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- Convenors:
-
Friederike Lüpke
(University of Helsinki)
Vincent Hiribarren (King's College London)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Streams:
- History (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 26
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Is (European) African Studies obsolete, or does it have a future as a critical convivial space and as a place from which African knowledges can be mainstreamed? We invite contributions from different disciplines, continents and countries to imagine the future of field.
Long Abstract:
European African Studies is rightly seen as colonial, anachronistic, or irrelevant. The field is based on the study of an entire continent in a single, albeit interdisciplinary, field. This perspective, that creates the Other through presupposing it as an entity contrasting with Global North societies, is outdated. The Northern dominance in the field reveals inequalities replicating the colonial era. Is it therefore counterproductive to even imagine a future for European African Studies? Or does the field function as a necessary anachronism, as a convivial space (Nyamnjoh 2017) needed for critical self-reflection, the development of true North-South collaborations, and for mainstreaming of knowledges on, from, with the African continent so that a specialist field becomes superfluous in the future?
We address these issues through papers from all disciplines in European African Studies that answer the following questions:
Which theories, epistemologies and methodologies have you discarded, and what have they been replaced with?
Do you still see the need for a special space dedicated to critical knowledge production involving African and non-African universities, and what should it look like?
Which knowledges would you like to mainstream (i.e., being part of general linguistic theories rather than on “African languages”, of history, rather than of “African history”, of social sciences rather than of development studies?
We welcome papers contributing to this discussion from different disciplines, continents and countries, so that the pluriversity (Mbembe 2016) of the field and its futures can be imagined from perspectives that overcome old North-South dichotomies.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Thursday 1 June, 2023, -Contribution short abstract:
The paper intends to bridge Eurocentric and Afrocentric approaches to African studies. The author argues that African scholarship should contribute to the understanding of other societies and not only the study of Africa and its diasporas.
Contribution long abstract:
In the wave of the decolonization of academic knowledge, there has been a critique of Eurocentric perspectives on the African continent as well as an anti-decolonisation stance (Táíwò, 2022). Africanists and African scholars call for the study of the African continent from within rather than from the outside, the study of African diasporas as well as the promotion of pan-African studies and Afrocentric perspectives. Whereas these propositions will indubiously add value to our knowledge about the continent, I argue that African studies need more than Afrocentric perspectives. African studies need Eurocentric and Afrocentric knowledge as much as they need whatever-centric views. The future of African studies is in its openness and its connection to other studies. Moreover, I suggest that African scholars should contribute to the study and understanding of other societies. African scholarship possesses a great and overlooked potential to say something about Africa and the world. The Negritude movement offers a good illustration of the contribution of African thinking and theory to our understanding of societal challenges beyond the African continent. This paper discusses some ideas about how African studies and its teaching could further contribute to academic knowledge at large.
Contribution short abstract:
Drawing on personal experiences since 2016 in teaching the course ‘Law and Governance in Africa’ at Leiden University, the Netherlands, this paper aims to enter into a critical yet constructive dialogue about the future of African studies in European university curricula.
Contribution long abstract:
Since 2016 I have been teaching a course titled ‘Law and Governance in Africa’ at the Leiden Law School, Leiden University to bachelor students with backgrounds in law and social sciences. It is a course that is close to my heart and in which I can make use of many examples from concrete research experience that I have gained. I notice however that over the years I feel increasingly uncomfortable about this course, and ask myself to what extent I am in the position to teach this course as a Dutch women. Over the years, I have made a number of changes to the set up of the course, the reading material, and the emphases I place. The aim of this paper is to share experiences and lessons learnt and to enter in a critical yet constructive dialogue about the topic. Is there a future for African studies in the curricula of European universities? And if there is, what will it look like? What are the do’s and don’ts? And which advice can we teach from experiences at universities in Africa?
Contribution short abstract:
European African studies can survive as a discipline only if it becomes a true convivial space. Karima Lazali and Angelo Del Boca’s works can be an example of a virtuous way of understanding European African studies by developing a shared space of histories and experiences between North and South.
Contribution long abstract:
Karima Lazali and Angelo Del Boca embody two virtuous examples of researchers that contributed positively to the development of European African studies. As a matter of fact, their work proved that it is possible to overcome the debate about North-South knowledge production and actively contribute to rewrite a collective global history based on shared memories and experiences, developing a new way to understand colonialism and its effects not only in the Global South, but also in the Global North. Through a psycho-political approach inscribed in a wider historical framework, Lazali (2018) traces the effects of colonialism on the postcolonial subjectivities of both Algeria and France, highlighting the connections between the two countries and developing a new space for confronting shared memories. Del Boca (1992, 1993, 2005) investigated the perception of Italian colonial institutions of both Italian colonizers and the colonized people of Libya and Somalia through the contextualization of the law-in-context analysis in a wider global history framework, being then able to include Libyan and Somali experiences in the broader field of Italian African studies. Lazali and Del Boca have shown that it is possible to overcome mere specialist knowledge production in favour of a rereading of people’s experiences, therefore contributing to the creation of a shared history between North and South. Eventually, Lazali’s work on Algeria and France and Del Boca’s studies on former Italian colonies can represent the starting point of a new virtuous way of understanding European African studies.
Contribution short abstract:
The long crisis of European African Studies has been especially deep after the impact of Post-decolonial studies. I want to expose the debates by the case of the Krió Fernandino community of Spanish Guinea. Were they “asimilados”, “black colonizers” or transcontinental and afropolitan people?
Contribution long abstract:
Fernandino was a very rich and selective African bourgeois elite empowered by the British informal colonization of Spanish Guinea. One interesting characteristic is that they lived between Africa and Europe from the last quarter of 19th century until today (Aixelà-Cabré 2022).
For Spanish travelers and historians the Fernandino were asimilados (Ramos y Navarro 1912:348; Campos 2016:84). As detailed the missionary Ruiaz (1928:84), the Fernandino “had no more moreno than their color”. The notion “asimilado” wanted to transfer to Spanish Guinea the rhetoric of the Hispanic race implemented in Latin America, according to which skin color would have no effect on status and consideration of "indigenous people", something that due to racist and segregationist practices in the colony was false. But it is interesting to face these interpretations with African voices. On one hand, there were Equatorial Guineans that catalogued them as “black colonizers” (Iyanga Pendi 2021:42) given that their success was strongly linked to colonialism and the exploitation of African workers. On the other hand, Fernandino descents described their ancestors as powerful, educated, and well dressed Africans. In fact, their details about how they were and live approach this African people not as asimilados or “black colonizers” but as multisited, transcontinental, transnational and afropolitan people, understanding Afropolitism as a way of being in the world (Mbembe 2007).
The final aim is to propose that it is needed to promote a strong collaboration between Europe and Africa sources and researchers given that some stories need both to offer a shared history.
Contribution short abstract:
African Studies does crucial work in transforming pragmatic knowledge about multi-disciplinary collaborations into theoretical perspectives that pave ways for new epistemologies and ways of formulating what academia means. European AS could do crucial work on epistemology - especially in Europe.
Contribution long abstract:
Multi-disciplinary scholarship and future alternative epistemologies
In a world where funding goes, increasingly, to large interdisciplinary collaborations, and most universities reward “internationalization”, African Studies, anywhere, need to carefully consider their role in multi-disciplinary futures. How to manouver for space to articulate locally relevant research agendas, while trying to generate funding to do anything at all? Funding mechanisms inevitably seem to move the question from if international – and thus potentially colonizing – forced networking is to be avoided, to more pragmatic questions of how to develop better practices for collaboration, and how to identify and avoid harmful, inequal partnerships. African Studies could be a driving force in developing such pragmatic, practical knowledge into theoretical perspectives that pave ways for new epistemologies and ways of formulating what scholarship means. The forced internationalization could also be harnessed to form genuinely different future universities.
This paper proposes that European African Studies has a role if it works towards new scholarly futures rather than staying with the past and present ideals. The most laborious task is within epistemology in European universities, including hard sciences. In most fields of science the critique of Eurocentrism is absent, or silenced, yet they are excavating data, eg. on pandemics, climate change etc. globally. Were European African Studies self-dismantled now, important reparative work remains undone. Hard scientists would not mourn the loss of critical voices. The paper is based on 4 year ethnography on collaboration between sociologists, gender studies and biomedicine.