On 10-21 February 2025, postdoctoral fellow Oulia Makkonen visited the Audiovisual Archives of Radio-Télévision Ivoirienne (RTI) in Côte d’Ivoire. Oulia’s ALMEDA case study focusses on remediations of Kotéba theatre performances. The archive includes some of the works of the famous Ivorian playwright, film director and musician, Souleymane Koly and his Ensemble Kotéba, who were based in Abidjan. Other materials of interest included television programs Théâtre Chez Nous, Ce soir au village and Mensonge d’un soir. These are programs that cinematically staged theatrical performances (Théâtre Chez Nous), record oral renderings of tales, myths and legends (Mensonge d’un soir) and portray oratures in their local setting (Ce soir au village).
Ashleigh Harris has a new ALMEDA pamphlet reflecting on the problems and potentials of AI in and for the field of African Literary Studies. Harris will be participating at the Charting New Territory: Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies organised by Frédérick Madore, Vincent Hiribarren in Hanover in February,…
The ALMEDA project is committed to a broad multilingual framework, not only to ensure excellent and substantial multilingual inclusion across as many African languages as possible (see our work with literary lexicons), but also to provide data on African literature’s global movements and circulation in non-African languages. To this purpose,…
Our latest lexicon of literary terms has just been published by Maurice Simbili Mwichuli, Kenyatta University. All ALMEDA’s data and lexicon publications are open for download and reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4 Licence. If you are a linguist or literary scholar working in an African language and are…
We are delighted to be joined by Anna Marie Skråmestø Nesheim who has received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project ‘Monetizing Performance Culture in French North and West Africa’. The project examines how the introduction of copyright systems affected the production of African performing arts in the…