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- Convenors:
-
Susanne Gehrmann
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Polo B. Moji (University of Cape Town)
Godwin Siundu (University of Nairobi)
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- Chair:
-
Susanne Gehrmann
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Ecology and planetary consciousness
- Location:
- H23 (RW II)
- Sessions:
- Monday 30 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Our panel responds to critical debates that connect African identities to ‘the planetary’ as a relational consciousness that is political, (un)geographic, ecological and cultural. We invite papers that read planetary relationality through African and Afro-Diasporic epistemic and imaginative works.
Long Abstract:
Keguro Macharia’s call for “knowledge that emerges from and tries to inhabit the s/place between an ungeography called Africa and a deracination called the black diaspora” (2016) evokes concepts such as Glissant’s tout-monde and poetics of relation, McKittrick’s critical black geographies and Mbembe’s mapping of accumulated meanings ascribed to Blackness. In a time of ecological collapse, neoliberal modes of governance and resurgence of nationalist xenophobic public cultures, how do people of African descent position themselves in a globalized world and make sense of their belonging to the planet at large while also acknowledging African and Afrodiasporic affiliations and solidarities rooted in the history of the continent’s colonial past, neocolonial present, and histories of dispersal? While the ongoing plundering of African resources and ‘slow violence’ of climate crisis on the continent speaks to a planetary consciousness of the need to reconsider human/non-human relationships, new genres such as African futurism (Okorafor,2019) rethink conceptions of humanity through African cosmologies and spiritualities Further intellectual and artistic works, such as Miano’s and Pitts’ visions of Afro-Europe, reflect on and develop new ideas of “being African in the world” (Mbembe 2005), functioning as “a critique of conventional narratives of African identity and emancipation” (Kasanda 2018). Our panel responds to this diversified body of epistemic and creative work, including philosophical, testimonial and fictional texts; essays, memoirs, novels, audio-visual cultural texts, and digital forms. We invite papers that critically reflect on African and Afrodiasporic relationality and imaginaries engaging through the thematic areas of “Imagining Africanness” and “Planetary consciousness”.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 30 September, 2024, -Polo B. Moji (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the liberatory promise and totalizing pitfalls of “diversality” as articulated in the manifesto Eloge de la créolité(,1989) as an Afrodiasporic planetary imaginary and relational identitarian schema produced by the Glissantian geographic contaminations and collusions of place.
Paper long abstract:
TThis paper revisits the notion of “diversality” or “ the conscious harmonisation of preserved diversities” proposed by the authors of the the manifesto Eloge de la créolité [In Praise of Creoleness] (1989 as the liberatory promise of creolised identities. It firstly considers French/ francophone linguistic context and slave histories from which this manifesto emerges, through Emily Apter’s (2005) rich conception of francophonie as “a planetary cartography, a postcolonial ontology […] a poetics of the Idea (Dependency, Empire, Racism, Love, Kinship, Groups, Universals, the Relation, Singularity, the Event, Extension, Transit, Capitalism, Citizenship, Logics of the World)”. Secondly, it considers Maryse Condé’s novella Pays Melé [Land of Many Colors] (1997) as literary representation of “diversality”, through the Glissantian notion of the totalité-terre, [whole world] (1997). Engaging the literary representation of the “contaminations de l’ordre géographique: les collusions de lieu” [geographic contaminations or collusions of place] (1997) that create, what the authors of the manifesto consider to be constitutive of the “mosaic” and “braid of histories” of creole identities and their liberatory promise of “diversality” in opposition to Western (French) universality. This enables a critical reading of both the liberatory promise and totalizing pitfalls of “diversality” as an Afrodiasporic planetary imaginary and relational identitarian schema produced by the Glissantian geographic contaminations and collusions of place associated with creolisation.
Godwin Siundu (University of Nairobi)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how MG Vassanji's memoirs A Place Within and And Home Was Kariakoor enlist geography, memory and race to interrogate points of (ir)rationality that affirm and/or question our humanity, as drawn from (post)colonial dynamics that (re)ordered society n Eastern Africa and India.
Paper long abstract:
Moyez Vassanji’s memoirs, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (2008) and And Home was Kariakoo (2014) enlist spatial consciousness of rural and urban India and Africa to (re)draw cartographies of South Asian diasporic presences in the regions and the world. While allegorizing the physical state of place with socio-economic and political standing of South Asian and other communities in these texts, Vassanji’s intellection swivels around a hermeneutic of suspicion; how, for instance, prejudice precipitates intolerance of different races and religions, whose logical end is the ruining of physical environment while dehumanising its human presence. If the historical ‘fear of small numbers’ (Appadurai, 2006) has eroded to the minimum our cosmopolitan rationality of ‘ethics in a world of strangers’ (Appiah, 2006), the overall outcome seems to be a resurging rightwing logic that risks plunging humanity into a dystopic end of a ruined world. For the VAD Conference, I propose to engage with these ideas, as they manifest in the two memoirs, and ultimately argue that Vassanji’s formal and substantive logic in the texts is a call to reposition the moral and ethical coordinates that frame what we value as the human and the humane, regardless of time, place, and race.
Elizabeth Olaoye (Midwestern State University)
Paper short abstract:
This study scrutinizes the Afropolitan gaze on Africa articulated by Afropolitan writers, characterizing these viewpoints as a manifestation of planetary engagement with the continent.
Paper long abstract:
This paper undertakes an exploration of instances of planetary engagement with the African continent as portrayed in Afropolitan literary texts. The analysis delves into the ambivalent relationship that Afroplolitan writers maintain with Africa, revealing a complex interplay of emotions and perspectives. A distinctive characteristic of Afropolitan literature lies in the depiction of characters who re-enter postcolonial spaces after a prolonged absence, sharing commonalities with the authors themselves—Africans of the global diaspora often returning after extended sojourns. Through an in-depth examination of these Afropolitan gazes on African spaces in Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah and Teju Cole's Every Day is for the Thief, this study elucidates moments wherein the returning individuals' perceptions of Africa and its realities become complicated by their broadened planetary outlook.
Michael Steppat (University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
African-descended people can position themselves with a strong awareness of their part in the Western heritage, as we decolonize African influences on earlier Western culture. The paper shows the impact of African-based textualities on the shaping of artefacts in early modern English culture.
Paper long abstract:
People of African descent now have new means to position themselves in our global culture with a strong awareness of their vital contribution to what often seems to be only a Western heritage. In countering a Eurocentric design within the humanities, it is now becoming possible to decolonize and call attention to a pronounced African influence on early modern Western literary culture. It is thus not only regarding the 20th century that an undoing of colonial knowledges is highly desirable. Drawing on Ette’s “literature on the move” and also Glissant’s “poetics of relation”, this paper offers instances of the early modern wandering and dispersal of cultural knowledges and spiritualities from the ungeography of Africa toward western European and in particular English spaces of cultural production. Along the way, routes of mobile literary knowledge intersect each other in the 16th and 17th centuries. In these European spaces, African-based textualities and oralities become pervasive though conspicuously not usually acknowledged factors in the shaping of textual artefacts—which can now be read as imagining Africanness in unexpected ways. The individualized European agency emerges as the moving target of an array of African-based entities swarming toward and dislocating it, so that its action turns out to be borrowed. The ensuing epistemological and transtextual encounters empower innovative re-readings of English literary production. The Black presence in early modern western Europe is a composite carrier of resources of mobile cultural memory, which communicate the aesthetic imprint of that presence to white minds.
Alex Wanjala (University of Nairobi)
Paper short abstract:
To develop my paper on Rebeka Njau's Ripples in the Pool (1975), I intend to establish the intersectionality between postcolonial ecocriticism and methods culled from ecofeminism, transformative feminism, and the aesthetics of proximity in order to develop a framework of "Postcolonial ecofeminism"
Paper long abstract:
At the present moment,there is a dearth in the consideration of gender issues in regard to literature that deals with nature and the environment in East Africa despite the fact that women writers and activists from the region have always highlighted how the effects of a patriarchal view in regard to human beings’ relationship with the environment in African society negatively impacts upon the lives of women in the private sphere, and how such issues have been symptomatic of a malaise in the larger East African society during the colonial and postcolonial period.One such writer is Rebeka Njau, whose manuscript entitled “Alone with the fig tree” won the South Africa Writing Committee Prize in 1964 and was later published as the novel Ripples in the Pool (1975). The novel is characterised by what Cajetan Iheka would define as an “aesthetics of proximity” due to its suggestion that humans and non-humans share the same agency, and because it provides aspects of the landscape with a form of spiritual vitality critical to the development of the plot of the novel. Thus the subdued critical reception of the subsequent novel that has been left out of the literary canon of texts published in the 1970s.With the development of cogent critical approaches in the contemporary period, it becomes increasingly evident that what may have been seen at the time as the text’s weaknesses, were really its strengths, hence the need to revisit the text and situate it within the framework of postcolonial ecofeminist criticism.
Ruth S. Wenske (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces representations of rain in two East African novels: Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust. It observes rain’s materialism in the novels to explain how animism is a storytelling practice (Garuba 2003) and a relational epistemology (Bird-David 1999).
Paper long abstract:
Ben Eherenreich recently observed that “only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so” (2020, 76), highlighting how capitalism has enabled environmental degradation by casting the natural world as ‘dead’ extractable resources. Conversely, many societies have conceptions of the world being ‘alive’ that are premised on a “relational epistemology” (Bird-David 199) of interconnectedness between humans and non-human entities including storms, rivers, animals, and spirits (e.g. Ghosh 2016; Mwangi 2019). As Harry Garuba notes, a predominant way through which this relationality is recognized is through narrative, by “according a physical, often animate material aspect to what others may consider an abstract idea” (2003, 274).
This paper focuses on the way rainfall registers such “animist materialism,” tracing how rain is described—and ascribed material aspects—in two East African works of literature, Kyomuhendo’s Waiting (2007) and Owuor’s Dust (2013). Looking at the planetary consciousness encapsulated in narratives of rainfall, I follow Sarah Nuttall’s recent call to “read for rain,” that is, “focus[ing] in a sustained way on what is happening to rainfall in and as climate crisis” (2020, 456). By “reading for rain,” I examine the narrative strategies used to describe rainfall, drought, and flooding, suggesting that the novels use “animist materialism” to convey a practice of relationality. As such, understanding literary modes of animism is fundamental not just for recognizing the world’s ‘aliveness’, but for countering the “epistemic injustice” (Musila 2017) that African ways of knowing have been, and are still, subjected to.
Nomonde Ntsepo (Rhodes University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how Doreen Baingana and Sofia Samatar expand the traditional cartography of what we consider friendship from human to non-human subjects, and offers glimpses of what it might look like to inhabit the earth with an ethic of friendship in African and Afrodiasporic literature.
Paper long abstract:
In the age of the Anthropocene, rethinking humanity’s relationship to the natural world is an urgent task. At its core, this paper considers African and Afrodiasporic literary representations of friendship with the more-than-human world. To do this, I read Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe and Sofia Samatar’s Tender alongside one another. Although working with different genres, both Baingana and Samatar gesture towards an enlarged understanding of friendship, one that includes unlikely connections with human and non-human subjects, and affective ties with the natural world. I suggest that Baingana and Samatar expand the traditional cartography of what we consider friendship from human to non-human subjects, and offer glimpses of what it might look like to inhabit the earth with an ethic of friendship.
Paul Muindi (University of Nairobi)
Paper short abstract:
This paper critically reads the novel as an African cultural inscription offering a point of relational consciousness with its narrative enlisting planetary relationality.
Paper long abstract:
Veronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men (2021) dramatises the Ebola outbreak to perform African ecologies at the intersection of environment and geographies of resistance. This paper critically reads the novel as an African cultural inscription offering a point of relational consciousness with its narrative enlisting planetary relationality. The ecological mapping of the novel’s fable carves a space for an exploration of the fragility of life within realities of problematic extractive industries which leave social structures eroded hence the paradox of loss and hope in configuring the planetary. Whereas the novel enmeshes human and non-human characters as symbolic of planetary relationality, it consents to the profound disruption in the relationship between humans and nature and platforms this vis a viz the discursive engagement with Ebola to decipher this paradox. Hence, the novel can be understood as problematising human/non-human relationships through African ecologies.