories as well as by racialised and gendered European immigration policies. Aside from this work, she has an enduring research and teaching interest in music, performance and popular culture in African cities.

 

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Artistry@Work is an online Seminar Series in the Anthropology of Artists & Artisans, running 2024–2025 

Maison des Sciences de l’Homme–Université Clermont Auvergne, in collaboration with the Royal Anthropological Institute

Organisers:  Dr Raphaël Blanchier & Professor Trevor Marchand

This seminar series in anthropology explores the situated practices of ‘artistry at work’ and, more broadly, the working lives and career trajectories of artists and artisans plying their trades in regions around the globe. The scope of the series also encompasses studies of occupations not conventionally categorised as “artistic” but that nevertheless foster creativity among (some) practitioners and even accommodate the development of “artist” identities. 

Find a list of all events here.

 

 

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