Important Dates

Each year, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence opens its calendar of activities with the New Year Lecture – a public event featuring distinguished speakers who engage with questions and concepts central to the Cluster’s research agenda.

In 2026, as the Cluster embarks on its second funding phase, the New Year Lecture will serve as a moment to pause and reflect on our achievements but also to look forward – to deepening our collaborations, expanding our perspectives, and shaping new directions in the reconfiguration of African Studies.

New Year Lecture 2026

5 pm - FZA Congress Hall and online 

- PROGRAMME - 

• Welcome: 
  Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Seesemann, Dean Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence
  
  
• Introduction: 
  Prof. Dr. Ute Fendler, Spokesperson Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence
  
  
• Keynote: 

  Prof. Dr.Tendayi Sithole,Professor in the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa

• Concert: Jean-Pierre Joséphine, Andry Michaël Randriantseva, Childo Tomás, Matchume Zango

About the lecture:

Tendayi Sithole "This Thing is Black, Blue, and Beautiful: On the Inter-Portraiture of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin"

“In this lecture, I propose to dwell on and with two important figures of the 20th century – namely, Beauford Delaney (artist) and James Baldwin (writer). It is in this mode of dwelling where a case will be made on the concept I would modestly call inter-portraiture. In 1944, Delaney made a painting entitled Portrait of James Baldwin and in 1965, Baldwin wrote an essay entitled Beaford Delaney: A Portrait and, understood as acts of radical love. It is these two acts that cement the meaning of inter-portraiture. The way these figures portrayed each other refiguring the world – that is, creating other conditions of possibility amid impossibility. In Delaney and Baldwin, the world defined and structured by the ugliness of racism had to be challenged through the politics of black radical imagination. I also propose that these politics map out trajectories where the black, the blue, and the beautiful meet, and this is the generative encounter where inter-portraiture becomes a mode of being-black-in-the world. Since both figures love the blues, and they aesthetically expressed themselves in the influence and confluence of this genre. Also, for them, beauty was a necessity, and they dared to dwell in it through their call-and-response – say, inter-portraiture.”