On African Fault Lines: V.Y. Mudimbe

On African Fault Lines

V-Y Mudimbe’s On African Fault Lines was launched by the Department of Political and International Studies’ Thinking Africa project on Tuesday evening. 

Described by Lewis Gordon as the African continent’s greatest thinker, Mudimbe, is this collection of meditations is concerned with three thematics: Africa’s place within today’s intellectual, economic and cultural configurations; the main axes that structure disciplinary practices concerned with African difference and the possibility of understanding being-in-the-world with reference to alienation, creativity and friendship.

There can be no doubt that On African Fault Lines is a brilliant and intensely thought assemblage of writings Intellectual good faith is the hallmark and true achievement of Valentin Mudimbe’s oeuvre, and it is spectacularly on display here. His good faith approach draws ‘Africa’ into the wide orbit of his thought as much as he draws his sources into ‘Africa’. The signal accomplishment of this book is that it teaches us how to learn.

— Grant Farred, professor of Africana Studies, Cornell University

Violence in/and the Great Lakes: The Thought of V.Y. Mudimbe and Beyond

7 to 9 August 2013

ELRC, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.

This colloquium is organised by the Thinking Africa project of the

Department of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University, in

collaboration with Grant Farred from Cornell University. The colloquium

reflects on the work of VY Mudimbe using these reflections to consider the

current situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Participants in

the colloquium include VY Mudimbe (Duke, USA), Grant Farred (Cornell, USA),

Gervais Désiré Yamb (Ottawa, Canada), Fabien Eboussi Boulaga (Yaoundé,

Cameroon) Olga Hel-Bongo (Laval, Québec), Justin K. Bisanswa (Laval, Québec)

and Kasereka Kavwahirehi (Ottawa, Canada).

Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony

Rethinking the South African Crisis

We are very pleased to announce that Gillian Hart will be giving this year’s Thinking Africa Public Lecture on the 15th of August. Gillian Hart is Professor of Geography and Co-Chair of Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Gillian Hart’s forthcoming book is about to come out with UKZN Press.

The publishers describe the book as follows:

“Rethinking the South African Crisis revisits longstanding debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Gillian Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts and struggles in the arenas of everyday life, feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalisation and renationalisation. Together they are key to understanding the erosion of ANC domination, and the proliferation of populist politics. This book provides an innovative and forceful dialectical analysis of the ongoing, unstable and unresolved processes through which the crisis in South Africa is playing out. It also suggests how Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated in relation to present circumstances, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.” 

Reclaiming African History, Reclaiming Humanity

Achille Mbembe to deliver a second “Thinking Africa” Public Lecture

Prof Achille Mbembe is to deliver the Second Annual Rhodes University Thinking Africa Project Public Lecture on  "Frantz Fanon on the Subject of Emancipation"  to be held  on 12 July, 2012 at the Rhodes Eden Grove Red Lecture Complex.

by Sarah-Jane Bradfield, Rhodes University Website

Prof Mbembe, who was born in the Cameroon, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and has held appointments at a number of the leading universities in the world, is widely considered to be one of the most significant African academics writing today, along with Mahmood Mamdani and VY Mudimbe.

Programme for the Second Annual Thinking Africa Colloquium

1. The Second Annual Public Lecture delivered by: Achille Mbembe, Thursday

12 July, 2012. Eden Grove Red. 7pm.

Title: "Frantz Fanon on the Subject of Emancipation".

2. Thinking Africa Colloquium: Ubuntu: Curating the Archive

Dates: 13, 14 and 15 July 2012

Venue: Continuing Education Centre (CEC)

Time: 9am-5pm

Frantz Fanon 50 years later: a ‘Thinking Africa’ conference

Richard Pithouse

by Richard Pithouse, Social Dynamics, Vol. 37, No, 3, 2012

The Thinking Africa Project in the Department of Politics & International Relations at Rhodes University hosted its inaugural annual conference in July 2011. It was decided to dedicate the conference to an examination of the contemporary meanings of Frantz Fanon due to the fact that 2011 is the fiftieth year since Fanon’s death and, also, the ongoing centrality of Fanon’s work to the thinking of emancipatory political possibilities in Africa.

Fanon died, in Washington, in December 1961. In his 36 years, the arc of his life moved from the Caribbean to Europe and North Africa. He had been a soldier with the Free French Forces, a student in France, a psychiatrist in the French colonial system and a revolutionary in the Algerian National Liberation Movement. Black Skin, White Masks, written while he was a student, is a canonical text in critical race studies. The Wretched of the Earth, written through failing health in 10 weeks in Tunis, stands as a foundational text in the critique of colonialism, the description and assessment of anti-colonial struggle and the diagnosis of the pathologies of the postcolonial state.

The Oppressive Paradigm of the Colonial Academy

Mandisi Majavu, SACSIS

Almost two decades into post-apartheid South Africa many black academics still feel that the “white networks that have de facto run academic decision making” are derailing the transformation agenda. This is according to the Charter for Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), a report commissioned by the Minister of Higher Education and Training, that was published in June this year.

What does it mean to be young, black and South African?

by Danielle Bowler and Chantelle Malan

Playing on Nina Simone’s lyrics, the African Music Channel, has adopted “Young, gifted and African” as their slogan, which is now frequently featured on t-shirts of the hip and trendy. The slogan aims to highlight the view that, contra the white world’s systematic denigration of the black world, the black world, and its youth in particular, have much to offer the world.

Frantz Fanon Fifty Years On - Course Outline

Frantz Fanon Fifty Years On

A post-graduate course in the Department of Political Studies & International Relations at Rhodes University, to be taught by Richard Pithouse as part of the Thinking Africa project During the Second Semester, 2011

Frantz Fanon died in 1961. In the fifty years that have passed since his death he has become a canonical thinker in a number of academic fields including postcolonial studies and critical race theory. His ideas continue to animate some of the most compelling theoretical innovation that is being produced in the South African academy and in Africana studies more generally.

Rhodes hosts experts for Thinking Africa

by Sarah-Jane Bradfield

A three-day colloquium under the theme “Fanon 50 years later” was hosted by Rhodes’ Department of Political and International Studies’ last week as part of their launch of their flagship project, Thinking Africa.

On Thinking Africa: the perpetual question

by Siphokazi Magadla, Address at the opening night of the Frantz Fanon Fifty Years Later Colloquium

 

It was in our first Fanon reading group in preparation for this launch that I learnt that Frantz Fanon dictated most of his books to his wife Josie Fanon who was doing the typing. Richard Pithouse explained that it is perhaps because of this that much of his work is so declarative compared to usual strict academic language. Immediately I could picture this man pacing up and down his living room wondering loudly questions that would haunt us today in our own living rooms, “what does man want? What does a black man want?” Indeed Fanon continues to dictate us “towards a new humanism” as he puts it in Black Skin White Masks.

Re-thinking the study of Africa

by Sharon Dell, University World News, July 2011

What is Africa? Who and what is the study of Africa for? These surprisingly complex questions have inspired a new postgraduate project at South Africa's Rhodes University, which aims to contribute towards "re-thinking the study of Africa" and pursue an innovative approach to teaching-led research.

Thinking Africa, rethinking everything

by Nigel Gibson, Thinking Africa Newsletter No. 2, 2011

The fact is that everything needs to be reformed and everything thought out anew.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Has it paradoxically become more difficult to be an oppositional critical humanist in the post-apartheid academy? I ask because during the 1980s some quite amazing intellectual spaces opened up in the universities, often related in one way to the social movements, the trade union movements and so on, in the struggles against apartheid. After 1994, the problem seemed one of practice and policy, leading to policy units trumping the development of more reflective units of academic study.