The Andrew W Mellon Foundation recently granted the African Studies Centre at the University of Michigan in the United States and Wiser, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, $1.5-million to support a programme of collaboration between the two. Our object in this project is to strengthen the international theoretical significance of academic writing on the humanities that is produced in Africa.
It is a sign of the comparative weakness of knowledge-making
in Africa that writing in the academic humanities on this continent has been
dominated, for the past half-century, by the wealthy research universities in
North America.
This dominance was a product of the fact that almost all the
most important African scholars — Kwame Anthony Appiah, VY Mudimbe and even
Mahmood Mamdani — have taken positions at the wealthiest and most
well-resourced institutions in the US.
But this dominance has not been entirely uncontested. South
African scholars, especially those based at the University of the Witwatersrand,
have been curiously influential in shaping the field of African studies. On
more than one occasion, North American academics have observed that this is an
interesting case of the tail wagging the dog.
To be sure, relations between researchers based in these
regions have often been fraught, subject to misunderstanding and to breakdowns
in scholarly communication. Not least here has been the problem of mostly white
scholars (on both sides of the Atlantic) writing about mostly black people — a
problem that is still only slowly unravelling.
These breakdowns were especially powerful during the 1980s,
but more recently the forms of miscommunication have changed in character. Over
the past decade especially, a distinct bias towards abstract theorising has
emerged in the American institutions. South African scholars have long been
interested primarily in empirical research. Careful studies of the local, of
the small towns of the highveld, seem to have an almost hypnotic power over our
academics.
Where South Africans have engaged with theoretical arguments
they have tended to genuflect, especially recently, adopting theoretical
concepts derived elsewhere with naive enthusiasm, without pausing to subject
them to scrutiny and criticism, rushing on to relate a local (sometimes very
odd) instance of what is often taken to be a uniform global process.
This is especially true of younger scholars encountering the
radical tones of Michel Foucault’s work, but it is very widely the case across
fields. In the humanities scholarship on Africa, theoretical terms — such as
biopolitics, governmentality, materiality, patrimonialism, neoliberalism and
transnationalism — are commonly used as shorthand descriptive devices to
capture large and complex processes.
On both sides of the Atlantic these concepts serve as
black-box tools of analysis. Often, in fact, they work as terms of abuse in
scholarship and in the public domain. Only rarely is the theoretical concept’s
suitability and power in South Africa, and Africa more generally, critically
examined.
Generously supported by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation,
Wiser and the African Studies Centre at the University of Michigan will work
together to turn this weakness into a strength. Over the next five years, we
will jointly host two two-week courses each year, located alternately in Ann
Arbor and Johannesburg.
These will be interdisciplinary courses on the significant
theoretical accounts that inform scholarship in the humanities, not only of and
about this continent, but also very broadly conceived. Participants will
include faculty and graduate students from Wits and from Michigan, and graduate
students and junior faculty from other African and American institutions will
also be invited to participate. The workshops will combine critical readings in
the existing scholarly literature with field trips to heritage sites, museums,
performances and art exhibits.
There is much in this collaboration that should benefit
Wits. The University of Michigan is a large, well-resourced institution, and
one of the very strongest universities in the world. Its leading researchers in
the humanities frequently set the agenda of international research.
But Wits also offers these scholars an invaluable social
laboratory, and the opportunity to test their arguments against the excellent,
detailed research being done here by a host of young scholars. Johannesburg
provides an unmatched platform to observe and participate in the cultures and
economies of Africa.
Both Wits and Michigan are also struggling to understand the
causes, symptoms and remedies of a global capitalist order that is manifestly
failing the people who live around each of these institutions. Both
universities are intimately invested in the problem of finding a future for the
cities — and societies — that have been created by 20th-century industrial
development.
The sequence of the themes we have chosen still has to be
decided, but individual problems will include critical investigations of the
colonial archive, biopolitics, neoliberalism, intellectual property and the
digital humanities, publics and their cultures, and technopolitics. Each
workshop will be convened by a committee of scholars from both institutions,
and overseen by a cat herder based at Wiser.
The workshops will comprise in equal parts carefully
selected foundational readings and research writings in progress. The
participants will be asked to interrogate the adequacy of the very broad
concepts that have come to dominate theory in the humanities, and to consider how
African cultures and histories might demand a reworking of those explanations.
We anticipate that these workshops will have several
different effects. They will strengthen the engagement with important
international theories in South Africa. At the same time, they should equip
scholars on both sides of the Atlantic with explanations that allow audiences
to see both the nuances of theoretical accounts of Africa and the inadequacies
and limits of explanations that have been adopted without considering this
continent.
