A key voice in Black cultural studies, Diawara has advanced his ideas through several arenas: memoir, magazine publishing, books on Black filmmaking, academia – he is professor of cinema studies at NYU, as well as director emeritus of its Institute of African Affairs – and his own films, which often consider how African traditions are pressured by global modernity. Screenings continued this year for AI: African Intelligence (2022), which hitches life and ritual in African fishing villages to the emergence of artificial intelligence, and ponders an Africanised relationship to algorithms; as well as Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023), which articulates the activist’s ideas on freedom, resistance, prison abolition and more. The Malian polymath put on another hat this year as a cocurator of Bamako Encounters, Africa’s most prominent biennial dedicated to photography. The 14th edition opened in November under the title Kuma (Bambara for ‘the word’), and features artists from across the continent whose work explores the interplay of image and language – a relation that Diawara has been mining for over three decades.