titel

Postcolonialism and far beyond! Three plenary lectures

More, More, More ...Future! Three round tables

Individual papers, artistic interventions, cultural events, ....

Paper presentations

Jean-François Bayart

Jean-François Bayart, directeur de recherche au CNRS, ancien directeur du CERI (Centre d'études et de recherches internationales, Paris), président du Fonds d'analyse des sociétés politiques et du Réseau européen d'analyse des sociétés politiques) a consacré l'essentiel de ses travaux à la problématisation de l'historicité de l'Etat et à l'étude comparée du politique. Ses premières recherches ont porté sur les sociétés politiques africaines. Il a notamment publié à ce propos L'Etat en Afrique. La politique du ventre (1989, 2006 pour la nouvelle édition; traduction anglaise chez Polity Press). Il a ensuite élargi son propos, dans une perspective comparative, à la critique des concepts de culture et d'identité (L'Illusion identitaire, 1996. Traduction anglaise chez University of Chicago Press) et à la critique politique de la globalisation (Le Gouvernement du monde, 2004. Traduction anglaise chez Polity Press). Son souci d'appréhender l'historicité du politique l'a amené à exprimer ses réserves à l'encontre des postcolonial studies (Les Etudes postcoloniales, un carnaval académique, 2010). Son dernier livre, L'Islam républicain. Ankara, Téhéran, Dakar (Albin Michel, 2010) traite des trajectoires républicaines de passage de l'empire à l'Etat-nation en Turquie, en Iran et au Sénégal - et répond à la vague d'islamophobie qui balaye l'Europe.

Jean-François Bayart

Jean-François Bayart, directeur de recherche au CNRS, ancien directeur du CERI (Centre d'études et de recherches internationales, Paris), président du Fonds d'analyse des sociétés politiques et du Réseau européen d'analyse des sociétés politiques) a consacré l'essentiel de ses travaux à la problématisation de l'historicité de l'Etat et à l'étude comparée du politique. Ses premières recherches ont porté sur les sociétés politiques africaines. Il a notamment publié à ce propos L'Etat en Afrique. La politique du ventre (1989, 2006 pour la nouvelle édition; traduction anglaise chez Polity Press). Il a ensuite élargi son propos, dans une perspective comparative, à la critique des concepts de culture et d'identité (L'Illusion identitaire, 1996. Traduction anglaise chez University of Chicago Press) et à la critique politique de la globalisation (Le Gouvernement du monde, 2004. Traduction anglaise chez Polity Press). Son souci d'appréhender l'historicité du politique l'a amené à exprimer ses réserves à l'encontre des postcolonial studies (Les Etudes postcoloniales, un carnaval académique, 2010). Son dernier livre, L'Islam républicain. Ankara, Téhéran, Dakar (Albin Michel, 2010) traite des trajectoires républicaines de passage de l'empire à l'Etat-nation en Turquie, en Iran et au Sénégal - et répond à la vague d'islamophobie qui balaye l'Europe.

Les études postcoloniales, une invention de la tradition?

Les études postcoloniales se sont imposées comme un courant important des études culturelles et de la recherche en sciences sociales de langue anglaise. Il est de plus en plus reproché à l'Université française de les ignorer, alors que des militants et des historiens engagés interprètent la crise des banlieues dans les termes d'une « fracture coloniale » plutôt que sociale. Ce mauvais procès n'est pas fondé. Il occulte toute une tradition d'écrits et de travaux qui ont perpétué en France une pensée critique sur la colonisation. Il tient pour acquise la contribution scientifique des études postcoloniales, qui certes ont pu être utiles, dans leur diversité, mais qui sont largement superflues au regard des apports d'autres approches. Surtout, les études postcoloniales restent prisonnières du culturalisme et du récit national dont elles prétendaient émanciper les sciences sociales. Et elles s'interdisent de comprendre l'historicité des sociétés, celle du moment colonial, celle enfin de l'éventuelle transmission d'un legs colonial dans les métropoles ou dans les pays anciennement colonisés. Leur reconsidération fournit l'opportunité d'ouvrir de nouvelles pistes de réflexion pour l'analyse de l'Etat, au croisement de la science politique, de l'histoire, de l'anthropologie et de l'économie politique.

Ato Quayson

Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, where he has been since August 2005. He did his BA at the University of Ghana and took his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow, returning to Cambridge in Sept 1995 to become a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Prof Quayson has published widely on African literature, postcolonial studies and in literary theory.

Ato Quayson

Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, where he has been since August 2005. He did his BA at the University of Ghana and took his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow, returning to Cambridge in Sept 1995 to become a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Prof Quayson has published widely on African literature, postcolonial studies and in literary theory.

Science, Public Health, and (Post)Colonial Urban Evolution

The paper will focus on three inter-related themes. First is the degree to which colonial urban planning in the city of Accra since the 1900s depended heavily on notions of sanitation /disease control and disaster management. Second is how disease and sanitation control were themselves were predicated upon a particular contagial notion of disease and the human agents thought to be responsible for its spread (mendicant and itinerant traders, for example) that was supported by the scientific notions of the time. And third is the various ways in which such notions helped to situate a particular idea of the African colonial urban subject that was partly contested and partly acquiesced to by different classes of the colonized. The consequences of these vectors for the overall unfoldment of the African urban and the concomitant post-colonial ideologies that evolved to deal with them will be subject to elaboration and critique.

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Dr. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, and Presidential Professor of African American Studies and History, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. He previously was head of the Department of African American Studies and the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Director of the Center for African Studies and Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has taught at universities in the United States, Canada, Kenya, Jamaica, and Malawi, and currently holds the title of Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He has also worked as a consultant for the Ford and MacArthur foundations and as an adviser to the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. He is a past president of the African Studies Association (2008-2009)– the largest professional association in the world dedicated to the study of Africa and the African Diaspora. Dr. Zeleza’s academic work has crossed traditional boundaries, ranging from history and economics to human rights and gender studies. He has published scores of articles and authored or edited more than two dozen books, several of which have won international awards including Africa’s most prestigious book prize, the Noma Award for his books A Modern Economic History of Africa and Manufacturing African Studies and Crises. He also edits The Zeleza Post, an online source of news and commentary on the Pan-African world (www.zeleza.com). His most recent book is titled Barack Obama and African Diasporas: Dialogues And Dissensions (Ohio University Press, 2009).

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (sardan@ird.ne) is Professor of anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Marseilles and Emeritus director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). He lives and works in Niger and is among the founders of LASDEL, Laboratory for Study and Research on Social Dynamics and Local Development, in Niamey). Since 1965, he has authored numerous books in French, among them: Les sociétés songhay-zarma (Niger, Mali) (1984), Les pouvoirs au village: le Bénin rural entre démocratisation et décentralisation (edited with T. Bierschenk, 1998), Courtiers en développement. Les villages africains en quête de projets (edited with T. Bierschenk et J.P. Chauveau, 2000), Une médecine inhospitalière, les difficiles relations entre soignants et soignés dans cinq capitales d'Afrique de l'Ouest (edited with Y. Jaffré, 2003). He has published two books in English: Anthropology and development (2005) and, edited with G. Blundo, Everyday corruption and the State. Citizens and public officials in Africa (2006). His last book (La rigueur du qualitatif. Les contraintes empiriques de l’interprétation socio-anthropologique, 2008) deals with methodological and epistemological issues, concerning the policy of fieldwork and the empirical constraints of anthropological interpretations.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Francis B. Nyamnjoh joined the University of Cape Town in August 2009 from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), where he served as Head of Publications from July 2003 to July 2009. He has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities in Cameroon and Botswana, and has researched and written extensively on Cameroon and Botswana, where he was awarded the “Senior Arts Researcher of the Year” prize for 2003. His most recent books include Negotiating an Anglophone Identity (2003), Rights and the Politics of Recognition in Africa (2004), Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (2005), Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006), Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa (2009). Dr Nyamnjoh has published widely on globalization, citizenship, media and the politics of identity in Africa. He has also published seven ethnographic novels, Mind Searching (1991), The Disillusioned African (1995), A Nose for Money (2006), Souls Forgotten (2008), The Travail of Dieudonné (2008), Married but Available (2009), and Intimate Strangers (2010), a play, The Convert (2003), and a collection of short stories, Stories from Abakwa (2007). For further details visit: www.nyamnjoh.com.

Patrick Chabal

Patrick Chabal, who trained in political science at Harvard, Columbia and Cambridge universities, is a Professor in King's College London. He has taught and done research in a number of (West, East and Southern) African countries as well as in the USA, France, Italy, Switzerland, India, Portugal and the UK. He is the author of a large number of articles on the history, politics, and culture of African countries and on political theory. His main book publications are: Africa: the politics of suffering and smiling (2009); Culture troubles: politics and the interpretation of meaning [ with J.-P. Daloz] (2006); A history of postcolonial Lusophone Africa [with others] (2002); Africa works: disorder as political instrument [with J.-P. Daloz] (1999); The postcolonial literature of Lusophone Africa [with others] (1996); Power in Africa: an essay in political interpretation (1992 and 1994); Political domination in Africa: reflections on the limits of power [Editor] (1986); Amílcar Cabral: revolutionary leadership and people's war (1983 and 2003).

John Tabuti

Dr. Tabuti is a university educator, ethnobotanist and researcher. He has more 14 years of university teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in ethnobotany and plant biology. He has published extensively. His research interests are in identifying useful species that have the potential to satisfy human subsistence needs and also provide opportunities for income generation. He has documented the uses of indigenous plant species, and researched the effects of such use on the plant populations. He has also undertaken efficacy and safety studies for medicinal species. He is also interested in promoting and conserving useful plant species. To achieve this second aim he has studied plant population structures and biology. The outputs of these researches have led to the identification of useful plants and threatened species that can be domesticated. The results also indicate that indigenous woody species are threatened and that there is need to develop management action plans to slow down loss of these species.

Mirjam de Bruijn

Mirjam de Bruijn is an anthropologist whose work has a clearly interdisciplinary character. She has done fieldwork in Cameroon, Chad and Mali and an important theme throughout is how people manage risk (drought, war, etc.) in both rural and urban areas. She focuses on the interrelationship between agency, marginality and mobility. Her specific fields of interest are: nomadism, youth and children, social (in)security, poverty, marginality/social and economic exclusion, violence, slavery, and human rights. In Mali she worked in the Mopti area with the Fulbe (Peul) and in Menaka with the Tamacheck (Tuareg), while in Chad she has worked in N'djamena (the capital) and in Central Chad with Hadjerai and Arab groups. In Cameroon she works in the Grassfields and the north. Her new research programme is a comparative study of the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and ICT's interrelationship with agency, marginality and mobility patterns in Central and West Africa. Dr Mirjam de Bruijn has been appointed Professor of Contemporary History and Anthropology of West and Central Africa at the Faculty of Arts at Leiden University as of 15 June 2007. She pronounced her inaugural lecture 'De telefoon heeft benen gekregen; Mobiele communicatie en sociale veranderingen in de marges van Afrika' op 5 september 2008.

Richard Rottenburg

Richard Rottenburg holds a chair in Social Anthropology at the Martin-Luther-Universitaet Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) and is Max-Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle). His research focuses on the anthropology of law, organizations, science and technology (LOST). He has written and edited books on the Sudan, on organizations, on economic anthropology, and on the transcultural production of objectivity (2009 Far-fetched facts. A parable of development aid, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT; 2009. Social and public experiments and new figurations of science and politics in postcolonial Africa. Postcolonial Studies 12 (4): 423-440.).

Wenzel Geissler

After studying history and biology I turned to medical parasitology and started to work in Africa, conducting doctoral research on intestinal worm infections. After some public health research, I then returned to study social anthropology and I went back to the same East African field site for a second, ethnographic, field research, this time to study shifting understandings of relations and touch, memory and time, among the people from a western Kenyan village. Since 2003, I teach social anthropology at the London School of Hygiene, and since 2008 in Oslo. In my research I draw upon my double training in science and anthropology by studying medical science in Africa. My ongoing research projects include a collaborative study of history and historical consciousness, remains and memories of the Kenyan government's Division of Vector Borne Diseases (DVBD) with an emphasis on the post-colonial period, and on the transformations of government, public health and science that the past decades have brought about. This study draws, in addition to oral histories and archival work, on ethnographic work with the Division and among its staff and their families. More recently, we have commenced long-term ethnographic field research in the collaborative field research station of the Kenyan Medical Research Institute, KEMRI, and the USA's Centres for Disease Control, CDC, in Kisumu, Kenya; our interest is here directed at the manifold collaborative relationships among the members of the 'trial community' ¬— including scientists and staff, as well as participants, 'local community' and 'the public' - that are constituted by clinical trials and programmes on HIV. The former, historical-anthropological project and the latter ethnography are both attached to institutions and to people in the city of Kisumu, Kenya, and to rural 'study areas' of medical research across western Kenya. I hope that the historiographic and ethnographic work will eventually come together in a historical ethnography of medical scientific and public health work in Kenya from mid 20th century to the present.

Janet Roitman (Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University)

Janet Roitman has conducted extensive research in Central Africa, focusing specifically on the borders of Cameroon, Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Chad. Her book, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press, 2005), is an analysis of the unregulated commerce that transpires on those borders. This research inquires into emergent forms of economic regulation in the region of the Chad Basin and considers consequential transformations in the nature of fiscal relations and citizenship. More generally, her research covers topics of political economy, the anthropology of value, and emergent forms of the political. Roitman has served as an instructor at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques de Paris. She is a research fellow with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and an associate member of the Institut Marcel-Mauss (CNRS-EHESS) in Paris. Since 2007, she has been teaching in the anthropology department at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her collaboration with the Institute Marcel Mauss and The New School centers upon a trans-Atlantic and interdisciplinary research project entitled "New Perspectives on Critique in the Social Sciences," which reviews the problematic status of critical theory. In the context of this work, Roitman is currently devising a personal research project entitled "The Stakes of Crisis," which inquires into the status of the concept of crisis in the social sciences. To this end, she has conducted seminars in Anthropology and International Affairs at the New School for Social Research from 2007-2010. In Fall 2010, she will be a research fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University.

Africa: beyond crisis

How one might think Africa otherwise than under the sign of "crisis" ? This question will be surmised through a review of the notion of "crisis" as it is presently mobilized in social science narratives across the disciplines. The concept of crisis -- in the sense of political crisis or economic crisis -- has come to serve as both a metaphor and placeholder in academic and popular discourse. It is posited as a way of characterizing "history" itself and is claimed to even serve as a means to access the production of significance or meaning in history. Devoid of heuristic power, "crisis" is a metaphor that is symptomatic of the insufficiencies inherent to contemporary analytics of both politics and economic life. Africa, in particular, is now represented under the sign of crisis, which does little to explain current configurations of political economy on the continent, entailing various modes of producing value and validating modes of regulation, or livelihoods.

Undisciplining science: Congo, literature and the arts

If, as Achille Mbembe states, the main challenge for the Humanities consists in rethinking the ways one may write about the world from an African perspective, and about the place of Africa in that world, the question then becomes how to do that? Africa today is not only a vast political, economical, moral or ethical project, but it is also, and perhaps predominantly so, an aesthetic project as well. How can the social sciences take that fact into account, how can it expand its analytical framework to account for this, and what is there to learn from the arts in that respect? Simultaneously, in what ways may the social sciences figure as a source of inspiration for African artists and cultural actors? These and other related questions will be addressed during this round table.

Paul Kerstens (KVS)

Paul Kerstens is sinds 2005 verantwoordelijke voor het Afrika-traject van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg (KVS) van Brussel. Hij studeerde Germaanse Filologie en Afrikaanse Talen en Culturen (UGent) en werkte als assistent voor de parlementaire Lumumba-commissie. Hij publiceerde artikels over Afrikaanse literatuur en koloniaal erfgoed. In 2001 startte Green Light in KVS, een denktank van jonge Belgische artiesten van Afrikaanse afkomst.

Institutional trajectories: African-European networks & associations

Western historiography identifies the start of modernity, of which the scientific revolution is a defining aspect, with Europeans' "discovery", "exploration" and subsequent exploitation and colonization of other continents, including Africa, while largely ignoring the extent to which this modernity was crafted in Europe's overseas territories and through Europeans' interactions with inhabitants of other continents. Europe has long 'thrived on forgetting Africa, that is, refusing to recognize "traditional" Africa's contemporaneity' (Fabian), i.e. its own modern (counter)cultures (Gilroy). Have European and African scientists achieved more equal and equitable relations off late and are true African-European partnerships possible? To what extent are science education and practice in Africa still influenced by passed unequal relations between colonisers and colonised? What are the relations between science and development aid? These and other questions will be addressed during this round table.