How not to think Africa from the Cape

by Harry Garuba, Thought Leader

How does one think Africa from the Cape in this post-colonial, post-apartheid moment? First, let me explain the rise of the notion of thinking from a place.

The idea of location and locatedness saturates contemporary academic life. In the humanities and social sciences, the shifts in contemporary theory have made an awareness of place, or a self-consciousness of location almost indispensible to thinking through/working through the problematics we isolate for research and analysis. Locations refer to the geographical spaces we speak from, the places we study and research, the subject-positions (such as racial, gender, class identifications) from which we speak, the historical, disciplinary, and institutional locations that enable and structure what we say, and so on.The question of thinking Africa from the Cape thus feeds into this broad movement in theory and critique in the academy.