Paper long abstract:

Kasetsart University, Thailand's first agricultural university, has widely collaborated with African universities, NGOs and governments for several decades. This partnership has been forged through technical assistance, exchange programmes and postgraduate scholarships. However, the so-called 'exchange' is still far from reciprocal. In Thailand, little is still known about Africa, and there is a grave lack of body of knowledge on Africa in Thailand. Despite long-term commitment through development cooperation with African countries and institutions, a holistic approach has not been implemented to forge even greater relations between Thailand and Africa.

With the idea of creating a common ground for Thai and African scholars, the Faculty of Social Sciences at Kasetsart University is establishing a centre know as Kasetsart University Africa-Asia Centre (KU-AAC) to promote multidisciplinary research on Africa. The centre aims at providing research grants for new and mid-career researchers who wish to conduct comparative research on Asia-Africa. It also wishes to act as a bridge between faculties within Kasetsart University, government ministries and other Africa-related partners and create a new interactive platform. In future, the centre plans to implement a new multidisciplinary postgraduate curriculum where Africans can learn about Thailand as much as Thailand can learn from Africa.

Currently, the Centre has gone through the brainstorming phase where a group of scholars from different parts of Africa and Southeast Asia gave their ideas on how the centre can be organized and implemented in a sustainable way. We hope that we can start accepting research proposals at the beginning of 2021.

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Paper long abstract:

The international roundtable on Asian Studies in Africa that took place between 9-11 November, 2012 at Chisamba, Lusaka, Zambia, was premised on the realisation that though contact between Africa and Asia stretches centuries back and has intensified and diversified in the last few decades through capital investment, commerce, political alliances and cultural transfers of knowledge, there has been no corresponding or systematic academic engagements with past and present African and Asian realities.

This lack is more glaring on the African continent where the study of Asia is still largely absent. A search for African universities offering Asian still draws a blank. This is despite the existence of some such programmes in isolated places such as at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, the recently established Centre for Asian studies at the University of Ghana and attempts to do so at the University of Dar-es-Salaam. Since the roundtable of 2012, and two major international conferences, one in Ghana and the other in Dar-es-Salaam in 2015 and 2018 respectively, discussions on how to build capacity in Asian studies in Africa have continued.

In the proposed presentation I hope to provide an overview of the current state of Asian Studies in South Central Africa as well as attempt an appreciation of challenges one encounters in trying to promote Asian studies in Africa. Even though the number of Africans with PhD’s on Asia has continued to increase, this has not resulted in the establishments of academic programmes specific on Asia. Why has this been the case? I hope to address this question.

Drawing on my own research experience in Vietnam and the conference I attended in Ho Chi Minh City and Phan Thiet in 2018, I will also attempt a discussion of why studying Asia can be of more relevance to Africa. This is particularly important at a time when a number of Asian and African countries are working together to develop academic and research agenda’s that could offer possible solutions to Africa’s current social and economic problems.

Paper long abstract:

Based on reflections of the 1955 Asian-African Conference (Bandung) and fuelled by the recent initiatives of the Africa-Asia Collaborative Framework (the 2012 Roundtable in Lusaka; the 2015 A-Asia conference in Accra; the 2018 A-Asia conference in Dar es Salaam; the 2020 workshop in Kasetsart Bangkok; and the future 2021 A-Asia conference in Saint-Louis, it was necessary for the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) to initiate and eventually set to launch the Africa-Asia Research Platform (A-ARP).

Having three constituent colleges (two for education and one for health), six campus colleges at the Mlimani Main Campus, five schools, five specialized academic Institutes (including the Confucius Institute), nine Directorates, twelve Centres (including Korean Studies, Chinese Studies, Indian Studies Centres), four Bureaus, four Service units and one Company, UDSM had been experiencing diversities in engaging with Asia. Establishment and formalization of the A-ARP not only bring together the UDSM faculty and graduate students from across the university with scholars from different parts of the world to identify key areas for research, theoretical and practical interventions and knowledge production and exchange (and/or sharing) but also enhance the spirit of unity and integration that is delivered by engaging with Asia in its entirety rather than in blocs and compartmentalization.

This paper documents the trails of fostering the unity and integration through Africa-Asia collaborative networks and situates the A-ARP on the same while highlighting an acceleration of the viable possibility of intervening in and reshaping the prevailing Africa-Asia collaborative interventions. The paper emphasizes the enduring lessons of the Bandung spirit residing in the challenges of resolving the tensions over the appropriate context for pursuing self-determination and paves ways for re-emergence of Africa-Asia concrete collaborative initiatives built in the sense of unity and integration.

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Paper long abstract:

Since 2012, IIAS has been engaged in the facilitation of an inclusive South-South Africa-Asia intellectual platform engaging academic institutions and individuals from the two world regions. The process began with an exploratory programmatic workshop in Chisanba, Zambia, in 2012, which laid the ground for the establishment of a pan-African African Association for Asian Studies (A-ASIA) and the running of triennial Asia-Africa open conferences in Africa. The first of these major (historical) events was organized in Accra, Ghana, in 2015, in collaboration with Legon university. A second such event was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 2018. The next event is scheduled to take place, in 2022 in Saint-Louis, Senegal, (with one-year delay because of the Covid pandemic). All these activities are built on close collaborations involving multiple actors (academic, arts and civil society), with the objective of supporting an inclusive, non-hegemonic, humanistic space of intellectual interactions between the two continents, that is not limited to geo-economic or political considerations. Partners from the other world regions, including Europe, are of course welcome to participate in the A-A platform.

Thanks to its wide global multi-sector network and its post-colonial institutional standing, IIAS plays an important role as logistical facilitator, especially by incorporating the know-how it acquired in running the world renown biennial International Convention for Asia Scholars (ICAS). The institute supports the activities of the A-ASIA network and it works closely with AA conference host institutions.

In addition, IIAS supports the development of an alternative transregional knowledge production and dissemination initiative through the 'Humanities Across Borders (HaB), Africa and Asia in the World' programme. HaB is not only set to re-imagine a truly multi-centered collaborative educational academic effort. The programme is also characterised by its revolutionary pedagogical approach in which knowledge is shaped, and shared, from the stand-point of local communities (vis-à-vis the state) around themes drawn from the lived experiences of making (craft), speaking (language), eating (food), and dwelling (space). Supported by the Mellon Foundation, New York, and built around a consortium of 20 institutions in Africa, Asia, North and Latin America and Europe, the HaB programme is primarily built on an active Africa-Asia 'axis of knowledge'.

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Paper long abstract:

This presentation will explore the Centres for Asian Studies in Africa as actors in the counter-hegemonic project of decolonization. In this regard it will pivot around the activities of the Centre for Asian Studies (CAS) which was founded barely a year after the Asian Studies in Africa Conference which took place in September 2015 in Accra, Ghana. The presentation will share and discuss the logistical, spatial, financial, organizational, strategic, ideational and other realities that must be confronted in building Asian Studies Centres in Africa using CAS as a case study. The presentation will point out how African Asianist scholars with their partners elsewhere decided to take counterhegemonic action, and how their approach differs from the status quo as a prefigurative politics of the power-with society they seek. It will then conclude with the needling challenges that still remain to be surmounted.

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Paper long abstract:

Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) is a public social science and humanities university instituted in 2009 to bring together academic excellence and social justice. It was natural for the university to begin with focusing on concerns generative of Indian and South Asian realities. Soon, however, it was realised that regions and localities are co-produced by intersecting processes at multiple scales. Since 2012, a few of us have collaborated to think through 'the Global' at the present conjuncture, that is, in a post-Cold War, neoliberal, multipolar, urban and ecologically-fraught world. These conversations resulted in the formation of the new School of Global Affairs, with academic programmes planned in the areas of Global Studies, Urban Studies, Public Health, Religion, and Science and Technology Studies. Of these, the first two have already begun. In designing the programmes, among other things, a pedagogical reimagination of the world has been attempted. Rather than take the continental imaginary for granted, we have pieced the world together via alternate cultural/environmental regions such as the Indian Ocean and the Himalayas. This way of imagining the world brings a historical, ecological and critical lens to the continuities and ruptures in the study of Africa and Asia-Africa, which, in the dominant thought regimes, are viewed through a narrowly state-centered and strategic lens. My intervention here will delve further into these issues, and make an argument for an engagement with Africa as part of a wider reimagination of the global in higher education and scholarship.

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Paper long abstract:

In 2016, the International Institute for Asian Studies approached us to invite us to participate in a project to build an Asian-African response to a global problem: reinventing and refocusing the place of the Humanities in the economy of the production of academic knowledge. The proposal came to us, not only at the right time, but also with a double interest.

At the right time, because we were in the midst of an attempt to promote, within our traditional university spaces, experiences of breaking away from inherited models, towards forms of production and sharing of knowledge in more decolonized modes. This was of twofold interest because, on the one hand, one of our leitmotivs at the time was to develop, from Africa, African readings or understandings on major world issues, and, on the other hand, to promote relations of collaboration and complicity with the Asian worlds and the African diasporas.

This paper returns, for a critical analysis, to the various contexts (institutional, programmatic and material, opportunities and obstacles) that have marked the construction of our response to the invitation of IIAS: the creation, in Senegal, of a Centre for Asian Studies in Francophone Africa.

It evaluates the dynamics and interactions, the positioning and the reservations that this offer has aroused for 4 years, both in the local context and in the international network that gave birth to it. It shows the learning processes that these authors have experienced in order to get around the difficulties, better argue the need for this Centre and, finally, find solutions to move the project forward.

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