Paper long abstract:

Where does our responsibility ends? Beyond what point do we no longer feel obliged to respond, to care, to study, to re-experience and re-think our own? When the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote his post-WWII philosophical texts (for example Negative Dialectics, 1966) his perhaps most urgent call was for including the unthinkable horrors of holocaust in Western philosophical thought, to let this radically outside experience in the philosophical cabinet. When, in Time and the Other (1984), the anthropologist Johannes Fabian contemplated how his discipline produces knowledge about the world's other people he famously coined the phrase 'the denial of coevalness' to describe the various strategies by which ethnographic texts deprived the others' experience of coevalness with that of the West.

In my presentation, I want to argue that the Czech postcommunist society's perception of Africa as the epistemological and experiential outside and of Africans as inhabiting another time-space unrelated to the Czechs' own, hence largely irrelevant is - due to local intellectual developments before and after the 1989, largely untouched by critical theory, anthropological debates of the 1970s and 80s, and post- and decolonial thinking - widespread as a sort of common sense in Czech academia too, having peculiar consequences for the shape of African studies in the Czech Republic today. To demonstrate the problem, I use my personal insight as a member of the faculty into the discussions surrounding the founding of the Centre for African Studies at the country's oldest and largest Charles University in Prague in 2019 (where, significantly, the country's then only African studies program, having successfully run for more than four decades, was closed down around 2005) as an example. I believe that the above mentioned framework may not only help us understand the nature of the awkward debate whether to (re)include African studies in the university's Faculty of Arts that had formerly hosted the program and that is broadly considered the country's benchmark of academic performance in humanities, but also explain why certain fields of African studies have been more welcome and thriving at regional universities across the country rather than in the centre. Ultimately, by returning to the initial questions, I try to offer an understanding of the underlying challenges African studies face in the Czech Republic as not just economic but moral, deeply political and having much to do with the postcommunist condition.

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Paper long abstract:

African Philosophy as a site of confrontation and collaboration with Europe has focused largely on Western and Southern Europe as mostly representative of European culture and scholarship, much to the negligence of Eastern and Central Europe. This cultural reductionism though, is best situated within a historical and imperialist context of blanket inferiority created by European scholarship, and to which much of anticolonial African scholarship has been a response. The idea of a monolithic, non-literate and barbaric Africa as conceived by Europe, is historically antecedent to the continent's counter-hegemonic decolonial scholarship that ignores the diversity and plurality of European history, culture and scholarship. This situation however, places significant limitations on the cross-cultural, collaborative and reflexive scholarship between Africa and Europe needed for decolonizing and decentering knowledge for mutual benefits. Using gender discourse as fodder, this paper makes a case for intercontinental multiplicity of knowledge by exploring the prospects for collaborative scholarship between Eastern Europe and Africa. Some of the questions that this paper aims to answer include: What instances of cultural, semantic or epistemic difference account for contested notions of gender and women rights, and to what extent is their appreciation obscured by the marginalization of peripheral voices? What contradictions and similarities characterize the conceptions of gender in Pre-communist Eastern Europe and Precolonial Africa? To what extent has the Western notion of gender contributed or inhibited meaningful gender discourse in Post-communist Europe and Postcolonial Africa? What are the prospects and challenges of a cross-cultural engagement between Eastern Europe on the one hand, and Sub-saharan Africa on the other, in the bid to proffer meaningful alternatives to dominant Western views on gender? Interrogating the notion of gender rights in Sub-Saharan African and Eastern European cultures represents one promising area of cross-cultural interrogation that stimulates a reimagination of the Western conception of gender as universal canon. The paper posits further that Eastern Europe, like Africa, has to some degree been a victim of Western epistemic and cultural subjugation, such that both are confronted with the burden of moving from the periphery to the centre in a bid to reclaim epistemic agency. While anticipating the methodological, historical, linguistic and cultural impediments to cross-cultural understanding, the paper concludes by identifying promising ways of reconceptualizing gender discourse from a diverse and inclusive perspective that normatively resonates with prevailing global realities.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the fact that African Studies in the Czech Republic were constituted a few decades ago, the trajectory of the discipline has been interrupted several times and it is only slowly finding its place among other established academic fields. Currently, Czech African Studies face multiple challenges at different levels: limited funding for research at the national level, heavy teaching and administrative loads at universities, external challenges of the discipline's relevance, and internal struggles within, to name just a few of them. Any attempt for change would have to address the situation in its complexity.

The proposed paper argues that one of the avenues for improvement would be to focus the attention on the generation of early career researchers. In the current context of a generational exchange, where the founding mothers and fathers of the discipline are leaving the scene, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers can support Czech African studies in multiple ways. The paper analyses the situation of the early career researchers in African studies in the Czech Republic including the structural conditions shaping their professional choices. It offers suggestions that could inform the scholarly paths of young researchers within the current context and, by implication, the prospects of the whole discipline.

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Paper long abstract:

Over the centuries, Africa was considered as a wild backward periphery and Africans as barbarians excluded from knowledge production, from culture and history. The «colonial library» was spread by foreigners - writers, adventurers, missioners, colonial officers. They were interested in creating «an image of Africa» changed over time, but always remained a cliché transformed in stereotypes.

Epistemological decolonization started in the mid-20th century is still ongoing. At the end of the 20th century, Africa went beyond the framework of Eurocentric ideas, declaring itself not only a continent with a rich and diverse culture and considerable potential, but also capable of shaping a worldview and uniting people all over the world. Africa and the African Diaspora have created a phenomenon known as Trans-Africa. Its intellectual, cultural, gender, personal, everyday histories keep topicality and applicability, engaging people throughout the world.

The turn of the 20th and 21st centuries was marked by a dramatic change of «discoursive formats». Postcolonial discourse has drawn African intellectuals into the field of research and has taken to the forefront of world science and humanities. Ali Mazrui, Abiola Irele, Frantz Fanon, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Toyin Falola contributed to the transformation of the metanarratives on Africa and African Diaspora. Philip Emeagwali - the Father of the Internet; Dambisa Moyo and her book «Dead Aid» (2009), followed by Leonce Ndikumana; Achille Mbembe and his ideas of Afropolitanism, «necropolitics» and «postcolony»; etc. - have inspired a «cyber attack» on stereotypes as well as the Eurocentric system of knowledge, by suggesting strategic fairness in partnerships, thus opening the portals of the «postcolonial library» opened.

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