Spring 2026
Curating Culture: African Festivals & Biennials in Global Perspective
Dates: February 12, 2026 - May 14, 2026Day/Time: Thursday 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM EST
Level: 400-Level
Certificate: Civic Engagement, Global Humanities
Instructor: Brett Pyper, University of the Witwatersrand
The arts of Africa and its diasporas have made notable contributions to global public culture in the postcolonial period and can be recognized across the world today. While nation states and other authorities have claimed important roles in these developments, artists, creative entrepreneurs, and variously constituted communities have also been vital exponents of festivals, biennials, carnivals, parades, and related arts events. While noticeably linked to nation-building in their state-led manifestations, these festive forms have also been used to claim visibility on the public stage by protagonists claiming recognition where it has been denied or repressed by governments. Often these articulate, in their forms as well as their program content, counter-hegemonic senses of self and collective identity. In this short, seven-week online course, we place African and Afro-diasporic case studies at the center of a conversation about how festive forms can be potent vehicles for the crafting of public practices, across boundaries. We critically explore comparative international experiences of curating and managing festivals, biennales and related art gatherings across Africa and its diasporas. The course is underpinned by the principle that the curation and the leadership and management of festivals integrally inform one another and that practitioners are increasingly looking not only to produce cultural products, but also frameworks that enable ecosystems to grow, sustain, and transform societies. We thus bring discerning curatorial and humanities practices into dialogue with the study of the strategic positioning, marketing and funding of these types of events. Intervening in the legacies of the historical objectification of people from Africa and their descendants, the course explores the potential of the agency of display to yield transformative cultural encounters. While thinking from Africa, the course engages festival practices wherever students are located.
Credits: 4 US / 8 ECTS