Important Dates

Each year, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence starts its line of annual activities and events with the New Year Lecture open to the interested public, featuring prominent speakers who address questions and concepts central to the Cluster’s agenda. After two years of Covid restrictions the 2023 New Year Lecture can finally be held in presence again. However, for those who are not able to join us in Bayreuth, the lecture will be streamed online.

NEW YEAR LECTURE 2023 will take place on

12 January 2023 from 6-8 pm (CET)

It will be held by Prof. Dr. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South and will be entitled:

"Ten Challenges in Reconfiguring African Studies"

Prof. Dr. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Abstract

This lecture distils ten challenges in reconfiguring African Studies, an agenda that animates and drives the work of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. The ten challenges range from the genealogical, epistemic, linguistic, chronological, theoretical, country-study, androcentric, disciplinary, canonical to how to deal with colonial library in African Studies.  While these challenges are not new, they continue to haunt the field of African Studies and to inhibit initiatives aimed at reconfiguring African Studies. At the centre of reconfiguring African Studies is the imperative of decolonization, the taking Africa as a legitimate site of knowledge production as well as the rethinking of thinking in African Studies. At a practical level, reconfiguring African Studies includes a shift from African Studies conceived as an Africanist enterprise, which privileges researching Africa from the outside to centring African thought, African knowledge, and privileging of researching Africa from the inside. This means that at the centre of reconfiguring African Studies there is a search of finding a new intellectual and academic working relationship between Africanists and African scholars. Therefore, the ten challenges speak to the complex politics of knowledge and problematic intellectual/academic practices that currently underpin and drive knowledge generation in African Studies. 

• 12.01.2023, 6-8 pm CET, RW I HS24
• Zoom link:

  https://uni-bayreuth.zoom.us/j/62822748003?pwd=Kyt6M2JZN2FmRGVqTXhQRTducGFUdz09 - Meeting-ID: 628 2274 8003 / Kenncode: 076013

• Find the invitation here.