Dr. Tejumola Olaniyan will present his paper, “Cartooning the Rwandan Genocide: Propaganda, Pleasure, Evil, Interest.” At this forum, This paper asks: what is the role of mass propaganda in the commission of mass-scale evil such as genocide? If the latter is impossible without the former, and pleasure and the pleasurable are at the heart of every successful propaganda, does it mean that pleasure and evil have a relationship? What is the name of that relationship? And, yes, what if political cartoons, the typically radical form with its caustic humor, are at the heart of the propaganda? What can resistant cartoonists do?
Dr. Tejumola Olaniyan is the Louise Durham Mead Professor of English, African, and African Diaspora cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His publications include Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama (Oxford UP, 1995), and Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (Indiana UP, 2004). He is also editor or co-editor of Taking African Cartoons Seriously (MSU Press, 2018); State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings (Indiana UP, 2017); Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Duke UP, 2016); African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (Blackwell, 2010); and African Drama and Performance (Indiana UP, 2004). He runs the web encyclopedia, africacartoons.com.
This event is co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD) and the Department of History.