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- Convenors:
-
Maria-Benedita Basto
(Université Paris Sorbonne Paris 4)
Clemens Zobel (University Paris 8)
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- Location:
- C1.03
- Start time:
- 27 June, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Representations of people in Africa are often over-determined by colonial legacies, denying historical agency and homogenizing differences. This transdisciplinary panel examines how such ideas are reproduced or displaced through contemporary relations with emerging powers in Asia and Latin America.
Long Abstract:
While all social representations bear the mark of institutional power-relations, we argue that as far as ideas on Africa are concerned, one encounters a particular state of over-determination. Work by authors, such as Mudimbe, Hountondji, Appiah, Amselle or Mbembe has examined the interplay between the social, political and economic effects of transatlantic slave-trade and colonialism, on the one hand, and artistic and scientific production, on the other hand. They have shown how individuals and collectives from the continent have often been assigned to a discursive location characterized by a denial of historical and political agency. Significantly, the cultural and racial essentialism which underpins this location is present both in the depreciative discourses of euro-centric evolutionism and in the affirmative gestures of afro-centric particularism. This panel examines how representations of Africa have been affected by the recent emergence of a multipolar global environment in which Western hegemony is increasingly challenged by emerging countries, such as Brazil, China, India, Malaysia and South Africa. Within a transdisciplinary perspective we study the effects of the involvement of these countries within Africa both in terms of the consequences for self-representations on the continent and for ideas on Africa produced in Asia and Latin America. Our objective is to identify the ways through which existing ideas have been reproduced and to explore if and how they have been displaced. Analysis is open to various sources ranging from scientific literature, policy documents, political discourse, and mass-media to school curricula, blogs, film, literature, art and architecture.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Elaine Tan (National University of Singapore)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the Union Government debate, a debate over the form and pace of regional integration in Africa, and explores the relationship between African states’ challenge to Western hegemony, the debate over regional integration in Africa, and the self-representations of the continent.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between African states' challenge to Western hegemony, the debate over regional integration in Africa, and the self-representations of the continent. The resurgence of regionalism in the late 1980s and the continued importance and deepening of regional integration has been a central feature of an increasingly multipolar global environment. This paper analyses the Union Government debate (2005-2010), a debate over the form and pace of regional integration in Africa. This debate, a twenty-first century iteration of the Pan-Africanist ideals that have been a persistent theme in post-independence African inter-state relations, has been largely ignored by scholars outside the continent. This has perhaps resulted from a certain amount of understandable scepticism; Pan-Africanist ideals of a radical restructuring of the continent have seldom been realised. However, the fact that states have persisted in reviving the debate on regional integration suggests that the debate is by no means insignificant or uninteresting. The academic inattention to this debate has therefore resulted in a missed opportunity to study the conundrums and puzzles posed by the debate. In this paper, the analysis of the Union Government debate allows us to examine the links between an African ideal of global multipolarity through regional integration, and an idea of Africa generated in the discourse on regional integration. This paper argues that the debate over African regional integration has been revived partially in order to challenge the influence of the 'West' in Africa, and this has led to the reproduction of essentialist understandings of Africa.
Joana Lucas (NOVA FCSH)
Paper short abstract:
Literary production on the territory that came to be the Islamic Republic of Mauritania will be here main object of analysis. I will focus on how narratives produced over time and carrying distinct paradigms contributed to the construction of a "Moorish" identity in pre-colonial and colonial contexts
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I propose to analyze, from an outsider's perspective, how the discourses about otherness and the "other" were produced, and how the African continent and its inhabitants were represented by the West, and its Eurocentric and privileged viewpoint.
I will focus on the narratives of "discovery" and "conquest" produced between the XV and XVIII centuries and on the different paradigms and forms of looking at the "other" and at its territory that those narratives offer.
Starting with the analysis of the narratives of conquest produced by European navigators in the fifteenth century, (an era also defined by the "maritime paradigm", Pratt, 1992), we will begin a journey through the representations present in the discourses concerning the "other" that were produced over the territory which later came to be the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
These narratives of "discovery", characteristic of the fifteenth century, were followed by a whole new wave of literary production imbued with various premises: illuminist, sentimental, heroic and anti-heroic. Those same texts were, in most cases, later used towards as instruments of the colonial powers that ruled over of the actual territory of Mauritania, who reproduced the language used to characterize the territory and its inhabitants, the "infamous" "Moors".
We will seek therefore to reflect on these various periods of narrative production about Mauritania, and how they had contributed to the solidification of a discourse that constructs the exoticism and radicalizes otherness, ultimately essentializing "Moorish" population.
Lena Heinze (University of Leipzig)
Paper short abstract:
The paper ‘Aesthetics of the Other’ gives an insight in transatlantic entanglements of scholarly careers and theoretical thought on ‘African identity’ by focusing on treaties on ‘Black’ and ‘African Aesthetics’.
Paper long abstract:
As an ideological basis common to colonialist, imperialist and racist discourse, the Eurocentric worldview permeates and structures contemporary practices and representations even after the formal end of colonialism. Critical theory and radical approaches in the social sciences still underestimate the power of Eurocentric myths, although they are today often recognized as progressivist and racist narratives. The same limitations can be found in current philosophical discourse. Academics from the Global North as well as the Global South have until now been using categories and conceptual systems which depend on a Western epistemological order. In the 20th century forms of ethnic cultural nationalism, such as "Afrocentrism", and ideas of "Africanity" have been promoted to challenge the strong Western tradition. Starting from the assumption that academic disciplines like philosophy can never be observed detached from their social and political background and that aesthetics are part of a process driven by power and interests, the proposed paper looks on the motivations that lead to the engagement in this academic realm and that influence the formulation of theoretical concepts on 'aesthetics', and more specifically of definitions of 'Black' and 'African Aesthetics'. It gives an insight in transatlantic entanglements of scholarly careers and theoretical thought on 'African identity' by looking at the treaties on ‚African Aesthetics' by the two scholars Godfrey Ozumba, University of Calabar, Nigeria, and John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji, The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaika, and their academic backgrounds.
Clemens Zobel (University Paris 8)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the use of Indian subaltern studies by African historiography furthers a de-essentialization of its representations. It focuses both on the issues raised by the engagement with subaltern studies and on how south-south exchanges confirm the role of Western academic centers.
Paper long abstract:
At the end of the 1990s the Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf edited a seminal collection of texts written by prominent representatives of Indian subaltern studies. In the introduction Diouf discusses the ways how subaltern studies and their Gramscian theoretical framework can provide a constructive contribution to revisiting the terms of national histories in Africa. This leads him to address the underlying problem of coming to terms with grasping otherness within knowledge configurations that remain under the influence of a colonial scientific heritage. In this paper I seek to examine the value of Diouf's arguments both as such and by connecting them to the discussion they have raised in and outside of Africa. Considering this case as the expression of a geopolitics of knowledge, I stress how this example of theoretical exchanges within the global south has had little influence on the Indian academic world, while reenforcing the mediating role of North-American and European academic sites.
Ana Martins (Queens' College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that instead of a celebratory discourse of origins what we need is to think about what can be done once the idea of Africa has been produced (in Brazil, or in Europe). Here, I ask how Afro-Brazilian writer Esmeralda Ribeiro deals with essentialist views of Africa as ancestral root.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to discuss the ideas of Africa which organise both the literary output and existing academic responses to the ethnic collective officially known as 'Afro-Brazilian women writers'. This will be done by focusing on Esmeralda Ribeiro's short-story, 'Guarde Segredo' (1998). As this story exemplifies, Ribeiro oscillates between an engagement with, and a subversion of, the fiction of the unitary authorial kernel which goes by the name of 'Afro-Brazilianness'. Despite Ribeiro's aesthetic and political 'dance' between consumption and criticism of an essentialist idea of Africa in Brazil, existing literary appraisals (Afolabi 2009) tend to assign Ribeiro the central position of (political) symbol and signifier of Brazilian national difference. In the light of this, I sketch a line of continuity between African paternalistic reifications of the mother (tongue) as the depository and matrix of memory (pre and post-independence), and the present quest for an African maternal kernel in Brazilian national identity. In both cases, the reification of the grand mother as orality, tongue, or smile, is, to quote Ward, 'not a fond and flattering caress but a deadly act of appropriation' (1997: 117). Ribeiro's depiction of the uncanny smile of Lima Barreto in the grandmother's lips provocatively exposes how the myth of Africa as origin and utopia in Brazil is dangerously incorporated into a 'monoglossic discourse that has been coded in advance' (Ward 1997: 121).
Maria-Benedita Basto (Université Paris Sorbonne Paris 4)
Paper short abstract:
In 2003 a law voted under the new government of President Lula made the teaching of African and African-Brazilian history in public education mandatory. This paper shows how a policy designed to break with discrimination seems to have paradoxically reinforced stereotypical representations of Africa.
Paper long abstract:
Within Latin America, Brazil is clearly one of the countries in which cultural forms related to Africa are most present in popular culture. However, this heritage and the many people related with it have always been subject to discrimination and knowledge of Africa itself remained outside of public attention. The law 10.639 on the mandatory teaching of African and African-Brazilian history and culture in primary and secondary education developed by President Lula's government responding to years of struggle by social movements confronts this paradox in an unprecedented move towards a politics of recognition. This paper argues that ten years after the law's creation, its effects have done little to change the place of an Africa so close and yet so far.Textbooks reduce African history to its mythical empires and confound colonial history with the institution of slavery, while mass media representations of the continent focus on tribal customs and wildlife. As a result, in spite of the importance of Africa in Brazil's current economic and foreign policy, the contemporary urban, cosmopolitan and socially, politically and culturally diverse Africa remains mostly unknown. This leads me to analyse some of the reasons for this outcome, but also to question if we are not facing the inherent effects of a politics of recognition.
Vivian Fonseca (FGV)
Paper short abstract:
It aims to analyze the narratives about Africa associated to the idea of the roots of capoeira, having as context the Brazilian capoeira masters and teachers diaspora. We seek to put in dialogue the relationships established in those territories where native and independents groups begin to appear.
Paper long abstract:
It explores the narratives constructed about the African continent with the idea of the roots of capoeira, having as context the Brazilian teachers diaspora. We seek to analyze the new relationships established in those African territories where native groups begin to appear and structure themselves. Despite common sense, in which capoeira appears often, even today, as an African practice, which was brought to Brazil in the context of slavery, capoeira begins to be taught in Africa, in a systematic way, only in the 1990s. The Brazilian capoeira players migration to the African countries have peculiarities regarding the expansion occurred in other areas, such as Europe. Usually, the choice of African countries by capoeira teachers to establish a teaching center does not keep relations with a social ascension project. In many cases, this choice is through a strategy of the group to which the teacher belongs, or it is also aiming to satisfy a personal project of life usually associated to the idea of returning to origins of capoeira and the discovery of its roots. Beyond these issues, some autonomous native groups, without relations to a Brazilian group, start forming in Africa, reconstructing narratives about its ancestry. While Brazilian "capoeiristas" legitimize your practice highlighting its connection with African elements, several African groups recognize and identify an authentic capoeira from its relationship with Brazilian cultural elements. On the other hand, some groups seek to build their own roots, erasing or reducing the role of Brazilian masters for the conformation of the capoeira.