Abstract
This year’s conference deals with the heuristic angle of Temporalities, which, among other things, considers how „the angle of temporalities will also be key to refining our perspective on reflexivity, since relations may project themselves into the future and / or repeat or refer back to previous relations“. (See Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence Proposal, p. 20). This understanding of how time is a specifically salient factor in shaping the multiple perspectives on and relations among African lives, lifeworlds, epistemic frames and endeavours, politics and economies, is especially cogent for the critical diversity literacy (see Steyn 2015; also Ahmed, 2012) and intersectional (see Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Hill Collins, 2015; Hill Collins and Bilge, 2018, Tamale 2020) trajectories of inquiry and analysis undertaken by the GDO for the Cluster’s agenda of Reconfiguring African Studies.
The envisioned Keynote Conversation is comprise of a panel of African and African diasporic women scholars of various status groups and disciplinary fields. The theoretical trajectory of African Futurism as pertinent to Black Feminist and Afro-Feminist scholarship (see Okofor 2019; McKittrick 2021) will provide a discussion frame for the conversation between continental and diasporic perspectives. Nigerian American author Nnedi Okofor (2019) defines Africanfuturism as salient in considering African relations to time, which in turn provides bridgeheads towards conceptualising relations between the continent and its diasporas:
Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, […] It's less concerned with "what could have been" and more concerned with "what is and can/will be". It acknowledges, grapples with and carries "what has been".
[…] Africanfuturism is rooted in Africa and then it branches out to embrace all blacks of the Diaspora, this includes the Caribbean, South American, North American, Asia, Europe, Australia...wherever we are. It's global. Africanfuturism is not a wall, it’s a bridge.
(see http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html)
The Keynote Conversation aims to deliver thought impulses ‚on the future of the continent, and how it is being shaped by Africa’s youth‘ (Badawi, 2024: 4). The Round Table participants – from their own situated knowledges perspectives - would address the reflections intended at this conference, i.e. on how the ‚power and agency of young people is [sic!] taking on a forceful historical processing of relations that impacts on multiple spaces‘ (see Conference Call 2024).
Hence the conversation is meant to generate African futurist visions from transgenerational Black Feminist and Afro-Feminist perspectives, geared towards necessary change and hope. Such an agenda needs to be cognizant of current and longstanding challenges and constraints, impacting on how Black women scholars live, work and move in relation to higher education spaces and politics.
This Keynote Conversation is intended as a transgenerational, transdisciplinary and transcultural set of exchanges. It is not meant to provide hard-and-fast, conclusive solutions; rather it will be an unfinished conversation (see Stuart Hall), in order to open up sites of engagement to interrogate the past, the present and the future of African knowledges and knowledge production practices.
The Director of the GDO, Dr. Christine Vogt-William will be facilitating and chairing the event.
Panelists