Other Universals Summer/Winter Institute
Anti-colonial Internationalisms
Identity, identification & cultural citizenship
The comparative method
12-16 August 2024
The Other Universals Summer/Winter Institute revolves around the ways in which equality and likeness-in-difference, universality and particularity have been imagined, lived and argued from anti-imperial vantage points in Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle-East and South Asia. It foregrounds the fact that neither nationalism nor humanism and humanitarianism exhaust the ways in which equality and universality have been imagined and iterated in the last few centuries. Humanitarianism functions by divesting life of all particularities making it almost bare and bereft of historicity; equal national citizenship is instituted on the grounds of particular, limited, delineable equivalences such as descent and territorial belonging. But the nation-state was not always the only end-point for political and aesthetic movements that emerged in colonised spaces. Instead, the nature of identities and communities that their protagonists sought to forge were designed to refuse subjections as well as craft affinity across marginal locations while abiding by the specificity of each place and its histories. Here we are referring to affinities that emerge from a shared experience of negation as colonial subjects, and as embodied in (the Francophone) nègre or nigger, blackness, untouchability, the fellah, class-based solidarities and sexualities often deemed non-normative.
Central to Other Universals’ concerns are political debates, discussions and aesthetic and literary practices of the late-colonial period that continue to articulate and animate desires for equality and solidarity across multiple subaltern locations in postcolonial spaces. The summer/winter school in Johannesburg will especially focus on three interrelated themes that iterate these concerns:
1. Anti-colonial Internationalisms
2. Identity, Identification & Cultural Citizenship
3. The Comparative Method
Anti-colonial Internationalisms: This thematic focuses on ideas about liberation that did not only reduce decolonisation to national political sovereignty; instead, it takes critical inspiration from internationalists such as C. L. R. James, Rabindranath Tagore, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jose Carlos Mariategui as well as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Cesaire, Paulette Nardal and Walter Rodney, amongst others, who imagined a freedom not tied to national units and homogenising cultural forces but lived out an expansive notion of anti-imperial internationalism. This internationalism was also lived out in cities like Cape Town, Johannesburg, Kingston, Accra, Dakar, Addis Ababa, Lagos, Delhi, and Dar es Salaam, which became a “nodal point for transnational political activism” in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as through multiple Asian-African conferences of women convened in the prior decade.
Panels and workshops under this theme will study accompanying understandings and practices of equality, solidarity, and federalism to help take forward research projects about anti-colonial histories, internationalist ideas, and practices of equality and solidarity. As part of this endeavour, we will especially seek to revisit Marxist traditions and examine Marxism(s)’s relationship to race, ethnicity and non-normative ways of being, asking, what can a living tradition of Marxist thought proffer to our current imaginings of a future beyond coloniality?
Identity, Identification and Cultural Citizenship: The relationship between the making of the colonial political subject and postcolonial political subjectivities is central to this thematic area. It identifies the colonial modern as a process that produced new forms of political subjects, crafted, made and re-made from the pre-colonial in order to not only divide, but also draw together previously discreet cultural formations now hierarchised as political communities under centralised authority. Wherein identities such as Black, Queer, Dalit, Muslim/Jew, Tribal exist inside of this history and resulting political formations, they also exceed them. How might we understand the relationship between identity and identification in late colonial and postcolonial political and aesthetic worlds? How have notions of majority and minority worked to produce legible but inegalitarian communities? What modes of cultural citizenship and idioms of difference define insider and outsider, and how have these differences been undone in postcolonial politico-aesthetic practices? These are some of the questions with which sessions under this thematic will seek to grapple.
The Comparative Method: In some parts of the colonised world, race has been the marker of difference mobilised to hierarchise communities; ethnicity, caste, questions of bloodline and origins, and questions of religious ordering of territorial space have played that role in others. Thinking from within and across the geospatial histories and temporalities of Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and South Asia illuminates the ‘universal’ aspects of that colonial process, as much as it illuminates what is distinct and specific to the present of our pastness. Universalisation and particularisation may be seen as aspects of a single process through which these reasons endured the colonial modern.
Furthermore, the universalisation of particular modes of thought goes alongside the particularisation of other modes of thought. The centuries between the conquest of the Americas and the decolonisation movement signified by Bandung witnessed two related movements in the history of thought. On the one hand, Eurocentric thought was elevated to a universal; on the other, non-European modes of thought were containerised as so many “traditions” of no more than local significance. An assessment of the intellectual legacy of this period calls for a double task: alongside a critique of Eurocentrism, an exploration of engagements across various non-European modes of thought discursively bound as discrete “traditions.”
This thematic will put scholars and students into conversation about questions such as: how do we compare distinct moments and traditions of thought and practice in the colonial modern in its universal and specific aspects? How do we think of postcolonial locations in geospatial configurations such as Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East, as both commensurable and yet in some ways also as incommensurable? As both translatable, but perhaps also as untranslatable? If comparison assumes a relation of similarity as the grounds from which comparison can proceed - often in modernity’s wake, the grounds being liberalism - what is at stake in asking whether comparison is possible rather than assuming it as the grounds from which we proceed?
Circling these three thematics, we think of the summer/winter school as an opportunity to speak from particular locations, and from within particular ‘traditions’ of anti-colonial, nationalist, emancipatory, and intellectual formations - with their own predicaments and lineaments, points of friction and questions of consternation - and yet, with a shared investment in thinking about intellectual formations and aesthetic practice across these worlds, that speak to and beyond the emancipatory or inhibitive contours the framing of ‘the nation’ has given us.
Other Universals is a supra-national consortium supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The consortium consists of scholars from several universities in Africa (in South Africa: University of the Western Cape, University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand, and University of Johannesburg; in Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University; and in Ghana: University of Ghana, Legon); in the Caribbean (University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus); and in the Middle East (American University of Beirut). Other Universals brings together scholars across different geographies to convene conversations around shared intellectual and political preoccupations. Other Universals hosts seminars, workshops and discussion groups across an array of thematic interests to support research on the long histories of radical anticolonial thought and cultural practices from the South. The consortium provides graduate student fellowships and creates a dynamic co-curricular programme for emerging scholars at the participating universities.