Expulsions: Knowledge, temporality, and materiality in Africa

In the most recent millennia of human history, individual freedom has increasingly become a precarious matter in the face of intergroup and intra-social predation, observably the more so the more institutionalised social hierarchies dominate the scene. González–Ruibal's "Archaeology of Resistance" reminds us – using the example of an intriguing contemporary cluster of "subaltern" ethnic communities in the Ethiopia-Sudan borderlands – that successful defense against predation has long been a collective affair of cultural and organizational choices, and that people and peoples often defend egalitarian and autonomist patterns to such ends as best they can. At a time when international coalitions of transformation profiteers mount unprecedented pressure on areas like the western and southern fringes of the Ethiopian highlands – where that defense had worked for millennia even in the violent proximity of powerful expansionist ethnic and state systems –, he also reminds us that resistance to change can be progressive and that fashionable academic obsessions with change can make for biases utterly opposed to emancipatory attitudes their faithful like to parade. This book by an archaeologist specialised in the deep history of violent power, its shapes and checks has two basic strengths at levels that might come as a surprise to anthropologists. First, it offers a thorough comparative ethnography of a regional cluster of cultures and societies with different levels of cultural autonomy, and second, it is a very important and topical contribution to anthropological discourse and theory. Anthropologists might have a hard time trying to give a more convincing account of a historically deep and phenomenologically rich landscape of cultural particularities, commonalities and interplay, of durable social strategies, material arrangements and developing power relations for a region like this. While historiography conspicuously privileges the expansionist hierarchical systems engaging societies at their ecologically and socially contrasting fringes for millennia in " resource wars, " the latter are the empirical focus of this remarkable study. Sandwiched between expansionist powers from the Ethiopian highlands to their east and from the plains of the Sudan in the west, they did not develop state structures but instead paradigmatic cultural sets of material and mental strategies to cope with the threat of submission and exploitation by those powerful neighbours and invaders.

The Omnipresent Past. Historical Anthropology of Africa and African Diaspora. Ed. by Dmitri M. Bondarenko and Marina L. Butovskaya. Moscow: LRC Publishing House., 2019

Contributors to this volume discuss a variety of ways the African past (Afri-can history) influences the present-day of Africans on the continent and in diaspora: cultural (historical) memory as a factor of public (mass) con-sciousness; the impact of the historical past on contemporary political, so-cial, and cultural processes in Africa and African diaspora.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography - Royal Geographical Society (w/ IBG) Annual Plenary 2021, 2022

Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond Southern Africa) within the discipline of human geography; and (c) erasures of the functions of racialization in African societies. These are compounded by the relative marginalization of African knowledge within decolonial thought, including decolonial geographies and the disunities between the subfields of black geographies and African geographies. To challenge some of these dynamics, we introduce the concept of defiant scholarship in Africa, a form of scholarship that seeks to work against and outside of dominant grammars and prevailing registers and which draws from a powerful and extensive intellectual tradition across the African continent. Working from Walter Rodney's ‘guerrilla intellectuals’ and drawing on Walter Mignolo's ‘epistemic disobedience’, defiant scholarship cultivates those ways of thinking and those practices that are external to, in opposition to, and/or unconventional to the coloniality of knowledge. We ask what it means for our scholarship to be disobedient to colonial and capitalist epistemes, and, in so doing, we sketch the contours of an African geographies subdiscipline that is anti-racist, decolonial, and in active conversation with black geographies. The result of our engagement is a call for a reinvigoration of African geographies as we currently know and practice them.

2012

IntroductionAny contemporary discourse in Africa that undermines the post-colonial dimension in the explication of its experiences will be running against its historiography. Postcolonial experiences here concern the activities of interrelated periods, which in concert, determine and shape the future and destiny of African people both within the continent and in the diaspora. The periods we identify here are the pre-colonial, colonial and the post-colonial. Any discussion of the African condition without due recognition of the interrelated activities of these periods will obviously be wrong-headed. So, our arguments in this work will take into cognizance the events of these periods and how they have together generated disappointment, frustration, despair and consequently, parochial identities in Africa today.The attempt in this study is to analyse the factors that have, in concert, contributed to the multiple crises in African socio-cultural and political landscape. The most devasta...

African Arts, 2017

At this time of revived activism on the African continent, a number of contemporary artists based in Africa are producing works that assert the need for further and more radical forms of change in society and in the art world. While the largely northern-driven world of contemporary art displays a fetishistic fascination with what it calls “African art,” often this art discourse is disconnected from art production and art reception on the African continent, as the written discourse largely remains the assumed domain of the “north”. As such, a problematic geography of reason is created in which those in the “south” are viewed as creators of raw materials (in this case artworks) that are theorized by scholars in the “north.” Focusing on a politics of knowing, this article argues that in order to achieve significantly deeper decolonial shifts in the field of the visual and performing arts of Africa, scholarly writers on the continent need to play a greater role in challenging epistemic dependencies and shifting the center of gravity of the global academy.

Polit Geogr, 2000

Journal of North African Studies, 2023

This article brings comparative race and ethnic studies, migration studies, and North/African studies together to investigate how local-historical conceptions of blackness intersect with contemporary border policing of “sub-Saharan” migrants. Defining race as a historically-contingent formation, I argue that blackness emerged at various periods in North African history (from the Islamic expansion to the present-day) to signify inferior social status and non-belonging, meanings that are shaped by the practices, discourses, and memories of slavery. This intervention connects critical studies on racialized border enforcement to other processes of social exclusions already at work within North African social space. It fills a critical gap in North African studies by providing a theoretically- and historically-grounded analysis of racial formation (and especially blackness) in the region that will have broad utility to scholars studying marginalization and marginalized people’s political mobilization at various historical moments. Finally, it challenges contemporary scholarship on race as (only) a modern category forged through European colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery.

poetics by the latter lends credence to spatial, historical, cultural transformations, resulting in alternative routes though with a certain degree of universal interconnectedness regarding the plight of women. Western feminism is not homogeneous, implying that its essentialist apprehension of Africa as homogeneous gives room for different cultural and historical contestations in a multi-cultured African landscape.