...One of the Meeting's most impassioned talks occurred on the second day in a discussion between Salah Hassan, Goldwin Smith Professor and Director, Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University, and Manthia Diawara, Professor and Director, Institute of African American Affairs at New York University. Hassan began by introducing Diawara, 'a pioneer of African cinema in the United States', and honouring Diawara's commitment to the Black intellectual tradition, namely through two influential books, In Search of Africa (1998), an intellectual biography of the continent, and We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (2003), which Hassan described as 'an autobiographical account of [Diawara's] journey as a young man through Mali then moving to Paris and ending in the United States'. Hassan praised Diawara's influential academic writings, and noted his shift towards engaging documentary making as a form of praxis, which grappled with representations of Africans on film.
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