Professor Shaden Tageldin from the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature will be presenting her paper "The Place of Africa, in Theory: Pan-Africanism, Postcolonialism, Beyond" on Friday, February 22th, 2013 from 1:30-3:00 in the Lippincott Room (Social Sciences Tower 1314).
Political Theory Colloquium is proud to present Professor Shaden Tageldin from the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. She will be presenting her paper, "The Place of Africa, in Theory: Pan-Africanism, Postcolonialism, Beyond," which has been accepted for a proposed special issue of the Journal of Historical Sociology on the topic "Contesting Imperial Epistemologies." Coffee will be served. All are welcome.
Abstract:
"Twentieth-century African theory translated two destructive diasporas--of peoples by the slave trade, of lands by empire--into a creative third: a pan-Africanist philosophy of decolonization that recovered Africa's pluralism as a powerfully 'diasporic' defiance of imperial taxonomies. Comparing a 1967 lecture given in Cairo by Senegalese poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor with a 1955 treatise on the philosophy of revolution by Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser (Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir), and both with Achille Mbembe's 2001 On the Postcolony, this essay shows how Senghor marshals race/culture hybridities, Nasser historical/geographic alignments, and Mbembe temporal entanglements to deconstruct monolithic constructions of 'Arab', 'Black', and 'African' being, space, and time--and to pluralize and 'world' a continent. It argues that the logics of trans-territoriality and trans-temporality that informed Third World solidarity in the 1950s-1970s represent a forgotten legacy of pan-Africanism to postcolonialism and to global theory generally. Africa's place, in theory, decenters Eurocentrism."
