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- Convenors:
-
Catherina Wilson
(Radboud University)
Joanna Boampong (University of Ghana)
Tilmann Heil (University of Cologne)
Silke Oldenburg (Geneva Graduate Institute)
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- 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, -Paper short abstract:
This text addresses the relationship between slavery, machines, and artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting the implications between coloniality and technology. It critiques the perpetuation of supremacist ideals while exploring critical discourses within the arts and sciences.
Paper long abstract:
With the rise of Western dominance in the global modern economy, a paradox emerges: the discourse of freedom coexists with the practice of slavery. This contradiction might be explained through Descartes' concept of "automata": a soulless being lacking autonomy, inherently subject to the control of a self-proclaimed human master. This idea forms the foundation for the development of modern mechanical and computational technologies, such as AI.
By emphasizing art history as a critical platform, I aim to explore the intersections of technology, race, and power, in dialogue with Brazilian Indigenous thinking and black artists production. I believe the intercultural and situated perspectives of the selected artists and thinkers can offer insights into how colonial oppression has shaped modern and contemporary landscapes. Additionally, I am convinced that researching technologies—or as the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui suggests, engaging with the concept of "cosmotechnics"—provides a way to challenge extractivist models, confronting what Nego Bispo refers to as "cosmophobia" , in a counter-colonial movement.
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.
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.
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”.
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).