Decolonising the humanities

by Suren Pillay, Mail & Guardian

What does it mean to pursue critical scholarship in the humanities and social sciences in a settler colonial society trying to move beyond the category "settler" and "native" towards becoming the citizenry bequeathed to us by our political settlement?

This is the question all South African universities share, however differently they were marked by apartheid. Its urgency is fuelled partly by the daunting demographic anxiety the humanities and social sciences face because of declining enrolment and the very worrying reality that we do not produce enough graduate students, particularly black South African PhD graduates.

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.

JWTC: Jean and John Comaroff on 'Theory from the South'

The Johannesburg Workshop on Theory & Criticism 

For Jean and John Comaroff, understanding these times, accounting for their lineaments, finally, is the point, the provocation, the critical pulse that underlies both the poetics and the disciplinary practice toward which Theory From the South aspires. Whether it succeeds or fails, or does both in some proportion, the issues that it was written to address remain too important to ignore, too serious to set aside, too weighty to wait.

Theory - north south and between

Kerry Chance, from Harvard University, attended the 2012 Session of the JWTC. She speaks to The Blog.
 

What in your view distinguishes ‘theory’ from Harvard and ‘theory’ from Johannesburg?

As I understand it, the proposition of the Johannesburg Workshop, among other things, is to read and produce contemporary theory from ‘the South,’ and thereby also to make visible the potential parochialisms of ‘the North.’ Having lived and worked in South Africa for over a decade, my approach to theory has been profoundly shaped by life and thought emanating from here. As anthropologists and scholars of Post-colonial and African Studies have argued for some time, our vantage in the world has a bearing on the kinds of questions we ask of theory, and how we think theory vis-à-vis the Western canon. So, while it is important not to lose sight of this proposition, the lines between ‘North’ and ‘South’ often are not so easily drawn. With regard to recent housing evictions in Johannesburg and Chicago, for instance, we might see more connections between Soweto and Chicago’s Cabrini Green than Sandton or Chicago’s Northside. In other words, we should not overlook emerging global relations and processes that suggest how ‘North’ and ‘South’ can be seen as multiple and beyond any simple dichotomy. In this vein, having spent the last year at Harvard, I can say that it is a place where African Studies is being taken seriously. There also are many academics, students, research projects, initiatives and student organizations that are ‘thinking from the South’ in important ways.

The Weapon of Theory

by Amilcar Cabral, The Marxists Internet Archive

Address delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana in January, 1966. 

If any of us came to Cuba with doubts in our mind about the solidity, strength, maturity and vitality of the Cuban Revolution, these doubts have been removed by what we have been able to see. Our hearts are now warmed by an unshakeable certainty which gives us courage in the difficult but glorious struggle against the common enemy: no power in the world will be able to destroy this Cuban Revolution, which is creating in the countryside and in the towns not only a new life but also — and even more important — a New Man, fully conscious of his national, continental and international rights and duties. In every field of activity the Cuban people have made major progress during the last seven years, particularly in 1965, Year of Agriculture.