“Africa*n Relations - Modalities Reflected”
Contributions from the Cluster Conference of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence
From July 14 to July 17.
Registration for events via email to Sabine.Greiner@uni-bayreuth.de
The Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence hosts its second Cluster conference from the 14th to the 17th of July 2021. The title of the conference, “Africa*n Relations: Modalities Reflected”, indicates the endeavour to focus on the Cluster’s 2020-21 annual theme, modalities of relating, understood as a heuristic angle to get a better understanding of the modes of relating we encounter in our study of African lifeworlds. Together with scholars from around the globe, members of the Cluster of Excellence from all five locations will present research results and exchange views on topics that are high on the Cluster’s agenda.
The conference’s format will be online, with events being held and live-streamed in Bayreuth and at the four African Cluster Centres (ACC), and others held virtually as webinars and video conferences. Apart from plenary sessions with keynotes, the conference will feature roundtables and thematic panels revolving around modalities and convened by Cluster members from Bayreuth and the ACCs. Speakers will include junior and senior Cluster members as well as invited guests whose work speaks to the panel theme.
Highlight: Okwui Enwezor Distinguished Lecture
One of the highlights of the 2021 annual conference will be the first annual Okwui Enwezor Distinguished Lecture. Established as a new lecture series in early 2021, it is designed to feature a prominent artist, curator, or scholar who will engage with groundbreaking contributions to the rethinking of African arts in a global perspective. The renowned art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu from Princeton University will deliver the first edition of the lecture series in honour of the late Okwui Enwezor as part of the Cluster conference on July 15, 2021
14.06. | 19:00 bis 20:15 Uhr
KEYNOTE: Relating Women in African Studies by Fatou Sow
Should we continue to ask whether and how women figure in reflections on African societies? What are their representations in contexts of multiple and profound ruptures? Concerned about our human rights and gender equality, we as African women are caught in the clutches of financial globalisation and the growing power of the neo- liberal economy; we are confronted with the political, economic and environmental crises on the continent, not least the severe setbacks to democracy and the rise of cultural and religious fundamentalisms.
Can we, without concern for legitimacy, construct our frameworks of reflection without looking for the colonial, but also African, sources of sexism, without taking into account the weight of patriarchy and its relations with an original matriarchy, without analysing the intersection of inequalities of gender, age, class, ethnicity, caste, race, religion, etc.? The debate remains open.
16.07. | 11:15 bis 12:30 Uhr
KEYNOTE: Decolonizing the University: a proposal from the perspectives of the Epistemologies of the South by Boaventura de Sousa Santos
He will engage with the epistemological proposal (the epistemologies of the south) he has been advancing and developing since 2008 in light of two conflated “nows”: the pandemic now and the epochal now or Zeitgeist. The two “nows” call for different temporalities and contemporaneities, involve different agencies and point to two “Noch nichts”. How different and how convergent?
16.07. | 18:00 bis 19:00 Uhr
Artist Lecture: Imagination, Thresholds and Ennui: Summons to Alt. Decoloniality? By Yvonne A. Owuor
In the matter of The Rest vs. The West, overfamiliarity has bred, not contempt, but also ennui. Conveniently for this exploration, ennui is also aesthesis. The situation has arguably been made all the more overt by a global pandemic that inserted itself bang into the middle of great decolonial discourses, disrupting the flow as the world, as one organism scrambled to contain an existential threat, and succeeded in proving that for all its rhetoric and protestations, when the crunch came, it was every nation for itself, and damn human rights, the rule of law and democracy. Today, no amount of crass vaccine nationalism will erase the memory of the discombobulation of those who had been so quick to tout their excellence and success, before crumbling before the actual test of the pandemic. Aesthetically, what has happened, is the metaphorical erasure of the fourth wall (stage) of enchantment and trance so that, now, the old (before Covid-19) public relations tactics fall, not on deaf ears, as much as bored ones. The world as a collective has probably entered a threshold space now; the ascendance of China and the rather hysterical (also aesthesis) response of most of the West to this historical occurrence suggests this. Liminal spaces are realms of change and possibility, of newness, of the evolution of a grammar of being and relating, of hope in re-emergence of the being undergoing a lustration. What might this mean for the extant decolonial/ decoloniality conversations, post-pandemic insights?
16.07. | 19:00 bis 20:30 Uhr
Conversations with Artists: Relational Transdisciplinarity and Artistic/Academic Knowledge Production
Whereas the multiple entanglements between Africa and its Latin American diasporas can hardly be squeezed into the boundaries established by the academic field, transdisciplinary cooperation between academics and artists offers a fruitful way out of disciplinary bottlenecks. In this roundtable, we will share insights into modalities of relating and translating that enable and restrain transdisciplinary knowledge production. As a first result of the Participatory Action Research programme carried out at the intersection of the Cluster projects “Moral Geographies of Re-Existence” and “Black Atlantic Revisited”, we will launch a video performance created by the artists Diego Araúja (Brazil), Lobadys Pérez (Colombia) and Matchume Zango (Mozambique). Taking a cue from the transdisciplinary video, we will jointly reflect on processes, products and pitfalls of border-crossing knowledge creation. In this vein, we aim at stimulating debates on innovative modes of doing research in ways that enhance in-depth and multi-perspectival analyses. Our contribution adds to discussions on knowledge transfer and dissemination with a view to widening the audience and raising the social impact of social sciences, humanities and the arts. Ultimately, multiple relations between Africa and its diasporas require multiple modes of knowledge production, reflection and diffusion in order to overcome historical and disciplinary strictures.
With Ute Fendler, Valerie Gruber and Gilbert Shang Ndi (all University of Bayreuth).
NOTE:
To participate at the cluster conference please write an email to Sabine.Greiner@uni-bayreuth.de.
About the CLUSTER OF EXCELLENCE
AFRICA MULTIPLE: RECONFIGURING AFRICAN STUDIES
The overarching aim of the “Africa Multiple” Cluster is to reconfigure African studies, on both the conceptual and the structural level. The cluster is conceived as a transformative space within which to systematically advance the study of Africa and its diasporas via the pursuit of transdisciplinary research, with a strong emphasis on critical area studies, in addition to the disciplines involved. Building on decades of internationally outstanding research in African studies at University of Bayreuth, the cluster will develop new approaches to the analysis of African and African diasporic lifeworlds through the lens of multiplicity.
The proposed structure of the cluster will set unique standards for collaborative research in this field, connecting a wide range of academic disciplines; building an innovative digital research environment; and integrating scholars and institutions in a global research network, with particularly strong nodes on the African continent. The cluster’s research (infra-)structure is designed to overcome existing power imbalances in the production and transmission of knowledge in African studies, and thus to set unprecedented standards for collaborative research in this field. Together with our African colleagues, we establish four “African Cluster Centres” on the African continent.
The defining concept of our research programme is multiplicity. This both describes our joint field of research, and emphasises that it is in and through multiple relations that the phenomena under study emerge. In order to facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to the study of multiplicity, we will also draw on the concepts of relationality and reflexivity as analytical tools; making up our three key concepts. The key concept of relationality refers to the (reflexive) relational processes in and through which phenomena materialise. To further analyse and conceptualise these processes, we have developed the four heuristic categories, or “angles” of modalities, medialities, temporalities and spatialities. We consider that these angles are particularly well-suited to the cluster, not only in terms of gaining methodological access to relationality and, through it, multiplicity, but also to initiate the cluster’s joint discussions across disciplines and empirical fields, without forcing them into one epistemological frame. The four angles will also be key tools for the research projects organised in and by the Research Sections.