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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, -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.
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.
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 Afropolitan 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.
Paper short abstract:
This communication deals with the common drift that affect people and plant beings in contexts of war, considering two artistic situations: Galb'Echaque by El Montassir in Southern Maroc, and the process when the remains of “Ténéré tree” were taken to the Boubou-Hama National Museum in Niger.
Paper long abstract:
“The attachment to an idea of a fixed landscape of Earth and humanity is the deepest mark of the Anthropocene” insists Krenak (2020). In various places, the experience of the catastrophe immobilized us in feelings of incomprehension of insurgencies of extreme inter-human violence. The awareness of the non-exclusivity of human beings on the planet walks amid successive fractures between the ecology of society and nature, pointing to the need for a critical refoundation of knowledge, both scientific and artistic. Cultural capitalism is moving towards the homogenization and destitution of politics in the arts, it participates in the aesthetic wars linked to imperialism and white racial hegemony (Nzegwu, 2003).
This communication deals with the capture and disconnection that affect people and plant beings in a common drift and the same destiny of impermanence, given the lasting effects of wars on those who lived them and those who did not experience them. I resort to two situations linked to historical-environmental in Sahara: 1) Artist Abdessamed El Montassir's reflection on traumas overshadowed by the dominant story in his work Galb'Echaque (2021), pointing to the need for an open aesthetic (Diagne, 2017). 2) The process that combines art, desertification, and human mobility when, in 1973, the remains of the “Ténéré tree”, a symbol of navigation in the desert, were brought to the Boubou-Hama National Museum in Niger.
The possibility of a non-human planetary future remains amid extractive strategies and academic indifference in the Capitalocene (Moore 2015, Demos 2017, Bourriaud 2021) driven by techno-optimism.
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.
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.