Forthcoming Seminar Series in the Centre for African Studies: Producing Africa
How has Africa been produced through different disciplinary knowledgeprojects, institutional sites and contemporary discourses?
This seminar series focuses on questions of knowledge production, and on the role of the university as a postcolonial institution. We want to make the link between disciplinary discourses, the university as institution, and a coloniality of knowledge and practice in present-day South Africa. A central question for us is how we set about producing knowledge in and of Africa outside of the framework of three inherited discourses: colonial ethnography, a nativist or essentialist discourse on Africa, and a form of development discourse which sees Africa as a problem to be fixed. In other words, how do we think Africa outside of tropes of Otherness, essential difference, and social pathology?
As the continent is reconfigured in shifting global geopolitics, economies and imaginaries, so is knowledge of, in and about it. How is Africa, and “African Studies”, being positioned within a contemporary configuration of knowledge/ power, as part of a process of “imperial globality” (Escobar 2008)? What new ways of thinking and figuring Africa – and the disciplines – have emerged as part of resistant projects and dissident critiques; and how have these been institutionally sited? What theoretical co-ordinates and intellectual affiliations underlie such projects? How is Africa being thought in the postcolonial university? On the continent? In the Diaspora? In South Africa, specifically? How has South Africa’s role as regional hegemon been reflected in the realm of knowledge production? How do we write a non-colonial knowledge agenda for the postcolonial university from the perspective of our own time and place?
Intended as a set of provocations, such questions point to an area of critical enquiry and an overdue debate on knowledge, the disciplines, and the university as institution, in the context of colonialism/apartheid and their aftermaths. The seminar series seeks to raise debate, unsettle disciplinary knowledges and engage critically with the ways in which contemporary Africa is being produced.
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