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- Convenor:
-
Jessica Farrell
(University of Minnesota-Twin Cities)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Elisio Macamo
(University of Basel)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH111
- Start time:
- 1 July, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel critically engages with questions concerning "the constitutive nature" of dichotomic formulations (e.g. rural vs. urban) in African studies. Panelists interrogate the 'fault lines' inherent within dichotomous framings to better apprehend how they conscript us to Eurocentric archetypes.
Long Abstract:
This panel will explore how dichotomous framings, such as rural versus urban, tradition versus modernity, and savage versus civilized, limit what is and what can be said in the field of African studies. By questioning the very premises which underlie these often taken for granted binaries, we will interrogate the ways in which African studies generally, but particularly the discipline of history, has been conscripted into a reliance on a variety of eurocentric archetypes for the production of knowledge about Africa, thus helping to both perpetuate and naturalize these epistemological and ontological frameworks. In doing this work, we seek to critically engage with what the ECAS Call for Papers refers to as "the constitutive nature of the tension between tradition and modernity" in African studies by troubling the 'fault lines' inherent in this formulation. For our purposes, the concept of 'fault lines' is thought simultaneously as the breaks, slippages, overlaps, and variations produced through the tenacity/obstinacy of disciplinary reason and Western conceptualizations/assumptions, and also as a formulation which enables the possibility for critique/critical engagement along the breaks, slippages, overlaps, and variations therein. Looking at how processes of urbanization have historically been described through and defined by assumed hierarchical relationships with the presumed inferior 'other', the papers included in this panel will address how dichotomic formulations such as rural versus urban are not only mutually reinforcing, but mutually constituted as well, helping to further legitimate and perpetuate obfuscating binaries such as traditional versus modern and savage versus civilized.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Through the trope of “the global village” (first inspired by military villagization in Kenya), this paper examines a persistent binary that opposes Africans’ presumed rurality, non-literacy, and magical thought to Europe’s supposedly urban, rational, and literate forms of thought.
Paper long abstract:
It is not well known that Marshall McLuhan's famous coinage of the "global village" arose from his research on African "modernization" in the 1950's. The global village—and McLuhan's related media theories—were indebted especially to John Carothers, an ethnopsychiatrist summoned to Nairobi during the British war against the Kikuyu Land and Freedom Army. Carothers' diagnosis of the KLFA hinged on a complex dichotomy linking rurality to Africans' putative episteme of magical, non-literate forms of thought and, conversely, linking urbanism to Europe's supposedly literate, rational episteme. Carothers recommended maintaining the villagization system of detainment camps after the war as de-militarized settlements providing psychological stability and access to communication technologies, effectively integrating tenant farmers into a "global village."
According to McLuhan, the global village would enfold the world's societies into a harmonious rural-urban unity connected by electronic media. The unity, however, was belied by a subtle difference: Electronic media —akin, McLuhan said, to African orality and magical thought— was to "re-tribalize" the "literate West," but the West's legacy of print-culture would, he suggested, instate an enduring epistemic difference between "re-tribalized" and "tribalized" societies. This paper examines the persistence of "the global village" as a conceptual framework which positions Africans as modern but differently modern. In the past three decades, digital technologies—intended to integrate rural Africans into a global market—have been construed as especially appropriate to (what Carothers called) "the African mind," characterized by its putative orality and "magical thought," and thus not requiring educational equity.
Paper short abstract:
African contexts are infused with citizenship paradoxes. The third space concept is utilised to document negotiated ways of belonging as counter-hegemonic emancipatory practices. The paper also analyses the emergence of a fourth space premised on agency and staging utopia beyond conventional ‘sensibilities.’
Paper long abstract:
The congruence of ideals stemming from the enlightenment period, colonialism, hegemonic neoliberal logic, modernisation/ urbanisation have produced seemingly core and periphery zones in relation to rural and urban spaces within African contexts. This has produced ambivalences and contradictions to citizenship, modes of belonging and the right to the city where the 'rural' as a metaphor for origin, culture, tradition, ancestors/the occult, past, socialism exists as excess to the 'urban' and thus modernity, the city, rights, present, capitalism, Christianity/Islam. However, rather than advancing a clash of epistemologies, this paper uses Bhabha's concept of the third space to document negotiated citizenship, identities and ways of belonging as counter-hegemonic and performed emancipatory practices. Within a critical theory framework, this paper contextualises the impasse of modernity within the African context via lived experiences where complicity and subversion are two sides of the same coin. Yet beyond the third space, the paper deliberates on the emergence of a 'fourth space' premised on agency, self-making, ingenuity and relevant practice of the everyday with African contexts. In this sense, the 'fourth space' speaks to sensibilities and practices that have 'no name' in relation to what 'we know'; possibly in the realm of what is perceived as illegitimate space. I intend to advance a 'fourth space' narrative that exists in African contexts beyond rural and urban binaries but within José Muñoz's logic of staging utopia situated and grounded in emancipatory lived experiences; experiences imbued with political agency.
Paper short abstract:
My paper focuses on how Liberian historiography has employed the binary formulation of white vs. black as naturally given. Instead, I explore the categories of difference developed in Liberia which challenge the constructions of racial thought that have limited Liberian historiography.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will examine how the binary formulation of white vs. black has been employed uncritically in Liberian historiography. In it I will argue that historians of Liberia have attempted to employ these racial categories as though biologically-defined, ignoring their social construction and instead presenting them as natural givens. Particularly, I argue, historians have tried to elide the origins of this white vs. black dichotomy in another problematic dichotomy, civilized vs. uncivilized, and that this racial binary cannot be invoked without simultaneously invoking the other. I then draw on Jonathon Glassman's work in War of Words, War of Stones where he argues "The distinction between 'race' and 'ethnicity,' then, is one of degree, not kind, and rather than regard them as qualitatively distinct, it is more useful to recognize them as modes of thought that fall toward opposing ends of a single continuum." I build upon this by exploring the unique categories of difference which the Liberian community developed to structure their society, categories of difference which challenged the constructions of racial thought they had inherited from their American socialization and which cannot be seen as either racially or ethnically defined. I thus argue that an analysis of these new categories of difference is uniquely positioned to expose the fallacy that race and ethnicity are conceptually distinct while opening new avenues for a more productive conversation about Liberian society in the nineteenth century which more openly addresses questions of race and civilization.
Paper short abstract:
The paper uses East London jazz musician Eric Nomvete's Pondo Blues together with the International Library of African Music archive of 'indigenous' recording Ndinovalo ndinomingi mingi to consider the limitations of thinking with rural and urban dichotomies when it comes to music and sound.
Paper long abstract:
The International Library of African Music one of the oldest established music archives frames the kinds of sounds and the ways in which we think about what Indigenous music is. In this paper I use a Jazz song Pondo blues/Ndinovalo Ndinomingimingi by Eric Nomvete and a recording of Ndinovalo Ndinomingi a traditional rendition found at ILAM to suggest a possible way out of limited frames of indigenous as rural and jazz as urban. I suggest that the urban/rural dichotomies are problematic when it comes to thinking about sound and music as being fluid . It also points to the limitation of archive as repository in capturing those fluidities and nuances and helps us to t of the archive as think with the notion of archive as a song.