Paper short abstract:

In the current state of African Studies there is a strong tendency to marginalize early, "pre-colonial", History of Africa in favor of a presentist approach of African contemporary challenges. Historicity and the return to early History should be a priority within the field.

Paper long abstract:

History is one of the pillars of African Studies since the foundation of this interdisciplinary area study. However, in recent years, this status of History within the field is not so clear. We examine two contrasting examples: the programs of the two major conferences on African Studies organised in Europe and the United States. Is it a general trend or a regional specificity? The place of History is unbalanced in the two cases but in both, though in different ways, there is a strong tendency to marginalize the early, "pre-colonial", History of Africa in favor of a presentist approach of African contemporary challenges.

In the second part of this paper we argue that historicity is indispensable to surpass the danger African Studies face of being subsumed as an area study field within Global Studies. The return to the History of early Africa should be a priority within the field. It puts supposed general and irreversible globalizing movements in perspective. A historicization of contexts and of concrete life experiences is needed to identify the different scales of connection, of web-like relations within Africa, its diasporas or elsewhere.

Paper short abstract:

The reflection on the challenges of decolonization in Africa remains current and active in any intellectual or political discourse on the state of the nation of many African states, still after about six decades from the moment in which many of them became independent

Paper long abstract:

The present work seeks to deconstruct, departing from the theses of Frantz Fanon, especially those formulated in the "Wretched of the Earth", the idea of a supposed civilizing mission, underlying the colonizing intention embodied in the equation "colonization equals civilization and paganism equals savagery. " On the basis of an inquiry about the questionable validity of the above-mentioned equation, he crossed facts to the doctrines dealing with the phenomenon of the colonization of Africa. Fanon conceived, with some objectivity, that the colonization of Africa was more a movement of depersonalization and objectification - of Africans in general and of black people in particular - than a project of humanization and emancipation of the black African natives. It became clear, throughout his work, that colonization was a violence based on the nominalization of the colonized. A violence that not only presided over the arrangement of the colonial world, but also rhythmed and nurtured the anthropological and ontological destruction of the black African, including all its social forms; it completely destroyed its systems of economic references, its "essendi et operandi" modes and decreed the socio-cultural crisis of the black African people.

Paper short abstract:

Francisco José Tenreiro is generally regarded as the first Portuguese-speaking poet of Négritude. This paper deals with his intellectual and artistic influences on African post-independence debates of belonging and with his influence on the discussion about a lusophone sense of belonging.

Paper long abstract:

Francisco José Tenreiro (1921-1963) is generally regarded as the first Portuguese-speaking poet of Négritude. Influenced by the black intellectual pioneers of his time, such as Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, Tenreiro did not distance himself from European influences and always sought bridges between Europe and Africa. In his poems as well as in his essays, he thus became a pioneer of conceptual concepts of mestizo and cultural encounter. By explicitly referring to his blackness and simultaneously declaring his poetic work as "lusophone" work, Tenreiro breaks down the boundary between colonial exclusion and intellectual assimilation. Through this approach he is not only a figure of resistance against the dictatorship and colonialism of his time, but already offers perspectives for the later African struggle about the question of (non-)affiliation to the lusophone space and the handling of the colonial heritage. This paper deals with Tenreiro's intellectual and artistic influences on this debate of belonging and asks to what extent Tenreiro's thinking still has an influence on the today's discussion about a lusophone sense of belonging.

Paper short abstract:

This work aims to discuss how digital games as GTA: San Andreas and GTA V corroborate the social belief that people with black skin color are criminals by nature. It is important for us to debate that, so we can fight back the prejudice imposed by Colonialism and Slavery.

Paper long abstract:

Stuart Hall (1994) points out the existence of a movement from black people looking for their representativeness under the domination imposed by the white culture. There is a need to create artistic manifestations that placed them as protagonists of their own actions. It is, of course, a way of perceiving themselves, especially at the beginning of the post-colonial period. This is important, because Caucasian society preaches the "erasure" of black culture: either they assume themselves as individuals belonging to the white society in order to reinforce the supremacy of that society, or disappear from it, making themselves culturally invisible. Hooks (1992) states that the absence of blacks in cultural material impairs the identity formation of these individuals. Since they do not see themselves in products that they consume, they understand themselves as inferior beings, culturally marginalized and incapable of self-valorization. Among the cultural products in which the blacks are in the background or do not even appear, are the electronic games. Although they are currently one of the most influential media around the world (Arseth, 2012), video game content is not intended for the black population. Or, when they are, they start from the bias of the marginalization of the black, especially of the man, as can be seen in the GTA: San Andreas and GTA V. This research work therefore aims to show how these two games corroborate the social belief that people with that skin color are criminals by nature.

Paper short abstract:

I have adapted Culture Analysis Model by Geertz (2008) to this proposal. By adapting and adopting this model, I analyzed Tambarare story, written by Adelino Timóteo and the Legend Malidza of Carneiro Gonçalves, to show how different cultural representations can be apprehended on ethnographic literary texts.

Paper long abstract:

Writing about African culture in colonial languages creates a deficit on understanding performative dimensions.

To prove that, I will interpret some cultural events in the Tambarare story, written by Adelino Timóteo and in the Legend Malidza of Carneiro Gonçalves. My objective is to show how some cultural dimensions can be captured on the ethnographic literary texts and how some can be used if the text approaches a culture, using that cultures' language.

To achieve that, I have adapted Culture Analysis Model by Geertz (2008). It is used to analyses culture o real context. By adapting and adopting this model, I analyzed the above mentioned texts, to show how different cultural representations can be apprehended on literary writings.

To gauge conclusions I interviewed eleven research subjects from each of the cultures represented in the texts, namely ndau and sena, who confirmed that there is verisimilitude between the represented cultures and the real ones. However, some reader's imagination in each of the texts cannot be completed from the point of view of the apprehension of the performative questions, if the text approaches a culture by using different language. This leads me to recommend that get that and understand literary ethnographic texts it is necessary to use an literary and cultural model, for instances the one I will be using in this research. A part of that, this study can contribute on understanding of the necessity of stimulate the writing in African languages and the register of the African memory.

Paper short abstract:

The work Disgrace, by South African writer J. M. Coetzee, has been discussed as a paradoxical object as far as its postcolonial status is concerned. Many see its universalist message as a form of de-historicization.

Paper long abstract:

The work Disgrace (1999), by South African writer J. M. Coetzee, has been discussed as a paradoxical object as far as its postcolonial status is concerned (Poyner: 2009). In fact, many see in it an arguable universalist message and a form of de-historicization. For Attwell, when reading Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), such hypothesis on universalism should be differentiated from "strategic refusal of specificity" and historical location (1993:74). In our paper we present these two works and expect to confront some of the critique about them with our own take on the critical aspects considered above and the problem of particularity.

We will also draw brief comparisons with Mozambican fiction namely from Mia Couto and João Paulo Borges Coelho, since part of their work allows as well the discussion on the postcolonial, history and "re-worlding".

Paper short abstract:

Given the level of changes going on in the world, here is an effort to delineate a possible approach to understanding African Identity.

Paper long abstract:

The African identity has remained a very contested issue. The struggle to define an African has moved from the colonial oppositional approach and the self assertive philosophical model to the recent new methodological approach of hybridization, Afrofuturism, Afropolitanism etc. The reality is that there is hardly any consensus among philosophers on what constitutes African identity and her future. I intend to analyze these philosophical arguments. The aim is to query the philosophical implications of these views in relation to the future of African social and normative order.

Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this article is to analyze diachronically the currents of thought produced in Africa in the twentieth century, according to the reflections on autochthonous identities, alterity, and universalism present in the discussions of contemporary authors.

Paper long abstract:

"How African are the so-called African studies?" (HOUNTONDJI, 2010). This question was formulated by Paulin J. Hountondji to problematize the epistemology of the researches produced on Africa, and to pay attention to what he calls "ethnophilosophy". This ethnophilosophy is made more by Africanists than by Africans in the broad sense of the word. The critique of essentialism as an intellectual premise goes against the purposes of autochthonous and racialist assertion on which the Négritude movement was based. Developed in the 1930s, the movement had in Aimé Cesáire and Leopold Senghor its main formulators. Defined as the set of values of the black world, the movement proposed a development of this reflection in three directions: "art - expression of blackness; - politics and blackness; philosophy and blackness" (AGUIAR, 2018).

Today, a number of African intellectuals have been distancing themselves from the essentialist premises, notice of the problems of a supposed African collective philosophy. Valentine Mudimbe criticizes the fact that both Western interpreters and African analysts use categories and conceptual systems dependent on a Western epistemological order. In this direction, the very movement of Négritude is conceived from a Westernized episteme, although presented by Africans. The Cameroon Achille Mbembe (2014) problematizes the black identity when affirming that it can only be understood as "identity in becoming".

Our objective is to present an overview of the main assumptions that mark the debate between the authors who created and formatted the concept of Negritude as well as its contemporary critics.