Panafrican Cartographies: Regional Imaginations in Postcolonial African Literature - Einzelansicht

"Panafrican Cartographies: Regional Imaginations in Postcolonial African Literature"

This course is interested in the alternative imaginations of space, time and belonging Panafrican cultural actors (political leaders, intellectuals, writers, musicians) have produced in response to the official and conceptual boundaries inherited from colonialism, such as the divisions between Anglophone and Francophone, North and Sub-Saharan Africa. This line of inquiry responds to the call by leading Africanist scholars like Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe, to rethink the very form emancipatory political communities might take on the African continent and its diasporas. 

The argument behind this critical orientation is that the conceptual framework in which the process of decolonisation has been thought about thus far – by and large defined by the political map drawn at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85 and the model of the modern nation-state – is deeply intertwined with the perpetuation of neocolonial political and economic asymmetries and extreme forms of violence. African cultural production from the 1950s until contemporary times constitutes a particularly productive archive from which alternatives to this dominant cartography emerge. 

This course employs an inclusive conception of literature which allows for the consideration of visual artistic, written, audio and institutional practices. In addition to engaging with cartography as an object of analysis, students will also be introduced to mapmaking as a quintessentially interdisciplinary method that combines scientific and artistic ways of knowing.

Classes will take place online, with a combination of synchronous and asynchronous elements.
The synchronous elements will take place during the announced dates on Friday, 10:15-11:45