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.

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

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.

Click here to read the full framing statement

Poster image credit: Jabulani Dhlamini, Dhlomo, Putswastena, Sharpeville II, 2015, courtesy Goodman Gallery

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Open Events Programme

What is lost in revolutionary moments? What is gained? In the wake of incalculable violence and devastation, how do we repair? Suren Pillay and Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi engage David Scott on time, worldmaking, reparations, and repair.

This roundtable brings together four distinguished scholars to unpack Marxism/s relationship with race, ethnicity, religion and sexuality. Together they centre connections between histories of internationalism in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East that engaged cultural and political identities with traditions of Marxism in the metropoles. What can a living tradition of Marxist thought proffer to our current imaginings of a future beyond coloniality? This question will enliven reflections offered in the course of the roundtable. 

Join us at Book Circle Capital for the launch of “Izimpabanga Zomhlaba” - Makhosazana Xaba’s groundbreaking isiZulu translation of Franz Fanon’s seminal work, “The Wretched of the Earth”. Joining Makhosazana in conversation will be Nosipho Mngomezulu.

Elizabeth W. Giorgis examines the immediate years after the uprising of 1974 in Ethiopia when the idea, meaning, and possibility of revolution were urgently debated and interrogated. Giorgis shows that the period’s history is written from a primarily masculinist gaze and the experiences of women as an integral part in the political and intellectual field of revolutionary struggle is hardly accounted. Despite the notable participation of women in Left-oriented struggles for justice and equality, the writing of history renders them invisible as if their revolutionary subjectivity was inconsequential to the larger paradigm of the period’s Marxist-Leninist political practice and debate. What is significant to note also is how young activists and intellectuals of the contemporary moment perceive women’s political experience in the left movement as a distant fading history. Between two writings of history — one that clearly stood against recognising the women who were part of this history and another that addressed the rise of a male-led struggle against injustice and inequality, Giorgis addresses and theorizes the ironies that constitute the geographies and politics of knowledge that systematically silence one history while privileging another.

Earlier this year 400 Kenyan police officers arrived in Haiti to restore law and order as the first contingent of an international force meant to restore law and order or ‘re-instate the state’. Lauded by Kenya’s President, William Ruto, as a “historic” mission of solidarity, the deployment of Kenyan forces resulted in unrest in Nairobi the day after their departure for the Caribbean nation. This roundtable asks, what is solidarity(ies) in the global south when mediated by former colonial powers?

This roundtable conversation with Simona Sawhney, Aaron Kamugisha and Ruchi Chaturvedi foregrounds the relationship between the making of the colonial political subject and postcolonial political subjectivities. Mindful that identities like Black, Queer, Dalit, Muslim/Jew, Tribal exist inside of political formations yet also exceed them, panellists will offer reflections on the relationship between identity and identification, particularly as these have played out in political and cultural life in the Caribbean, India and South Africa.​

Pulling together more explicitly the connection between aesthetics and politics, this roundtable asks how we imagine beyond coloniality? What praxes of (co)creation have enabled this?

Almost ten years since its inception, the Other Universals Collective, takes the closing of the Summer/Winter Institute as an opportunity to reflect on the intellectual and ethical commitments that sparked its initial convening – sameness-in-difference, forms of radical allegiance, alternative political imaginaries of freedom, the incommensurability of colonial experience and much more. What work was “other universals” meant to do as a theoretical frame, a method, and a practice of being? Has it? What might it do now in this ever vanishing present?