Achille Mbembe on Fanon, Violence and Sartre's introduction to Les Damnés de la Terre

Lewis Gordon, Nigel Gibson and Achille Mbembe Speak on Fanon in Johannesburg

'The trouble with being female in politics:' A Roundtable Panel Discussion about Women and Politics in South Africa Today

Thursday, 13 February, 2014 - 17:30

Hosted by: Catherine Burns

'The trouble with being female in politics:' A Roundtable Panel Discussion about Women and Politics in South Africa Today

WiSER, 17:30 for 18:00-19:00

6th Floor Richard Ward Building, East Campus, University of the Witwatersrand

The title of this discussion is taken from a piece written by Rebecca Davis for the Daily Maverick.

From 17:30, please join us to mingle over refreshments; followed by 30 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes for audience discussion.

Book Launch: Jeff Guy's Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal

Theophilus Shepstone and the Forging of Natal: African Autonomy and Settler Colonialism in the Making of Traditional Authority is an account of the life of Theophilus Shepstone, Secretary for Native Affairs in the Colony of Natal from 1846 to 1876 and an examination of the nature of the concept of traditional authority in South Africa today.

Speakers: Keith Breckenridge and Jeff Guy

Tuesday, 1st October 2013 at  6pm in the WiSER Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus, Wits University

Refreshments will be served.  Please RSVP: Najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za

Siliva Federici's new book launched in Johannesburg

WiSER and JWTC invite you to the Launch of a new Book by Silvia Federici

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

Written between 1975 and the present, the essays collected in this volume represent thirty years of research and theorizing on questions of social reproduction and the transformations which the globalization process has produced. Originally inspired by Federici’s organizational work in the Wages For Housework movement, topics discussed include the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, and the development of affective labor. Though theoretical in style, the book is written in an explanatory manner that makes it both accessible to a broad public and ideal for classroom use.

Speakers: Catherine Burns (WiSER) and Sharad Chari (CISA)
Tuesday, 17^th September 2013 6pm

Decolonising Thought - Walter D Mignolo (Centre for Indian Studies in Africa & Wiser @ Wits)

Africa in Theory

On Monday the 8th of April Achille Mbembe will be presenting "Africa in Theory" to the WISH seminar at WISER from 3:00 to 4:30pm.  We particularly ask those who will attend to read the paper prior to the event, as the presenter will not restate the content.

Abstract: As the new century unfolds, many increasingly acknowledge that there is no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination or to pose new questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded upon; how to draw on multiple models of time so as to avoid one-way causal models; how to open a space for broader comparative undertakings; and how to account for the multiplicity of the pathways and trajectories of change. In fact, there is no better terrain than Africa for a scholarship that is keen to describe novelty, originality and complexity, mindful of the fact that the ways in which societies compose and invent themselves in the present – what we could call the creativity of practice – is always ahead of the knowledge we can ever produce about them. As amply demonstrated by Jean and John Comaroff in a recent book, Theory From the South, the challenges to critical social theory are nowhere as acute as in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps the epicenter of contemporary global transformations in any case the site of unfolding developments that are contradictory, uneven, contested, and for the most part undocumented.

Debating the ANC's 'Second Transition' Policy Documents

Thought Amidst Waste

Presented by Richard Pithouse, WISER

Date: 

Monday, 28 May, 2012 - 15:00

Achille Mbembe argues that the rendering of human beings as waste by the interface of racism and capitalism in South Africa means that “for the democratic project to have any future at all, it should necessarily take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and 'the human' from a history of waste”. This paper notes that people who have been rendered as waste in South Africa have often contested their position as the damned of the transition to parliamentary democracy by asserting their humanity, in principle and in practice. But it argues that some approaches to defending democracy in South Africa against growing hostility to democratic values and practices from within the ruling party are taking the form of an active reinscription of the rendering of people as waste. It suggests that we need to question the nature of our democracy rather than the demand for inclusion.

Southern Theory | Global Humanities -- A Lecture Series on Frantz Fanon

WISER

After a thousand years of world ascendency, the Euro-American archive might finally be running dry.  Meanwhile, not only is the world moving South and East, but so is theory.  The redrawing of the global intellectual map which started during the era of decolonization is proceeding unabated.  The worldwide dissemination of thought is buttressed by a worldwide circulation and translation of texts, a highly productive invention and re-appropriation of concepts and the de-nationalization of the great academic debates. Under what conditions can the de-nationalization of the humanities bring a truly global perspective to conventional theory and criticism and rekindle our research imagination?