DOCSLIB.ORG

Great Lakesab

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Great Lakesab VIOLENCE IN/AND THE GREAT LAKES i Thinking Africa is a series produced by the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. For more information on the project, visit http://www.ru.ac.za/politics/thinkingafrica/ or write to: Leonhard Praeg: Series Editor Thinking Africa Political and International Studies Rhodes University Private Bag 94 Grahamstown 6139 South Africa Email: [email protected] Previous series titles: The Return of Makhanda: Exploring the Legend by Julia C. Wells (2012) On African Fault Lines: Meditations on Alterity Politics by V-Y Mudimbe (2013) A Report on Ubuntu by Leonhard Praeg (2014) Ubuntu: Curating the Archive edited by Leonhard Praeg and Siphokazi Magadla (2014) ii VIOLENCE IN/AND THE GREAT LAKES The Thought of V-Y Mudimbe and Beyond Edited by Grant Farred, Kasereka Kavwahirehi and Leonhard Praeg iii Published in 2014 by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Private Bag X01 Scottsville, 3209 Pietermaritzburg South Africa Email: [email protected] Website: www.ukznpress.co.za © 2014 University of KwaZulu-Natal All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from University of KwaZulu- Natal Press. ISBN: 978-1-86914-284-1 Managing editor: Sally Hines Editor: Alison Lockhart Proofreader: Christopher Merrett Typesetter: Patricia Comrie Indexer: Ethné Clarke Cover design: MDesign Cover art: Luc Tuymans, Speech, 2010 (206.4 x 138.4 cm, oil on canvas) Printed and bound in South Africa by Interpak Books, Pietermaritzburg iv C O N T E N T S Acknowledgements viii Introduction: Silhouette of the Unknown Woman 1 Grant Farred 1 For a Common Ascension in Humanity: The Intellectual’s Mission in the Great Lakes Region 16 Kasereka Kavwahirehi 2 Life, ‘Life’ and Death 35 Grant Farred 3 Violence of Details and Details of Violence in Novels by V-Y Mudimbe 54 Justin K. Bisanswa 4 Representations of Violence in V-Y Mudimbe’s Novels 74 Olga Hél-Bongo 5 Making Visible and Eradicating Congo’s History of Violence: Maiming the Female/National Body 87 Ngwarsungu Chiwengo 6 A Phemonenology of Violence 108 Laura Kerr 7 On the Banality of Violence: State, Power and the Everyday in Africa 128 Zubairu Wai 8 Postcards from the Postcolony 161 Leonhard Praeg 9 Debitores Sumus . On Ways of Exhausting Our Question on Violence 188 V-Y Mudimbe v Coda: Violence and the Sublime 202 Leonhard Praeg Notes on the Contributors 209 Index 211 vi To V-Y Mudimbe: Friend, Colleague, Thinker vii A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S Both the seminar, hosted at Rhodes University, South Africa, and the publication that emerged from it, Violence in/and the Great Lakes: V-Y Mudimbe and Beyond, would not have been possible without the support of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University and the Thinking Africa project at Rhodes University. As editors, we would like to thank the Africana staff at Cornell – Ms Renee Milligan for her tireless, diligent work on arranging the logistics, all conducted in the best possible spirit; Ms Treva Levine for her keen oversight and the interim director, Salah Hassan, for providing subvention support – and the Thinking Africa staff at Rhodes – Siphokazi Magadla, Sally Matthews and Phumlani Majavu – for working through the winter break to organise the colloquium. We also acknowledge the generous financial support provided by the office of Peter Clayton, deputy vice-chancellor of research at Rhodes University. We are grateful to V-Y Mudimbe’s assistant, Mr Trip Attaway, for liaising among three institutions and two continents. It could not have been easy, but Mr Attaway always, it seems, had a smile at the ready, no matter what the logistical issues were to be resolved. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press was encouraging and supportive from the first. We are grateful for the work they have done to make this publication possible. As has been the case in the preceding volumes of the Thinking Africa book series, we would like to acknowledge the support and dedication of Debra Primo and Sally Hines. In particular, we would like to thank our editor, Alison Lockhart, for her close and insightful reading of the manuscript. Grant Farred would like to thank Richard Pithouse, who first welcomed him to Rhodes University. His engagement with the Thinking Africa project at Rhodes University began with Richard. Thinking Africa would like to thank Grant Farred from Cornell University for initiating and funding the lion’s share of this collaboration. Lastly, we want to thank the participants/contributors for their commitment to the project. Our colleagues travelled great distances to attend the seminar and they kept, as nearly as can be expected, to the publication schedule; moreover, they did viii so in good cheer. All of which, we suspect, can be ascribed to their deep regard for the thinking of V-Y Mudimbe and the pressing questions his work provokes, as well as the intellectual example he has established over several decades. Through his work, our friend, colleague and, above all, our teacher, Valentin- Yves Mudimbe has inspired many generations of scholars, all across the world, to take up the difficult issues he raises. He does so in the most learned, generous and serious way imaginable. We are all immensely pleased and, indeed, honoured to have been able to share the colloquium experience with him. This publication is the acknowledgement of our relation (one that he will deny, as is his wont) of intellectual and ethical debt, a debt we are all too happy to assume, to underwrite, to him. So much of our work would not be possible without him, without the oeuvre he has created – for us and for those who will surely take up this responsibility after us. ix Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience. Once again, the dialectical motif of quantity recoiling into quality scores an unspeakable triumph. — Theodor Adorno, ‘After Auschwitz’ x INTRODUCTION I N T R O D U C T I O N Introduction Silhouette of the Unknown Woman Grant Farred . mustn’t responsibility always be expressed in a language that is foreign to what the community can hear or understand only too well? — Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death Here is a nightmare of my wearing black for more than ten years. — V-Y Mudimbe, ‘Debitores Sumus . .’ V-Y Mudimbe’s essay, ‘Debitores Sumus . On Ways of Exhausting Our Question on Violence’ (Chapter 9), grounds this volume. It does so only in part, it must be said, because Violence in/and the Great Lakes derives from a conference, of the same name, assembled in Mudimbe’s honour. ‘Debitores Sumus’, a ‘statement about the deaths of millions of people. For sure, between seven and ten, by now. The statement is grave’, is the central essay because it sets the terms for this thinking of violence in Mudimbe’s native region. Violence in the Great Lakes region is the ‘nightmare’, the number of dead so shocking as to exceed any other in history, that compels Mudimbe to wear only black ‘for more than ten years’. In its oral presentation, at the conference at Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, South Africa, there was a signal moment in which Mudimbe – a bespectacled man, almost hunched over his papers, dressed all in black, only the grey in his whiskers providing any contrast – presented his audience with another, now long-forgotten nightmare. Mudimbe’s oral presentation – possessed of the authority of delivery, the authority of physical presence – was the defining moment of the conference and as such it, rather than the published version in this volume, provides the philosophical basis for this introduction. The ending of Mudimbe’s presentation was, like his choice to forswear any colour other than the most sober one, unmistakably a political event. It was 1 GRANT FARRED poignant, too, possessed of an ethical conviction and a singular rhetorical and symptomatic force. It was strategically placed, designed to unnerve, to throw everything that had gone before – most of which is recounted in this volume – into stark, and starkly troubling, relief. It apprehended the audience, it made itself – Mudimbe’s ‘revelation’ (I will offer other articulations of it shortly) – the object of thought that reverberated; Mudimbe’s ending pointed back, it would seem, to the very beginning of the colloquium, but not only to the conference proceedings that had gone before, coming as it did in the final session of a gathering organised to honour Mudimbe. The last words of his presentation reached back chronologically to an act of violence that long preceded the conference. It was the very elocution of the last word that could not stand as such; instead, it demanded a response, as any ‘final’ remark is apt to do. The process of engaging with the last word that is, of course, never the last word, began in Grahamstown and finds its most recent articulation here – this time as the ‘first word’ in this collection, a first word that birthed the philosophical terms in which Violence in/and the Great Lakes is conceived. The ethical force of the Grahamstown presentation derived from the haunting image with which Mudimbe concluded his argument. One night, in a convent, a woman was dragged off by some unidentified forces of repression (we have no idea exactly who committed this act), we know not where the Unknown Woman (there is no other way to name her, a fact that must itself trouble us) was taken but we suspect the worst, as we should when people are disappeared in the dead of night.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Black Williams: a Written History
    BLACK WILLIAMS: A WRITTEN HISTORY WILLIAMS COLLEGE BLACK STUDENT UNION INTRODUCTION “In order to know where you are going, you must know where you came from.” It was that very belief that raised questions in the minds of Williams Black Student Union board members in the spring of 2002. The BSU board in 2002–2003 was composed mainly of freshmen who hadn’t yet been acquainted with the oral history of the BSU. This realization led the board to seek out information about the history of the BSU that could be passed on to incoming freshmen and also be made available to all its members. The fact that the history is so rich—and turbulent—further necessitated the writing of this history. However, the search for information in the likeliest places proved futile: there was no summary record of the BSU available. Therefore, that spring the BSU decided to create a complete history of the Union that would include all of the events that led to its creation, the events that led to the acquisition of Rice House, and, as nearly as possible, all that has happened on campus since the creation of the Union that affected its membership. This idea was submitted to Prof. Tess Chakalakal for her evaluation and advice in the summer of 2002. She suggested that we elaborate on an already solid foundation. Not only was there a need for a record of the rich history of the BSU, she said, but also of the blacks who attended Williams: a written, accessible history of Williams’ illustrious black graduates would not only inform current students but would attract prospective students —especially black students—to Williams.
    [Show full text]
  • Democracy Dispossessed: Land, Law & the Politics of Redistribution In
    Democracy Dispossessed: Land, Law & the Politics of Redistribution in South Africa Amanda Alexander Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2015 Amanda Alexander All rights reserved ABSTRACT Democracy Dispossessed: Land, Law & the Politics of Redistribution in South Africa Amanda Alexander This dissertation concerns the history of land politics in South Africa and, equally, land as a vehicle for understanding the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid order. In 2004, after a decade in power, the ANC government’s failure to carry out widespread land reform began to test the country’s democratic possibilities. In the lead up to that year’s national election, social movements urged landless people to boycott the polls and occupy land instead as part of a “No Land! No Vote!” campaign. With this clash as its entry point for analysis, this dissertation examines historical factors that have shaped South Africa’s neoliberal democracy and prospects for redistribution. It offers insights into some of the most significant questions facing the country: What is the historical relationship between land dispossession, citizenship, and politics in South Africa? And why, well into the Mbeki years, was the country unable, or unwilling, to reckon with it? Broad in scope, this dissertation examines a number of institutions that shaped the politics of land, economic development, and citizenship in South Africa over the last century. It is particularly focused on period of the 1940s-2004, encompassing the apartheid era and the first ten years of democracy.
    [Show full text]
  • CURRICULUM VITAE Magdalena J
    CURRICULUM VITAE Magdalena J. Zaborowska Professor ************************************************************************************** University of Michigan Home address: Department of American Culture and 1820 Weldon Blvd Department of Afroamerican and African Studies Ann Arbor, MI 48103 3700 Haven Hall t: (734) 994-5213 Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045 t: 734.763.1460 f: 734.936.1967 e: [email protected] EDUCATION 1992 Ph.D. (With Distinction) Department of English, University of Oregon, USA 1987 M.A. Department of English and American Studies, College of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Warsaw, Poland 1986 Summer Seminar in American and English Studies, University of Poznań, Poland 1985 B.A. (equivalent) University of Warsaw, Poland 1982 Matriculation (Honors). IV Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Hanki Sawickiej, Kielce, Poland PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 2010 - Professor, Department of American Culture and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 2007-10 Director of Graduate Studies, Program in American Culture 2001-09 Associate Professor, Program in American Culture and Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 2000-01 Visiting Associate Professor, Program in American Culture and Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 1999-00 Research Fellow, Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, Tulane University, New Orleans, USA 1999-00 Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus University, Denmark 1998-00 Associate Professor, Department of English and American Studies, Aarhus University 1996-97 Assistant Professor, Department of English and American Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark 1992-96 Assistant Professor, Department of English, Furman University, USA 1987-92 Graduate Teaching Fellow, Visiting Lecturer, American Studies Program and Department of English, University of Oregon, USA PUBLICATIONS Books: Me and My House: James Baldwin and Black Domesticity.
    [Show full text]
  • B O O K S & J O U R N a L S S P R I N G
    DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS & JOURNALS SPRING & SUMMER 2007 contents general interest film/tv Subcommander Marcos, Henck 1 The Hypersexuality of Race, Shimizu 30 Beautiful at All Seasons, Lawrence 2 The Urban Generation, Zhang 30 The Enemy, Campo 3 Dietrich Icon, Gemünden & Desjardins 31 Femininity in Flight, Barry 4 Sessue Hayakawa, Miyao 31 Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband, Johnson 5 anthropology Goth, Goodlad & Bibby 6 Reading Boyishly, Mavor 7 Beyond the Body Proper, Lock & Farquhar 32 Gods in the Bazaar, Jain 8 A Coincidence of Desires, Boellstorff 32 Chicana Art, Pérez 9 The Will to Improve, Li 33 Beyond Black Mountain, Schroth 10 Caribbean Journeys, Olwig 33 Street Level, Schoonmaker 10 Native Hubs, Ramirez 34 Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico, McEwan, Middleton, american studies Cartwright & Stacey 11 Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate, Whitman 12 Imagining Our Americas, Shukla & Tinsman 34 The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, Nicolar 13 The Heart of Whiteness, Carter 35 Interventions into Modernist Cultures, Parry 35 music sociology Beyond Exoticism, Taylor 14 Soul Covers, Awkward 15 The Affective Turn, Clough 36 Sociology Confronts the Holocaust, Gerson & Wolf 36 african american studies asian studies Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States, Martin & Yaquinto 16 Beyond Belief, Roy 37 Warfare in the American Homeland, James 16 Kingdom of Beauty, Brandt 37 cultural studies history An Empire of Indifference, Martin 17 Ghosts of Passion, Bunk 38 Dolly Mixtures, Franklin 18 Communication and Empire, Winseck & Pike 38
    [Show full text]
  • A History of Queer New Mexico, 1920S-1980S Jordan Biro
    University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 9-1-2015 Uncommon Knowledge: A History of Queer New Mexico, 1920s-1980s Jordan Biro Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Biro, Jordan. "Uncommon Knowledge: A History of Queer New Mexico, 1920s-1980s." (2015). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ hist_etds/8 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in History ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Jordan Biro Walters Candidate HISTORY Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Virginia Scharff, Chairperson Cathleen Cahill Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz Peter Boag UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE: A HISTORY OF QUEER NEW MEXICO, 1920S-1980S BY JORDAN BIRO WALTERS B.A., History, California State University Sacramento, 2004 M.A., Public History, California State University, 2009 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy History The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2015 ©2015, Jordan Biro Walters iii DEDICATION For my husband, David. May we always share the quest for knowledge together. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I thank all of the oral history participants from whom I’ve learned. Their narratives have given clarity of purpose to this project. The participants whom I interviewed include, Ginger Chapman, Vangie Chavez, Therese Councilor, Ronald Dongahe, Jean Effron, Zonnie Gorman, Bennett A.
    [Show full text]
  • John Drabinski Prof CV
    John E. Drabinski Amherst College 413.542.5461 P.O. Box 5000 Department of Black Studies [email protected] Amherst, MA 01002 http://jdrabinski.com Education 1996 The University of Memphis. Memphis, TN. Ph.D., Philosophy, M.A. (1993) Difference and Sense: The Problem of Relation in the Work of Emmanuel Levinas. 1991 Seattle University. Seattle, WA. A.B., Philosophy and English – magna cum laude (Great Books Program) Appointments 2016 - present Charles Hamilton Houston 1915 Professor Amherst College, Amherst, MA Department of Black Studies (Chair of department: 2015-2018) 2012 – 2016 Professor Amherst College, Amherst, MA Department of Black Studies 2007 – 2012 Visiting Associate Professor Amherst College, Amherst, MA Department of Black Studies 2004 – 2010 Visiting Associate Professor Hampshire College, Amherst, MA School of Social Science (jointly appointed with Department of Black Studies, Amherst College) 1997-2004 Assistant Professor, Assumption College, Worcester, MA. (2003-2005); Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI (1999-2003); University of Houston, Houston, TX (1998-1999); Post-Doctoral Fellow at Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (1997-1998) Publications Books Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019) Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Winner of Frantz Fanon Book Prize. Godard Between Identity and Difference (New York: Continuum, 2008). Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). In Progress What is the Afro-Postmodern? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, under contract for 2020) ‘So Unimaginable a Price’: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 70K words and contracted for late-2020) In Praise of Creoleness (by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, & Raphael Confiant) (Albany: SUNY Press, in progress/late-stage for 2020).
    [Show full text]
  • R.Kelley CV July 2020
    Robin D. G. Kelley, Ph.D. Department of History University of California at Los Angeles 6265 Bunche Hall Box 95147 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473 (310) 825-4601 [email protected] EDUCATION University of California, Los Angeles, 1987, Ph.D., United States History University of California, Los Angeles, 1985, M.A. African History California State University, Long Beach, 1983, B.A. History EMPLOYMENT Distinguished Professor of History and African American Studies, and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, University of California at Los Angeles, July 2011 - Present Chair, Department of African American Studies, UCLA, July 2016 – June 2017. Visiting Scholar, Hokkaido Summer Institute, Sapporo, Japan, July 2016 Interim Chair, Afro-American Studies Interdepartmental Program, UCLA, Fall 2014 – Summer 2015. Distinguished Visiting Professor of African American Studies, Stanford University, Spring 2016. Professor of History and American Studies, University of Southern California, July 2006- July 2011 Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History, The Queen’s College, Oxford University, September 2009 – August 2010 Associate Director, Center for Diversity and Democracy, Sept. 2008 – June 2011 William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies, Columbia University, July 2005 – June 2007 Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Department of African and African-American Studies, Harvard University, Fall 2005 Acting Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University, Fall 2005 – Spring 2006 Visiting Scholar,
    [Show full text]