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- Convenors:
-
Irene Brunotti
(University of Leipzig)
Lara-Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi (Institute of African Studies, University of Leipzig)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Location-based African Studies: Discrepancies and Debates
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
- Location:
- S68 (RW I)
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 1 October, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
We explore how race is being linguistically absenced across Europe, while phenomenologically present, how race is linguistically absent from different African languages, what is its phenomenological status in African settings, how does this relate to race as analytical category in African Studies?
Long Abstract:
In this panel we are grappling with two race-related tensions. Firstly, European countries have been showing a tendency towards the erasure of the word race (e-race-ure) in their constitutions. This move aims at avoiding any possible repetition of the racial atrocities of the Second World War by not reifying the concept of race in writing. This e-race-ure is countered by many Black Europeans and Europeans of Colour who insist that the absencing of the word race would create a void in the juridical vocabulary, leading to the impossibility of proving the race-related violence against their bodies that is still very present. Secondly, in African Studies the word race has been used to describe and explain many diverse African realities, even if the word itself is absent in the locally relevant African languages.
As teachers of African languages, we grapple with race as a wor(l)d, with how it might be linguistically and conceptually absent/absenced, but phenomenologically present within different onto-epistemologies, and reflect on the possibilities that its presence/absence opens up or closes. Concerned with more just and caring modes of thinking, researching and teaching, we would like to discuss the absencing/presencing of the wor(l)ds race with scholars who have engaged with, or stumbled upon, these tensions: What is it about the wor(l)d race that drives attempts at e-race-ure across Europe? How is the phenomonen of race (not) worded from within different African languages and onto-epistemologies? And how does this relate to, or question, race as an analytical category in African Studies?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 1 October, 2024, -Jakub Vávrovský (University of Hradec Králové)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on different ways how racionalizations, raciolinguistic profiling and racism are expressed by fans at Czech football stadiums and on social media as places providing enough anonymity while also arguing that race is a tabooed object excluded from discourse.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is part of a broader research focusing on the integration of African football players in the Czech Republic. As football remains a major sport in which racism is still present to a relatively high degree, this paper focuses on the various ways in which fans in Czech stadiums express racialisations, raciolinguistic profiling, overt as well as covert, sometimes even unintentional racism. Given that the Czech football environment still functions as a white establishment “allowing” players to play its white game, "whiteness" is normative, and race is an absent presence often excluded from discourse because it is a tabooed object. The data was collected primarily through ethnography at several football stadiums in the Czech Republic, closely examining Czech specific language terminology in relation to ideologies of race and racial labelling. The participant observation data capturing social and racial meanings in Czech language usage was combined with content analysis of selected social media posts. Analysing both platforms as places in which one feels "among their own" it provides for much anonymity and unfiltered commentary. The preliminary results of this research point to the fact that although words indicating a clear presence of race are almost absent in the statements of fans, racism is very present and expressed in various ways, often hidden and sometimes unintentional.
Madeline Bass (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Paper short abstract:
This paper connects research work with Oromo diaspora communities in Europe to an ongoing study of African im/migrant organizations in Germany in order to better understand the relationships between indigeneity, Blackness, and diaspora.
Paper long abstract:
This paper connects research work with Oromo diaspora communities in Europe to an ongoing study of African im/migrant organizations in Germany in order to better understand the relationships between indigeneity, Blackness, and diaspora. The argument builds from a discussion of the concept of black, or guraacha, in the Oromo indigenous epistemology. Beyond a literal translation of the color or a specific racial category, guraacha is tightly linked Oromo concepts of self and other, and relationships with the world around. Throughout the move from Ethiopia to Europe, however, the meanings of guraacha and blackness are complicated by processes of racialization and ongoing anti-colonial struggles. Building from this conceptual frame, I make a broader case for a view of racialization that incorporates the specificities of Blackness and African Indigeneity. By viewing African diasporic lifeways as influenced by both Indigenous knowledges like guraacha and diasporic experiences of Blackness, the role of race can be more clearly explicated. Such an inquiry also clarifies how African indigeneity is (re)experienced and described in the European diaspora alongside and against experiences of Blackness. This approach to African Studies and African diaspora studies makes conceptual and theoretical space for meanings of race and racialization that are better in tune with the ways Blackness is lived and articulated across geographies.
Catey Boyle (Harvard University)
Paper short abstract:
Deploying an ethics of relationality, I call for a project of archival reading that interrogates ideologies of gendered racialization and enslavement produced by early-nineteenth-century African and European elites in northern Africa, as well as their post-colonial rearticulations in the present.
Paper long abstract:
This article centers on the inscription of an enslaved Black woman in early-nineteenth-century Ottoman Tunis preserved in the French colonial archives. I call for a project of archival reading that interrogates ideologies of gendered racialization and enslavement produced by early-nineteenth-century Islamicate elites and European colonial observers, as well as their post-colonial rearticulations in the present by politicians and translators. Deploying an ethics of relationality that productively holds common difference across privilege, time, space, race, class, gender, status, and ability, I contend that this praxis is essential for engaging with the multiple forms of anti-Blackness that have conditioned the production and legacies of this archival trace. Furthermore, this praxis amplifies the rich and complex histories of Black Tunisians. To confront the violence of anti-Black racism and xenophobia linking the northern regions of the African continent to empires of the Global North in the past and present, this project of archival reading is grounded in coalition-building among activists, organizers, and researchers in Tunisia and the broader Global South and North.