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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.