Paper short abstract:

Egyptology is witnessing a shift of its perspective, from the study of ancient Egypt towards an appreciation of the entangled history of Egypt between Africa, Europe and the Middle East, past and present. This paper explores the potential of Egyptology for a shared thinking about an Afropean future.

Paper long abstract:

Egyptology was one of the most transnationally operating academic fields at the beginning of the 20th century, writes art historian and anthropologist Bénédicte Savoy in her book on the bust of the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti that is displayed today in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Her assessment rightly highlights the strongly interrelated involvement of European nation states and the US in the institutional and academic formation of Egyptology and in the intellectual appropriation of ancient Egypt for the cultural memory of "the West". Such narratives have traditionally overlooked the exclusionary effects of Egytology on the African context and the wider population of Egypt. Egyptian Pharaonism and Afrocentric interpretation of ancient Egypt have been politically driven responses to European Egyptology. This paper asks how transnationalism can be redefined positively to make Egyptology relevant to an inclusive Afropean future. It positions Egyptology in the long history of the Afropean world and addresses current perspectives on and approaches to a shared thinking about ancient Egypt. Given the many obstacles - inequalities within and among countries, Euro-American biases in global knowledge regimes, the entrenchment of academia and heritage in political and economic interests, currently rising nationalism in Europe - the paper is a tentative exploration of what "Egyptology in an Afropean world" might mean.

Paper short abstract:

This work examines the role of indigenous Africans and medical employees in the management and promotion of Western medicine in southwestern Nigeria.

Paper long abstract:

This work examines the role of indigenous Africans and medical employees in the management and promotion of Western medicine in southwestern Nigeria. This will restore agency to the subordinating groups of indigenous African medical workers who were very instrumental in the provision of medical services, especially to rural communities in southwestern Nigeria. As part of this research effort, the ways several African subordinate health workers such as dispensary workers, sanitary workers, sanitary inspectors, nurses, and local health providers collectively or individually worked to contribute to the promotion of healthcare services in most rural spaces in the southwestern region will be examined. This research promises to make a significant contribution to knowledge in terms of providing a new perspective for examining the colonial medical service in Nigeria, especially the roles of the indigenous subordinating Nigerians who have often been overlooked or at best given scant attention, in the works on colonial medical service in Nigeria. By adopting a subaltern approach, my research promises to effectively capture the voices, activities, and agency of the largely unsung heroes of the colonial medical system in terms of providing various healthcare services to rural dwellers who were largely left out of the colonial medical system.

Paper short abstract:

“Afropean” is treated here as a contemporary analysis Euro-african relations. I will, however, show a deeper history to this concept- tracking the fundamental relationship between the colonial mobility governance and racial classification, through histories of Greek migration in southern Africa

Paper long abstract:

The study of Euro-African mobility has, of late, focussed on European anxieties about African mass immigration. This anxiety is a manifestation of a centuries old urge to dominate mobility, human and material, across oceans - to define and thus govern the "desirable" and "undesirable" migrant ever more carefully. A close reading of that history reveals a spectrum of immigrant origins, identities and experiences – such as those of Greek immigrants in Southern Africa who were neither coloniser nor colonised. This reality sat uneasily both within imperial ideologies, premised on binaries of coloniser and colonised, and emerging modernist ideas of “scientific”, racialised colonial governance in the late 19th century. In response, colonial and imperial officials produced a growing and ever-changing set of immigration governance systems that relied on ever-increasing formalisation of the classification of desirable (i.e.: “white”) and undesirable mobility, moving patterns of classification away from older, cruder “common sense” ideas of racial superiority. This paper is therefore concerned with the establishment and reinforcement of the boundaries of “Europeanness” through ideas of “whiteness” and “civilisation” and, eventually, in opposition to "Africanness" and “Nativeness”. It seeks to explore how these categories were negotiated and changed over time and how its inherent contradictions, in turn, created systems of migration governance that are central to the global history of migration governance to this day.

Paper short abstract:

Brazil and Cuba are considered as 2 primary locations within the process of the diasporization of Ifá/Orisa traditions in the New World. The focus of this paper is a close reading of some of the documents and monuments that are today a great legacy of that era and tradition across the Black Atlantic

Paper long abstract:

Brazil and Cuba are considered as 2 primary locations within the process of the diasporization of Ifá/Orisa traditions in the New World. The focus of this paper is a close reading of some of the documents and monuments that are today a great legacy of that era and tradition across the Black Atlantic. The metaphor of museums as a 'storehouse' for memories and a warehouse of historic documents shall be deployed in the analyses of the corpus and populations selected for the essay.

Paper short abstract:

Going beyond the debate on "African vs European time" the paper looks at practices of standardizing and vernacularizing time. I investigate opportunities that allow to chose between time registers, in particular when referring to the future in current Afropean debates on global environmental change.

Paper long abstract:

If thinking of Africa or Europe in terms of a continental space is flawed (see "The myth of continents" by Lewis and Wigan 1997), then what about "Afropean time"? After all, most Africans and Europeans are connected by living in the same, or neighbouring, time zones: "Greenwich Mean Time" as it was known in the colonial past and "Zulu Time" as it still called in international sea- and air traffic. Co-evalness is what we strive for in anthropological accounts and the stereotypes connected to "African time" seem to be finally on the way out. Do we need a new language that helps us to talk about shared and diversified concepts of time? Do we all mean the same things when we identify "generations" or when we complain about "seniors exploiting juniors" or ("juniors not respecting seniors") - also in university settings? And in terms of practical research: What is the time horizon that we target? Is scholarly writing always for "eternity"? Or is it only relevant when it is part of a fixed-term project? How much do we want to invest in archiving and accumulating? How important is forgetting and giving things up?

In this contribution I trace some of these questions. I want to overcome the old debate on "African versus European time" by looking at practices of standardizing and vernacularizing time instead. And I investigate opportunities that allow to chose between time registers, in particular when referring to the future in current debates about the global environmental crisis.

Paper short abstract:

This is an exploration of the gestures in Evangelical religious performances. It aims to understand how certain ‘visible bodily actions’ acquire social significance such that they convey spirituality. The point of departure are the communicative gestures of Nigerian Yoruba religious practitioners.

Paper long abstract:

Common to the Afropean world is religion, in this case, Christianity. It includes a message and practitioners both of which have to be communicated to observers as holy and spiritual respectively. Stepping away from dogma, the performance of religiosity is integral to the spread of religion and the ability of religion to captivate is inextricably linked to gestural signals and embodied practices not only of its practitioners but also of its material objects of representation and significations. Of interest to me in this discussion is to understand how a religious gesture emerges, assumes its meaning and significance such that there is a communal and conventional consensus that is built around a specific ‘form + meaning’ relationship. What informs the perception of certain movements of the body, including facial expressions, head, and hand gestures (kinesics), postures, deictics, and paralanguages among others as ‘spiritual’ rather than mundane? What social pressures inform their selection and configure their uses? Are there specific language ideologies that work in their evocation to elicit, as it were, ineluctable pious deference, and that factors in their deployment to assert specific identities?

By posing and investigating the question- what is sacred in gestures, I intend to seek responses to the above questions as well as to explore the dynamics process involved in transforming a communicative signal into an index of spirituality. Data would be drawn from archival material and extant practices as observed among the Aladura Church and Deeper Life Bible Church from the Yoruba nation in Nigeria.