Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Anth47


Lexicons of freedom, experiences of emancipation 
Convenors:
Alessandro Gusman (University of Turin)
Riccardo Ciavolella (CNRS/EHESS)
Alice Bellagamba (University of Milan-Bicocca)
Send message to Convenors
Format:
Panel
Streams:
Anthropology (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
Location:
Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 22
Sessions:
Friday 2 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin

Short Abstract:

Freedom is increasingly indicative of an emerging field of reflection in African Studies and beyond. We invite papers to open a "bottom-up" perspective that questions freedom as dreamt, sought, and achieved in concrete experiences of successful (or unsuccessful) emancipation.

Long Abstract:

For long onto the margins of African studies, freedom is increasingly indicative of an emerging field of reflection that combines ethnography, history and political sciences in order to reposition the discussion on its contours and contents from a Southern perspective.

Insights on African lexicons of freedom, as entangled in specific cultural and social environments, come from Riesman's pioneering ethnography of Fulani ideas of self and society (1973) or from Kopytoff and Miers' (1977) seminal definition of African freedoms in terms of belonging, which Nyamnjoh (2002) and Geschiere (2009) have further enriched through a focus on contemporary contexts. Whereas post-colonial thinkers have addressed this controversial notion in light of African history of subjection first to the slave trade, and then to European imperialism, a growing literature has considered African ideas of freedom at the crossroad between local, regional, interregional and global process of change. Other researchers have explored the wave of new declinations of freedom triggered by the end of Cold War and the 1990s liberalisation of the continent's economies and political systems through processes of privatisation, decentralisation, and democratization (i.e. Englund 2006).

Focusing on local and historicised lexicons of freedom (and related ideas of autonomy, mastery of the self, independence, etc.), we invite to open a "bottom-up" perspective that questions freedom as dreamt, sought, and achieved in concrete experiences of successful (or unsuccessful) emancipation. Authors are invited to submit papers based on field and/or archival research, to enhance the understanding of the similarities and differences cutting across geography and history.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -
Session 2 Friday 2 June, 2023, -