Lecture: Optical Innovation and Visual Piety in Senegal

Optical Innovation and Visual Piety in Senegal

Thursday, November 6, 5:30 p.m.

at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology

Manning Hall Gallery, Main Green, Brown University

In conjunction with Brown’s “Year of Focus on Africa,” Professor Allen F. Roberts (UCLA Department of World Arts & Culture) will discuss the use of modern imagery to capture, redefine, and reinvent representations of the sacred and the Holy by Senegal’s Mouride communities. The Mouride Way is a mystical Islamic movement in Senegal that possesses a vibrant visual culture. In 2003, lenticular images were introduced to Senegal. Astonishingly, one image shifts from a portrait of the Mouride saint Amadou Bamba to an image of “the Prophet as a boy,” underscoring their spiritual proximity. However, this latter image is derived from a photograph of a Tunisian boy taken in 1904 by Rudolph Lehnert as an Orientalist postcard, later reproduced in National Geographic (1914). Herby hangs a tale of optical technologies, floating signifiers, the efficacy of images, and the materiality of pictures.

Reception to Follow

This lecture is supported by donations to the Jane Dwyer Memorial Lecture Fund, and the Friends of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology.