Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Catherina Wilson
(Radboud University)
Joanna Boampong (University of Ghana)
Tilmann Heil (University of Cologne)
Silke Oldenburg (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Livio Sansone
(Federal University of Bahia)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Location-based African Studies: Discrepancies and Debates
- Location:
- S58 (RW I)
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 1 October, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Entrepreneurs, migrants, artists, and politicians bridge Africa and Latin America to work, create, and re/connect. Latin American Studies in Africa and African Studies in Latin America are growing fields of knowledge production. How is this Southern dialogue shaped in form and content?
Long Abstract:
African migrants crossing the dangerous Darien gap, a Kenyan delegation learning about Colombian coffee production, exchange between Latin American and African artists, Colombian government's #EstrategiaAfrica: Knowledge production engaging these two continents is increasingly relevant to capture and re/centre configurations in African Studies. Mobility, imaginations, and exchange of knowledges contribute to re/focus the material and intangible epistemological foundations across two continents. Contributions range from conceptualizations, such as “Nuestra América” (Mara Viveros Vigoya), “Améfrica ladina” (Leila Gonzalez), theoretical and political dialogues regarding “decoloniality” (Sabelo Ndlovo-Gatsheni, Anibal Quijano), to ethnographies of circulation and return, for example, of Afro-Brazilian formerly enslaved communities to West Africa (Joanna Boampong). How can African Studies contribute in exploring the manifold shifts in focus and interest that take place beyond the continent? Which forms and contents of knowledge emerge, and how do they engage with the past and imagine the future?
This panel invites ethnographically grounded and conceptually sensitive contributions from all areas of exchange across the two continents that explicitly engage with emerging perspectives from the Southern dialogue itself. The objective is threefold: (1) Re-centring the Africa-Latin America bridge as a way to contribute to decolonizing academic practice in general. (2) Convening scholars and practitioners from all sides of the Atlantic to reconfigure Area Studies focused on Africa or Latin America only and intervene in formalised knowledge archives so far disproportionately held in the global north. (3) Increasing the knowledge circulation and collaboration among actors between the two continents and their reception in the global north.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 1 October, 2024, -Raphael Ribeiro da Silva (UERJ)
Paper short abstract:
Em diálogo com a filosofia popular brasileira, propomos a Orixalidade. Enquanto epistemologia ética-estética-filosófica, oriunda do lugar de saber dos terreiros de candomblé e Umbandas no Brasil, redesenha identidades e relações através do território epistêmico das religiosidades afrodiaspótricas.
Paper long abstract:
Este projeto de pesquisa se apresenta como um exercício crítico e ao mesmo tempo, enquanto uma experimentação estética. Neste trabalho, alguns códigos estéticos, culturais e éticos da cultura brasileira, mais especificamente os que circundam uma geopolítica das religiosidades afro diaspóricas e do pensamento popular, são consideradas em simultaneidade. Em diálogo com a filosofia popular brasileira (Haddock-Lobo, 2020) e outros campos do conhecimento, propomos uma perspectiva ética atravessada por múltiplas linguagens artísticas. O que cunhamos por Orixalidade, enquanto conceito, trata-se de um espaço ético-estético-político. Neste sentido, enquanto plataforma criativa e multidisciplinar, serve enquanto material de análise ético-filosófica, ou seja, é experimentada enquanto objeto-acontecimento. Enquanto uma categoria ética-estética-filosófica, oriundos do lugar de saber dos terreiros ou roças de candomblé e Umbandas no Brasil. Desde nossa ancestralidade espiralar, que redesenha identidades e relações, percorreremos o território epistêmico dos orixás e entidades das macumbas populares, em busca de um epistemologia do bem-viver que nos arranque de uma colonização, numa perspectiva ancestral, mas contemporânea, ou como apontara Denise Carrrascosa: “con(tra)temporâneo”, que é desde o contemporâneo, mas também age contra o regime.
Paola Barreto Leblanc (Federal University of Bahia)
Paper short abstract:
This text delves into the intricate relationship between slavery, machines, and artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting how technology serves coloniality. It critiques the perpetuation of supremacist ideals while exploring critical discourses within the arts and sciences.
Paper long abstract:
In the emergence of Western dominance within the global modern economy, a paradox arises: the discourse of freedom juxtaposed with the practice of slavery. This contradiction finds resonance in Descartes' concept of "automata" as soulless beings, reinforcing the dehumanization of slaves. These beings, devoid of autonomy, are objects naturally predisposed to the supervision of self-proclaimed human masters. This notion underpins the development of modern mechanical and computational automation technologies, such as AI, fueling projects aimed at liberating the proclaimed universal subject from labor through machine enslavement.
Critiquing supremacist ideals, it navigates critical discourses within the arts and sciences, unveiling how historical oppression shapes modern technological landscapes. Emphasizing art as both method and critique, it explores intersections of technology, race, and power, drawing insights from feminist studies, Brazilian indigenous contemporary art, and African gnosis.
Through interdisciplinary dialogue and reflection, the intercultural and situated understanding of technology presented by the artists and scientists we invoke in this text helps us understand AI as the realization of mental schemas that forge social and political structures constituting human societies. Researching technologies, or as Yuk Hui invites us to consider, contemplating cosmotecnics, is a way to challenge the extractivist models that have shaped our path thus far and combat what the enchanted Nego Bispo referred to as cosmophobia, the need for compartmentalization and separation underlying the idea of enslavement.
Giulia Dickmans (Freie Universitaet Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
During the Cold War, Cuba’s internationalist venture in Angola was shaped by a semi-institutionalized global framework of solidarity. This research looks at how the actors on the ground, especially artists, shaped, experienced, and memorialized this South-South relationship.
Paper long abstract:
In January 1966 the first Tricontinental conference was hosted in Havana. Around five hundred delegates from eighty-two countries met to discuss what an anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-racist world could look like, not necessarily agreeing. Nevertheless, in Cuba, the “year of solidarity” was inaugurated and the headquarters of the Organization of Solidarity of People from Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) were installed. Havana rapidly transformed into a global hub for activists, ideas, art, and networks where the “two major contemporary currents of the world revolution” met: the socialist one started with the October Revolution in the Soviet Union and the parallel one of the national liberation revolutions, fighting for independence all over the world. This research looks at how Cuba’s internationalist ventures, especially in Angola, were a result of this semi-institutionalized global framework of solidarity and the worldview behind it. The main focus will be on the actors on the ground and how they shaped, experienced, and memorialized this South-South relationship and the Cold War dynamics. The aim is to depart from a bipolar conflict and restore middle powers and smaller actors to visibility. Special attention will be given to the integration of Angolan cultural and artistic elements into the praxis of Cuban internationalist artists between 1975 and 1991.
Sitna Quiroz (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation provides a decolonial reading of Pentecostalism. It situates its development in Africa and Latin America in a broader history of ‘modernity’ (Quijano 2000), and it uses Anzaldua’s (2015) notion of Nepantla to think with and provide another reading of Pentecostal Christianity.
Paper long abstract:
The study of Pentecostal Christianity has flourished in regions such as Africa and Latin America since the 1980s. Scholars have emphasised its modernising effects in both regions due to processes of globalisation. Although some scholars have explored connections between both regions through transnational churches, the study of Pentecostalism in both regions seems to have remained mainly separate. Significant debates in this field continue to be dictated from and mediated through institutions and scholars working in the ‘Global North.’ However, we still need to develop analytical frameworks and theoretical tools that re-centre scholars and theories from the ‘South’ in studying this form of Christianity. The aim of this presentation is twofold. First, it situates the development of Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America in a broader history of ‘modernity’ (Quijano 2000). Second, it uses Anzaldua’s (2015) notion of ‘Nepantla’ to think with and provide another reading of Pentecostalism. It argues that this form of religion emerges from and speaks to conditions of ‘Nepantla’. In other words, it appeals to the postcolonial condition of people living ‘in-between’ on these two continents. In doing so, it provides structures for living, but it paradoxically reproduces the conditions of coloniality from which it emerges. This presentation wants to encourage new ways of thinking about this form of Christianity and to understand it within broader historical colonial entanglements that go back to 1492.
Omawu Diane Enobabor (The Graduate Center at City University of New York)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses contemporary Black migration through Latin America as atemporal, future-charted, and in response to anticipated societal and ideological shifts that coalesce to situate critical climate and economic migration in the African diaspora.
Paper long abstract:
This paper blends theoretical interventions made in Black geographic thought, public policy critique, archival
research, speculative fiction, and ethnographic research to situate the recognition of the African
Captive Maternal as an intrinsic variable toward undoing the linear and temperate finality of
western modernity. Increased migration from the African continent to the Americas has been linked to the pinging devastations of ecological crisis via capitalist exploitation (Rodney 1972, Ahuja 2021, Walia 2022) . This shift goes undermined as migrants from the African continent and racialized as Black are restricted from the access provided by
migration management labels like asylum seeker and refugee. To unravel and complicate the
nuances of the ability of folks to migrate, looking at African women mobilities in the Americas
situates how there are consistent ways of relating and being in the Diaspora that can counter the
colonial effects of capitalist extraction. Contextualized through the theoretical contributions on the mobility of the African Diaspora through the Americas via the text Changó, el Gran Puta, a seminal text on the movement and history of members of the African Diaspora, and the writings of Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Malcolm Ferdinand, I tie the the ability, pattern and pace of Black mobility through the Americas as evident of decolonial response and renewal toward addressing and resolving colonial extractivist ruins. I argue that the African diaspora cultures in Latin America open a space where women can bring specific knowledge that contributes to developing inclusive lifeways that protect and sustain Black life.
Gilbert Shang Ndi (Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation discusses the "flow" of Congolese music and musicians from Africa to the Caribbean and its re-writings of the Middle Passage archives. In so doing, it contributes to the understanding of new transatlantic agents, texts, rhythms and objects in South-South mobility.
Paper long abstract:
Music is one of the elements of cultural survival/flourishment and constitutes an indispensable memorial archive of human relations, aspirations, anxieties and visions. It is impossible to engage with South-South transatlantic dynamics without a careful examination of the fundamental role of sound/music in re-signifying the lifeworlds of Afro-descendant subjects. In this perspective, the Colombian cities of Cartagena de Indias and Barranquilla incarnate intercultural hubs of new forms of movement and mobility between Africa and South America. The popularisation of African music in these two cities in particular grants insights into contemporary modes of cultural transactions between the Caribbean and Africa that can be aligned with historical connections dating back to the slave trade as well as the new wave of the globalisation of African popular culture trends. In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of cultural (re?)connection through the migration of Congolese music and musicians to the Colombian Caribbean coast and its possible contributions to transatlantic cultural studies. I will track the re-signification of musical references in a Caribbean context caught between nostalgia for Africa on the one hand, and systematically stereotypical othering of Africa, on the other hand. The trajectories and contours of cultural products as well as cultural agents, from Africa to the Caribbean, will enable me to throw light on new approaches to transatlantic encounters and movements in the late 20th and early 21st century and their peculiarities. Secondly, through specific examples of soukous-champeta lyrics by artists such as Remy Sahlomon, Mbilia Bel, Lokassa Ya Mbongo and Extra Musica, I will examine the processes of re-coding and re-mixing of metaphors, sound and texts as means of re-appropriating Congolese soukous/rumba rhythms in the the popular culture landscape of Colombia's Caribbean coast.
Javiera Carmona (University of Tarapaca)
Paper short abstract:
Chile posee un valioso patrimonio afrodiaspórico entre sus museos nacionales y las experiencias privadas de coleccionismo que juntas abarcan un siglo de relación con África, marcada por saberes y prácticas de extractivismo cultural/natural global y también por prácticas humanitarias y antirracistas.
Paper long abstract:
Los museos nacionales de Chile poseen un valioso patrimonio afrodiaspórico que revela la participación del Estado en la red global de intercambio y acumulación de piezas naturales y culturales provenientes de África animadas por misioneros y científicos europeos que sentaron las bases del sistema de museos universalistas del país en las primeras décadas del siglo XX. A fines del siglo XX surgen en Chile otras experiencias de coleccionismo de piezas africanas de carácter privado ligadas al exilio chileno por la Dictadura de Pinochet en las décadas de 1970-80, y se trata de experiencias implicadas en acciones humanitarias y antirracistas de la diáspora chilena en Mozambique, Sudáfrica y otros países donde acumularon objetos que luego llevaron consigo en su retorno al país con la restitución de la democracia. Al finalizar, se suman a este proceso de cien años las colecciones del siglo XXI formadas desde la vitalidad del mercado internacional de artesanías africanas y la industria del turismo global en conjuntos de objetos que adhieren a discursos estéticos con implicaciones personales, ideológicas, políticas, sociales y culturales. Los objetos afrodiaspóricos en Chile permiten incursionar en las múltiples capas de sentido de la relación con África entre los siglos XX y XXI que a la vez confronta el pasado y presente del país, una relación que revela las prácticas colonialistas estatales que vuelven intercambiables las piezas africanas con las de los pueblos indígenas, y también las prácticas emancipatorias basadas en una sensibilidad por acompañar y homenajear las múltiples voces africanas, pero también “consumirlas”.
Edgar Córdova Morales (Research Institute on Contemporary Maghreb (IRMC)-Tunis) Ilaria Giglioli (University of San Francisco)
Paper short abstract:
The paper develops a grounded ethnography of global processes of border fortification "from below" in Tunisia and Mexico, arguing that following networks of people on the move can shed light on how similar strategies of border delimitation and contestation develop in disparate borderlands
Paper long abstract:
Tunisia has long been a key country for the experimentation of EU migration control policies. More recently, it has become a key node in violent and treacherous geographies that immobilize, illegalize and potentially expel new racialized West African migrants.
Drawing on a transatlantic ethnography in Medenine (Tunisia) and Tapachula (Mexico) between 2018 and 2022, we argue that the reinforcement of Europe's externalized borders in Tunisia, and more broadly in the central Mediterranean, has influenced recent migratory flows of thousands of West Africans across the southern Mexican border. This contemporary escape route to the Americas has reconfigured Mexico's southern border into a global epicenter of new struggles for migrant mobility under a global genealogy of colonial violence in terms of anti-black policing and dispossession.
Based on scholarly contributions on race and postcolonialism, we analyze protests, anti-racist demonstrations, hunger strikes and the relentless quest for new migratory routes to cross Mexico by West African migrants in situations of forced immobility and precariousness. Subsequently, we focus on how these border struggles in Mexico inspired immobilized West African migrants in Medenine through social networks, news and rumors among networks of mutual acquaintances, making them feel part of a broader movement against a global border regime. At a conceptual level, the paper thus develops a grounded ethnography of global processes of border fortification “from below”, and argues that following networks of people on the move can shed light on how similar strategies of bordering and forms of contestation of borders develop in disparate geographies worldwide.
Antonia Thuin (UFABC FAPESP)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to discuss how artistic practice can be combined with literature and theory to create new epistemologies from the South in the arts through the analysis of works from African artists in the 35th São Paulo Biennial.
Paper long abstract:
On the third floor of the 35th São Paulo Biennial, we can see a space with clay pots in different forms and colors, each one with a phrase in multiple languages; they are on top of white columns at sight height, M’Barek Bouchichi uses poetry and traditional pottery to invite us to his world, in multiple languages from both continents. When we go down one floor, we are faced with a sand-toned space. Rugs in different hues of beige and brown, benches in a circular form, and small colored booklets sitting on them for us to read. On the wall nearby, there are phrases about monoculture. We are invited to sit and talk. Nadir Bouhmouch and Soumeya Ait Ahmed in their work intend to use the printed word to maintain memory, and the booklets are made in traditional Brazilian form, as cordeis. The word has an important role in both works; it invites us to understand different points of view from South America and Africa around issues of art, nature, and human. Artistic practice, bell hooks would say, can be a means to change history or at least to change how we perceive ourselves. I aim to discuss how word, practice, and theory in both works are intertwined, dismissing the usual Western ideas of separation in favor of multiple universals (DIAGNE, 2017).
Cecilia Burgos Cuevas (Freie Universität Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Where are the traces of the Afro-descendant population after the Mexican Revolution? While official sources have no record of ethnicity, social revolts in Veracruz shed light on the racialization of some lower-class women who demanded their right to land and better working conditions.
Paper long abstract:
The erasure of the African enslaved population in Mexico is especially tangible in the twentieth century. It is owed, partly, to the national idea of a homogeneous nation conceived since the Independence but strengthened and rooted in racial ideas since the Revolution. A historical gap exists; although it is acknowledged that Mexico, like all of Latin America, possesses a historical African heritage as a recipient of enslaved populations, written records from the 19th and 20th centuries fail to document it adequately. This is particularly striking for certain regions of Mexico, including Veracruz, the main entrance port for slave ships and known for its “black heritage”.
Throughout the 20th century, the prevailing notion was that all Mexicans were mestizos. The fight against racism primarily focused on reclaiming indigenous roots, while the folklorization of African-rooted traditions and other elements contributed to simplifying the national narrative, simultaneously invisibilizing the long-standing presence of the Afro-descendant population.
This paper aims to trace the remnants of this population, recognizing that once freed, afro-descendants integrated into the broader population. However, instead of joining the elite, the vast majority became part of the lower social class and participated in social movements, such as agrarian and workers' revolts in the state of Veracruz after the Revolution. Because of the absence of specific "afro" or "black" organizations due to the mestizaje premise, this analysis focuses on the racial prejudices emanating from the elite.
Orlando Deavila Pertuz (Universidad de Cartagena)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation addresses the history of black neighborhoods/diasporic communities in Cartagena by resorting to the work of Afro-Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella. His work challenged racial silence introducing race as a salient factor in thinking of the city's process of urbanization.
Paper long abstract:
Throughout the colonial era, thousands of enslaved Africans arrived in America through the port of Cartagena. Up until today, their descendants make up a significant share of the city’s population. However, the racial silence that has prevailed since Colombian independence has compromised the efforts by local and national historiography to discuss the historical experience of Black people in the city, including, the question about the role that race and racism played in the way they have settled in the urban space. This presentation addresses this question by resorting to the work of Afro-Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella. His work, which included novels, ethnographic accounts, and essays, challenged racial silence and placed race at the center of the analysis. His novel Chambacú, Black Slum (1965) openly introduced race as a salient factor in thinking of the process of urbanization that Cartagena went through since the mid-twentieth century. Zapata represented the city’s Black-majority neighborhoods as diasporic communities where African-rooted cultural traditions prevailed despite racism, state violence, and poverty. He also described the state efforts to clear these sites as part of the history of material dispossession faced by the African diaspora in the Americas. By analyzing his novel this presentation discusses the intersection between race and space in the production of urban space in Colombia as well as the possibilities to overcome racial silence by decolonizing the archive through the use of non-hegemonic historical sources.
Felipe Antonio Honorato (University of São Paulo)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explains the Brazilian diplomatic model and demonstrates that Africa is a key actor to this doctrine because of its prominence in the Southern Atlantic and the existence in the region of a Brazilian led initiative to keep this part of the Atlantic Ocean demilitarized - the ZOPACAS.
Paper long abstract:
The peaceful action of the Baron of Rio Branco in dealing with national borders ended up shaping Brazilian diplomatic behavior. The guidelines established by Rio Branco allowed Brazil to adopt a diplomatic approach that made the most of its geography: as South America is a continuous physical unit, the country began to no longer see borders as places of separation, but rather as opportunities for cooperation. It is important to emphasize that, in an environment of instability on the continent or poor relations between Brazil and its neighbors, this diplomatic orientation becomes infeasible.
The Southern Atlantic is Brazil’s main international trade corridor and a very important hydrocarbon supplier, much because of the Guinea Gulf and the Pré sal. In order to this, it is essential for Brazil, within its diplomatic doctrine, to keep the region stable. The South American country has been cooperating with some African counterparts to maintain the region stable, demilitarized and away from the traditional powers' interference, through an initiative called South Atlantic Peace and Cooperation Zone (ZOPACAS).
The aim of this paper is to, using the bibliographical review as methodological tool, explain the diplomatic model developed by the Baron of Rio Branco, show that it still being used by the Brazilian diplomacy, and demonstrate that Africa is a key actor to this model because of its prominence in the Southern Atlantic and the existence in the region of a Brazilian led initiative to keep this part of the Atlantic Ocean demilitarized - the ZOPACAS.