The Journal of African Cultural Studies will be organising a stream at the ASAUK2026 conference. The stream will include panels that extend and develop the conversations from previous ASAUK conferences (ASAUK2018 in particular, which resulted in the “Ethical?! Collaborations?!” special issue). The stream will also include panels that focus on dimensions of African culture, performance arts, visual arts, music, cinema, the role of the media, the relationship between culture and power, and culture and gender.
We welcome in particular panel and presentation submissions that show evidence of understanding life on the ground, and that demonstrate local knowledge and linguistic competence.
Please be in touch with the editor to discuss your idea, at jacs@internationalafricaninstitute.org
Panel Title: Oral Performance and Cinema Narration in East African Popular Culture
Cinema narration is a concept coined in reference to a cinema audience reception practice associated with East Africa that involves oral narrative performance (cf. Krings 2013, Waliaula 2025). Initially, the technology behind it involved the mediation of foreign films for local audiences by suppressing the audio element of the film as initially produced and superimposing a narrative that was both a translation and interpretation of the motion picture. Studies on this practice have examined it in the logic of intermediality and narrative extension. As a genre of popular culture, it has been understood as part of the appropriation of global cultural forms in spaces of limited cultural production. This stream sets out to interrogate this assumption by situating East African cinema narration in older forms of orality. We have used orality to mean the spoken word as it is used in particular social contexts by people who bear certain relations to each other, for a variety of reasons (cf. Finnegan 2007). It is a pervasive phenomenon in the social experience of life and manifests in ways that may align with and/or disrupt other structured forms of culture. In this case, orality is understood as applicable in the undoing of ‘modern regimes’ of film consumption and aligning the process to the oral narrative tradition. The underlying subject of the stream is narrative performance as both medium and tool in the disruption and deconstruction of film distribution and consumption in East Africa as well as the alignment of the reception experience with the everyday streams of life. Papers in this stream explore different dimensions of cinema narration across East Africa, including linguistic translation and forms of cultural identity at play, spaces of performance in the urban informal neighbourhoods and how cinema narration becomes an archive for the narratives of the everyday social experience of life in the margins and survival strategy in the context of deprivation and powerlessness, evolving forms of popular culture in the context of communal reception, new trends of orality in the filmic marketplace, and popular art forms that have emerged that imitate the cinema narration structure.
