Questions about how we engage, conceive of and receive Africa in the Cape – and of how the Cape positions itself in Africa – are vigorously argued over across the peninsula with the regularity and ferocity of the south-easterly winds.
Showing posts with label Thinking Africa from the Cape. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thinking Africa from the Cape. Show all posts
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Thinking Africa from the Cape
by Suren Pillay, Thought Leader, 2011
Growing up in the Cape, we were taught that we were “Western”. How do we explain and undo this colonial sensibility? From my location at a university, there are two realisations from which to proceed. Firstly, the history of knowledge production, and the history of the organisation of knowledge — the ways we organise disciplines in this country — has a colonial and apartheid genealogy, and is dominated by Enlightenment thinking. We share this with the postcolonial world in the Middle East, in Asia and in Latin America. It is the post-independence inheritance of most of the formerly colonised world.
Growing up in the Cape, we were taught that we were “Western”. How do we explain and undo this colonial sensibility? From my location at a university, there are two realisations from which to proceed. Firstly, the history of knowledge production, and the history of the organisation of knowledge — the ways we organise disciplines in this country — has a colonial and apartheid genealogy, and is dominated by Enlightenment thinking. We share this with the postcolonial world in the Middle East, in Asia and in Latin America. It is the post-independence inheritance of most of the formerly colonised world.
Monday, 6 June 2011
The Cape must embrace its rich mix
by Achille Mbembe, Meg Samuelson, Sarah Nuttall and Grace Musila, The Cape Times, 7 June 2011
The Western Cape is one of the most creolised regions of South Africa.
The Western Cape is one of the most creolised regions of South Africa.
A fulcrum between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, it has never ceased to be a site where North-South, East-West axes and the land mass of the African interior collided and intersected, including during the long years of white supremacy and its wild dreams of racial separatism.
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