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- Convenors:
-
Nikitta Adjirakor
(University of Ghana)
Mingqing Yuan (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Language and Literature (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 24
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
In this panel, we invite reflections on current and imagined practices that produce a narrative of an inclusive, freedom-making space of African Studies and academia. What steps and strategies produce a future of learning, teaching and publishing that transgressively reclaims knowledge?
Long Abstract:
In the comedy drama series, The Chair (2021), the fictional Pembroke University is used to illustrate the asymmetries in knowledge production, particularly through a gendered and racialised lens. Throughout the show, the two women of colour attempt to reimagine the university, its pedagogy, praxis and sense of community making. Imagination, then, can be posited as a rebellious act that can attempt to redefine and reestablish academia. Outside the fictional Pembroke University, the disparity in knowledge production is also replicated in African Studies. Practices like publishing, fieldwork, funding and pedagogy reveal entrenched imbalances where academic knowledge and its rewards are carried out on the bodies of Black people while simultaneously withheld from said people.
In this panel, we invite reflections that take imagination as a core concept to address the potential transformative environment of African Studies within and outside the university. How might practices in academia be reimagined as spaces against systemic exclusion? What does the future of learning, teaching and publishing that seeks to transgressively reclaim knowledge look like? What does it mean to actively imagine a decolonized future, rooted in decolonisation's rebellious and restorative historical meaning? What steps and strategies echo this rebelliousness, building spaces and structures that reimagine African Studies? We invite reflections on current as well as imagined practices that produce a narrative of an inclusive, freedom-making space of African Studies and academia.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 June, 2023, -Valerie Gruber (University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
We will reflect on online and on-site methods of knowledge co-creation developed with Afro-descendant artists and community actors from Brazil and Colombia. These practices aim at exploring imaginations of a life in dignity through mutually beneficial ways of doing academic research.
Paper long abstract:
Participatory approaches to knowledge production address an urgent need in African and African Diaspora studies: they are laboratories to imagine and develop research practices targeted at overcoming social, racial and gendered hierarchies. Based on two years of doing Participatory Action Research (PAR) with Afro-descendant communities from Brazil and Colombia, we will present diverse methods of knowledge co-creation carried out both online and on-site. Thereby, artistic forms of expression such as music, dance and poetry are used as a common language to imagine life in dignity and identify strategies to achieve this vision. Accompanied by an online mentoring process, our PAR group produced several video performances during the pandemic and published them on the DjumbaiALA YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@djumbaiala2458/videos). In 2022, we realized the actual exchange program in Cartagena (Colombia) and Salvador da Bahia (Brazil), bringing together young artists and community actors from both countries. We found that the imagination of alternative futures is only possible if hierarchies in formal education, gender, race or class do not inhibit an open exchange of ideas and concepts. This requires a high level of empathy and constant dialogue, taking advantage of methodologies stemming from social arts and arts education. Reflecting on these experiences sheds light on diverse possibilities to co-create academic and artistic knowledges as well as the potentials and limitations of transdisciplinary online and on-site collaboration. This aims at inspiring researchers and professionals who intend to ground their work with Black communities on reciprocity and mutual learning, while boosting creativity, equality and decoloniality.
Sadia Zulfiqar (LUMS, Lahore, Pakistan)
Paper long abstract:
Through a focus on Mariam Bâ’s So Long a Letter, this paper argues for the importance of indigenous feminist theories in interpreting the work of African women writers. I argue that western systems of knowledge create binary categories, disregarding perspectives that do not conform to hegemonic frameworks; yet the radical indigenous feminism of Bâ’s text cannot be satisfactorily analyzed within such a worldview. Instead, I approach So Long a Letter using Minna Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge (2020), which focuses upon the emotional and spiritual needs of African women within their specific cultural milieu. Salami’s study posits emotion as a legitimate tool in the fight against sexism and racism; a valid way of knowing that can co-exist with reason rather than becoming its abject. This sheds light on Bâ’s feminist politics, as indigenous feminist structures reveal her heroine Ramatoulaye in all her complexity as an empowered Senegalese woman.
Glory Essien Otung (Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence - BIGSAS, University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
This paper advocates historical perspective in deliberations on imagination as rebellion against scholarship exclusivity. It recognizes (extra-)academic and multimodal sources in the analysis of strategies in the linguistic realization of imaginations in favor of inclusivity in African Studies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper advocates historical perspective in reflecting on current and imagined practices for an inclusive academia. Among the numerous colonial legacies in postcolonial societies are teaching, learning, and generally scientific methods. Drawing from Orientalism (Said 1978) and The Coloniality of Power (Quijano 2000; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013), the standardization and institutionalization of western thought patterns as academic disciplines, methods and publishing houses thrives across colonial and postcolonial/neocolonial phases. Accordingly, this paper is a postcolonial pragmatic (Anchimbe and Janney, 2010) analysis of 'Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense' by the Nigerian activist and music legend, Fela Kuti (1986) and excerpts from British colonial assessment records on precolonial education methods of the members of some Cameroonian communities (1916 – 1961), the former as historical but surviving linguistic realization of imagined campus indecorum. Campus indecorum is an oxymoron curled from the concept of campus decorum (Otung, 2021). While decorum is implicitly embedded in the conceptualization of campus in the later phrase, indecorum plays a contradictory role in the former. However, this literary technique captures the academia, its etiquettes, as well as the rebelliousness of ‘students’, a metaphor for the excluded adapted from the data. Analysis targets Fela’s conceptualizations of teacher as an epistemic gate-keeper. It also highlights Fela’s musical invitation to join his song as a clarion call to the excluded category to resume the resistance against exclusive scholarly etiquettes. By illustrating this suitable historical example and by providing recommendations for campus indecorum, this paper seeks to contributes to the reflections on inclusivity in African Studies.
Irene Brunotti (University of Leipzig) Lara-Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi (Institute of African Studies, University of Leipzig)
Paper short abstract:
We center two imaginative wor(l)ding practices - walking around in words and cutting words together-apart - which help us to imagine African Studies as a spacious un/learning space. Its un/freedom and un/safety made us and our students response-able towards in/justices within and beyond academia.
Paper long abstract:
We think through two imaginative wor(l)ding practices: (1) walking around in words and (2) cutting words together-apart (Barad 2007,2021). In the seminar Postcolonial Debates, we encouraged students to (1) to “walk around in a word or even a letter” because it “entails stories, different stories” (Barad & Gandorfer 2021: 32). Dashes facilitate such walks, like in Haraway’s (2016) ‘response-ability’, making us pause within the word, directing us towards becoming response-able (able to respond) in encounters with any-body. These walks lead to (2) cutting words together-apart, using the slash as in un/learning. Cutting together-apart is “the enactment of an agential cut together with the entanglement of what’s on “either side” of the cut since these are produced in one move” (Barad, Juelskjær, and Schwennesen 2012, 20). In un/learning, the slash re-members that, while learning, we are also unlearning. The slash keeps us in trouble, opening up ever new entanglements and wor(l)ds. It doesn’t allow us to speak of African Studies as an inclusive freedom-making space, as it re-members that in/clusion also closes off and any freedom co-constitutes unfreedom. The slash imagines African Studies as a spacious un/learning space, whose un/freedom and un/safety make us response-able towards in/justices within and beyond academia. Our students walked this un/safe path with these wor(l)ding practices, re-turning (to) their conventional ways of thinking about issues of race, post/coloniality and de/coloniality in Africa and in their own lived wor(l)ds.
Qianqing Huang (University of California, Los Angeles)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on how scholars of Black Studies face challenges from Higher Ed institutions within the US and beyond, this paper examines how they resist and navigate the ongoing popularity of symbolic diversity to reimagine classrooms and new modes of knowledge production through their activism.
Paper long abstract:
Black Studies in the United States was birthed out of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. Since the founding of the first Black Studies Department at San Francisco State University, black studies have been needed to counter the white-dominated narratives in the space of Higher Ed, aiming toward a new mode of knowledge production and transgression. Rather than providing the missing piece to the puzzle, black studies scholarship overturns the narrative: "Black History is not a part of American History, it's the American History itself." The historicity of Black Studies determines the political nature of the discipline itself, as well as its scholar-activism-oriented approach. It brings no surprise that the discipline is under constant attack from Right-Wing groups' Anti-Critical Race Theory campaigns. However, what's more than often neglected is how these activist scholars also face institutions as resistant to their work despite the ongoing narratives of diversity and political correctness.
As Sarah Ahmed reminds us that there exists a gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experiences of diversity practitioners, this paper explores how the institutionalization of diversity and the relevant policies (such as Affirmative Actions for students and Affirmative Employment Programs) obscure the racist and exclusionary practices. More importantly, this paper focuses on how black scholars gear toward new modes of knowledge production, redefine and reimagine inclusive spaces, and ultimately challenge higher education institutions.