European Development in Africa: Colonial Gaze to Eye-Level Partnerships

The BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University is excited to welcome University of Pittsburgh Professor Randall Halle for a lecture titled Seeing European Development Policy in Africa: The Difficult Transition from Colonial Gaze to Eye-Level Partnerships. Read an overview of the lecture below. Lunch will be provided. There is no virtual option for this event.

As development replaced colonization in the 1950s and 1960s, German and European representation of its African partners began to change. Shifting from over a century of depicting the “mission civilisatrice” and the “white man’s burden” to something new did not happen overnight. This talk reviews how Africa appears in European media to ask: in what ways did the developmental frame differ from the colonial gaze. It may seem obvious to state that how you see a partner in an exchange determines how you interact with them, powerful or poor, needy or prosperous. Yet, the frame of seeing, whether as neocolonial subjects or eye-level partners, continues to determine the negotiations of the Global North and the Global South.

Randall Halle is Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies and the Director of the European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. A preeminent scholar of German and European cultural studies, his research focuses on German and European film and cultural policy. His books include Visual Alterity: Seeing Difference in Cinema (2021), The Europeanization of Cinema (2014), German Film after Germany (2008), and Queer Social Philosophy: Critical Readings from Kant to Adorno (2004).

Host or Publisher BMW Center for German and European Studies