African 901: Decolonial Narratives of Africa

The unprecedented acceleration of mass population displacements, the overthrow of old regimes and the rise of new ones, the punitive expansion of globalized neo-capitalist autocratic powers, etc., have prompted a drastic rethinking and reevaluation of the knowledge production coming from the Global South. For the last few decades or so, we have entered the phase of epistemic revision of postcolonial mystified consciousness and practices. The complex multiplicity of power hierarchies at a global scale in the present world-system are creating new realities and generating inventive productions, critical of and going beyond these dichotomies: Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, nationalism and globalization, ex-colonizer/ ex-colonized relationships and the lingering effects of colonialism.

Through a robust study of narratives from Africa and its diaspora (Héla Ammar’s visual art from Tunisia; Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions from Zimbabwe; Alain Mabanckou’s novel Broken Glass, Congo/France; Bahia Shehab’s street art from Egypt; Abdellah Taia’s novel, Infidels from Morocco, among others), we will explore how these cultural productions offer new geographies of liberation that are able to “decolonize the minds,” by suggesting alternative decolonial imagination. Some theoretical and critical readings (Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Aimé Césaire, Ramón Grosfoguel, Achille Mbembe, V. Y. Mudimbe, Gayatri Spivak, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, etc.) will help us to also explore how these narratives contribute to a critical perspective beyond the outlined dichotomies and to a redefinition of the postcoloniality, and in which ways they rethink class, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies, as they are all entangled.

In short, we will explore how these narratives offer new ways of “being-in-the-world,” emerging from a particular locus of enunciation, that is from a subaltern perspective, which transcends the postcolonial predicament and offer a more inclusive and “pluriversal” (and not universal) paradigm.