Paper short abstract:

Food is central to human life and society, and has thus served as a useful source for historians. Focused on East Africa, this paper demonstrates how moments of food production open unexpected channels of communication through which non-culinary information can be shared and knowledge created.

Paper long abstract:

Food, a central aspect of cultural heritage, has long offered useful fodder for historians across the geographic, temporal, and thematic spectrums. The process of food preparation, meanwhile, has been considered at various times and places as menial labor and, in contrast, as a kind of high art. In this paper, I focus on a series of anecdotes about baking cakes and other instances of food preparation in Lamu, Kenya and its environs in the early decades of the twentieth century. Participants included residents of the coastal city, visiting European researchers, men and women, Muslims and Christians. And while sweet baked goods or elaborate meals were one result of such exchanges, I hope to demonstrate how the communication, the material requirements, and the social structures embedded within the act of cooking and baking required the sharing of knowledge between parties who might, in other contexts, be kept studiously apart.

Paper short abstract:

Creative practices of making fashion in Senegal that include copying, reproduction, and remediation of existing forms and styles can open new perspectives on debates of post/de/colonialism and knowledge production.

Paper long abstract:

All over the continent, fashion made in Senegal is associated with elegant beauty, and Senegalese tailors are widely accredited with inventiveness and creativeness. The rich history of fashion in the country is intimately linked to an early cosmopolitanism connected to a taste for the new in the fashioning of the persona, and tailors and dyers are constantly pushed by their clientele. By way of ‘sartorial code-mixing’ (Kastner 2019) meaning the combination of a range of materials and styles from different periods and spaces, unique and tailor-made products are crafted in thousands of street corner workshops and ateliers. Based on ethnographic research and in line with recent scholarship (Ingold and Hallam 2007; Meyer and Svasek 2016) that argues against a limited understanding of creativity as pure innovation and rather advocates the inclusion of practices of copying, reproduction, and remediation of existing forms and styles, I suggest that making fashion, both critical and playful, can open new perspectives on debates of post/de/colonialism and knowledge production: Critical or playful, fashion makers question and reverse conventionally assumed flows and categories by means of the very act of creating tradi-moderne fashion, of processing raw materials in form of imported fabrics according to local aesthetic preferences or of adapting so-called traditional garments to meet the realities of urban life.

Paper short abstract:

The paper scrutinizes the content of non-news television shows from 1980s Liberia, it argues that television production in Liberia at the time constituted a democratic form of knowledge creation, with programmes where knowledge issues that affected the public were discussed.

Paper long abstract:

The fact that governments closely controlled early African television has encouraged scholars to interpret the resulting programming as being closely related to policy and nation-building alone (Harding 2003). Yet, arguably, some programming was created not because of, but rather in spite of, government influence. This paper is particularly interested in educational television programmes in a broad sense.

The proposed contribution scrutinizes the content of non-news television shows from 1980s Liberia, by examining certain tapes from the archives of the Liberia Broadcasting System (LBS). It argues that television production in Liberia at the time constituted a democratic form of knowledge creation, with the tapes in question ranging from talk shows and forums where issues that affected members of the public were discussed (including breastfeeding and healthcare, as well as culture and heritage). Sometimes, the opinions of the public were purposefully sought in order to map out future episodes.

While it is now difficult to measure the impacts of these programmes at the point of their original broadcast, as historical sources, they nevertheless reveal the ambition of the LBS producers to create shows that served local audiences. As a result, this proposal contributes to ongoing conversations about decolonising knowledge by pointing out educational practices in non-academic cycles for at least as long as its main turn subaltern studies.

Keywords: Television, Television Programming, Decentred Knowledge, Liberia, Liberia Broadcasting System

Paper short abstract:

"Extalgia" facilitates new understandings about how the absence of the dispersed is commemorated and curated in homeland memory through the expression of suffering and creativity by stay-at-homes.

Paper long abstract:

Since Johannes Hofer's coinage in the 17th century of the term ''nostalgia'', which he used to describe the pathological suffering of Swiss soldiers serving abroad, various disciplines engaging with migration have focused on this experience to the extent of ''theoretical closure''. I argue that the discursive attitude has prevented a systematic consideration of the simultaneous suffering and creativity that are provoked in stay-at-homes when their loved ones are dispersed to other lands. It is this experience of homeland suffering and creativity about the dispersed loved ones I have termed ''extalgia''. The paper draws upon insights from the Ogu cultural practice of effigy carving in the representation of departed twin children to underscore how dispersal from the homeland provokes suffering and creativity in the left-behind. I illustrate further the networks of suffering and creativity that are implicated in extalgia through a textual discussion that mobilizes African and African diaspora writing to animate the complex spatio-temporal trajectory of the term. The paper concludes that extalgia facilitates new understandings about how the absence of the dispersed is commemorated and curated in homeland memory through the expression of suffering and creativity by stay-at-homes, and challenges us to transcend the legible frames of exile to a holistic reading of exile as a spectrum. Ultimately, the paper invites other scholars to consider the various ways in which the concept of extalgia is dramatized in other contexts across the globe, particularly concerning the conceptual and practical borders and networks between extalgia and the time-honoured notion of ''nostalgia''.