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- Convenors:
-
Marie Pernice
(Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3)
Sophie Moulard (Sciences-Po Bordeaux)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 15
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
As our entry in the Anthropocene is debated among the scientific community, calls to come back « down to earth » (Latour, 2017) in order to inhabit the Earth from its soil increase. In this panel, we would thus like to reflect upon African futures sinking down into the subsoils of the continent.
Long Abstract:
Squeezing out by an ever more aggressive extractivism the resources consumed by our society, the future we build is doomed to root itself in an hollowed out soil threatening to collapse under us. To try and hinder this process, scientists and philosophers put forward new ways of thinking inspired by the mineral world, especially by its temporality (Bjornerud, 2018) and by geological phenomena such as sedimentation (Duperrex, 2022).
Hence, in this panel we suggest to take the point of view of the mineral to imagine Africa's futures from its subsoils. Our approach wants to be both anthropological and literary.
Indeed, the hollowing of the subsoils impacts not only the future balance of African natural areas, but also the one of the human groups who live interdepently with them. This leads to investigate the strategies developped to inhabit an unstable soil, and how the daily attention paid to endangered subterranean spaces reshapes relationships within the communities who are related to them.
A number of recently published African novels, permeated by the imaginary of the underground, adress precisely these environmental and anthropological issues. A city whose foundations are eaten away by artisanal copper mines in Sinzo Aanza's work (2015), a delta devastated by oil industry in Helon Habila's (2010): vulnerable subterranean spaces and the fate of those who rely on them generate literary plots. Trying to capture through their writing subterranean ecosystems, authors unveil their unique esthetics and the crucial part they play in the building of African futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
By examining literary production about resource extraction from Johannesburg and the Niger Delta, I foreground lived experiences of environmental transformation, waste, and pollution. The paper theorises notions of temporality, highlighting slow violence and exhausted futurity.
Paper long abstract:
Literary production about oil drilling in the Niger Delta and gold mining in Johannesburg has been copious. This paper analyses how subterranean resources come to the surface, causing environmental transformations and overhauling lived experiences. I examine “Fancies Idle” by Peter Abrahams (1938), Mohale Mashigo’s Intruders (2018), and Uhuru Phalafala’s Mine, Mine, Mine (2023), alongside Obari Gomba’s Pearls of the Mangrove (1999), Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), and Chimeka Garrick’s A Broken People’s Playlist (2020). Combining literary analysis with socio-environmental history, I will highlight two issues. First, I seek to understand how notions of waste and pollution have been experienced, relating this to questions of value in the context of mining and oil drilling. By zooming in on mining waste dumps and agricultural fields devastated by oil spills, I ask what was valued and by whom. How could the promise of extractive wealth coexist with ecosystem ruination? How has literature depicted the creation of sacrifice zones and wasting relationships? Secondly, I theorise notions of temporality, connecting the past, to the present, and future. How do notions of slow violence come together with exhausted futurities? How does literary production mediate resource extraction’s future promises of wealth and historical processes of pollution and environmental degradation? As resource extraction is one of the defining features of the Anthropocene, it is important to map historical and literary representations of mining and oil drilling in order to understand the material and imaginative transformations it has set in motion.
Paper short abstract:
Pepetela’s O desejo de Kianda and Ondjaki’s Os transparentes both describe “petro-magic”’s hold onto the Angolan capital Luanda. Through a poetic and animist exploration of the city, these novels announce the revenge of the more-than-human forces hidden in the Angolan subsoil.
Paper long abstract:
Written almost twenty years apart, Pepetela’s O desejo de Kianda and Ondjaki’s Os transparentes both describe “petro-magic”’s hold onto the Angolan capital Luanda. Through a poetic and animist exploration of the city, these novels announce the revenge of the more-than-human forces hidden in the Angolan subsoil. In Pepetela’s narrative, the “deep” rise up against the neocolonial order through the figure of Kianda, the water-spirit destroying the Kinaxixi buildings to free itself from its asphalt prison. In Ondjaki’s novel, on the other hand, devastating excavations are conducted to unearth the oil reserves hidden in Luanda’s subsoil, evoking a morbid process of neoliberal self-devoration taking place under the eyes of a defeated population. Despite their antinomic outcome, this article will argue that both books seek to uncover traces of popular solidarities, brought back through the lens of animist cosmologies and new possibility of interspecies coalitions.
Paper short abstract:
As African subsoils are subject to a growing extractivism, this paper questions the conflicting underground imaginaries underlying contemporary French-speaking and English-speaking African novels. It especially highlights the unstability of soils caused by extractive processes.
Paper long abstract:
Subterranean spaces are subject to a growing extractivism, partly triggered by fantasies about the riches they conceal. This rush towards earth's depths and their wonders constitutes the backdrop of numerous contemporary French-speaking and English-speaking African novels, such as Généalogie d'une banalité by Sinzo Aanza (2015) or Oil on water by Helon Habila (2010). This paper aims at questionning the various underground imaginaries associated with mines and oil extraction areas which intertwine in some of these novels. Indeed, staging the conflictual appropriation of supposedly bountiful African subsoils, they often oppose the idealized vision of infinite riches extracted from the underground by powerful mining companies, to the more or less sterile digging of artisanal miners and mining city dwellers, hoping to escape their squalid daily life via the undreground. However, those extractive pratices on different scales converge in so far as they hollow out the soil, making it liable to collapse. The unstability of the soil thus caused by polluting extractive processes tends to blur the frontier between aboveground and underground. Literary portrayals of aboveground through a subterranean imaginary ensue. Hence, the thick dust produced by excavating sometimes literally covers up everything in the open air, recreating some sort of new layer above the surface. In parallel, the impression of living beneath the earth can also merely be induced by modified sensory perceptions, oppressive settings and psychological pressure. In this respect, the novels studied in this paper aesthetically bear testitomy to a subterranean experience located whether literally underground or aboveground.
Paper short abstract:
Multidisciplinary presentation of an anthropological work in the Western Sahara - Laayoune and Dakhla - and its philosophical analysis, to think about the limits of international law using literature as a territorial definition to extractivist sovereignty.
Paper long abstract:
This work takes place through a transdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and philosophy. The starting point of our contribution is based in a four-month fieldwork research - as a preamble to a longer research - in Western Sahara, mainly around the regions of Dakhla and Laayoune. The empirical data of this ethnography is based on the observation of this "local" economy which is characterized by the colonial extraction of natural resources.
In this dynamic, it is the economical, politico-religious, and legal inscriptions that determine the prolongation of a colonial situation whose analysis must be made. In that sense, the clientelist relations and their resistances to the long time are one of the consequences of this post-colonial political order that we will analyze. We propose to think about the consequences of a delinking (Mignolo, 2007) from the economic, legal, and literary representations produced by europeo-centrism. In fact, taking this shift, allows us to analyze a "regime of historicity" (Hartog, 2003) alongside the colonial library (Mudimbe, 1988): manuscripts, architectural forms, economic and ideas circulations, oral histories, and invisible entities. The poems of Mohamed Salah Abdelfatah "Ebnu" or Limam Boisha offers an apprehension of extractivism and the logics of coloniality but also of the spaces of possible emancipations and recognitions that do not respond to the configurations of the jus publicum europeanum : the colonial/extractivistic matrix of international law.