The Politics of Time

Imagining African Becomings

Achille Mbembe,Felwine Sarr, Philip Gerard

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509551118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is undergoing a major historical shift: Africa, and the Global South more generally, is increasingly becoming a principal theatre in which the future of the planet plays itself out. But not only this: Africa is at the same time emerging as one of the great laboratories for novel forms of social, economic, political, intellectual, cultural, and artistic life. Often arising in unexpected places, these new forms of life materialize in practices that draw deeply from collective memory while simultaneously assuming distinctly contemporary, even futuristic, guises.

In November 2017, the second session of the Ateliers de la pensée – Workshops of Thought – was held in Dakar, Senegal. Fifty African and diasporic intellectuals and artists participated and their debates unfolded along numerous thematic lines, approached from the standpoints of many different disciplines. This volume is the result of that encounter. Among the many topics discussed were the concurrence and entanglement of multiple temporalities, the politics of life in the Anthropocene, the project of decolonization, and the preservation and transmission of different ways of knowing. At a time when the world is haunted by the specter of its own end, the contributors to this volume ask whether one can, by taking Africa as a point of departure, seize hold of other options for the future – not only for Africa, but for the world.

The Politics of Time and its companion volume, To Write the Africa World, will be indispensable works for anyone interested in Africa – its past, present, and future – and in the new forms of critical thought emerging from Africa and the Global South.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr
• I
• From Thinking Identity to Thinking African Becomings Souleymane Bachir Diagne
• Notes for a Maroon Feminism From the “Body Double” to the Body as Such Hourya Bentouhami
• Weaving, a Craft for Thought Writing and Thinking in Africa, or the Knot of the World’s Great Narrative Jean-Luc Raharimanana
• II
• Africa and the New Western Figures of Personal Status Law Abdoul Aziz Diouf
• Rethinking Islam Or, the Oxymoron of “Secular Theocracy” Rachid Id Yassine
• The Impossible Meeting A Free Interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Hemley Boum
• III
• Circulations Achille Mbembe
• On the Return The Political Practices of the African Diaspora Nadia Yala Kisukidi
• Reopening Futures Felwine Sarr
• IV
• Un/learning Rethinking Teaching in Africa Françoise Vergès
• The Bewitchment of History Mohammed Dib’s Who Remembers the Sea Soraya Tlatli
• Currency, Sovereignty, Development Revisiting the Question of the CFA Franc Ndongo Samba Sylla
• V
• Memories of the World, Memory-World Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux
• Cum patior Africa The Political Production of Regimes of “the Nigh” Nadine Machikou
• The Sahara: A Space of Connection within an Emergent Africa, from the Anthropocene to the Spring of Geo-Cultural Life Benaouda Lebdai
• Migrations, Narrations, the Refugee Condition Dominic Thomas
• VI
• Humanity and Animality (Re)thinking Anthropocentrism Bado Ndoye
• The Tree Frogs’ Distress Lionel Manga
• To Speak and Betray Nothing? Rodney Saint-Éloi
• The Paths of the Voice Ibrahima Wane
• Index
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