African studies at a crossroads

Producing theory across the disciplines in South Africa

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3608892
AutoresKsenia Robbe (0000-0003-2951-1333, Leiden University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen40
Número2
Páginas255-273
Fecha de publicación2014-05-04
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial Dynamics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0253-3952 • E-ISSN: 1940-7874
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02533952.2014.932175
OpenAlexW2095817969
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas33

African studies in South Africa is currently at a crossroads – of making choices in the process of establishing itself institutionally and reconstituting itself as a discursive and epistemological field, including an interrogation of its histories and a decolonisation of its scholarly legacies. But being at a crossroads does not imply being at a loss; on the contrary, for African studies it means realising its potential of being a hub of critical thinking and a catalyst in the transformation of the humanities and the social sciences in the country and, possibly, internationally. Proceeding from this assumption, I will ask: what are the conditions of possibility for the emergence of African studies in South Africa as a space of transdisciplinary debate, one that is driven by a commitment to socially relevant issues and within which critical standpoints to be voiced by public intellectuals can crystallise? Some approaches critical for the development of such a field are present in South African scholarship, but – as it often happens in hierarchical academic structures – they are scattered across different disciplines or areas of expertise. Further, one of the main problems of African studies scholarship internationally – lying at the core of power inequalities of scholarship in Africa and the West – is the artificial split between "theory" and "(empirical) material" and the question of who is expected to produce what. This article starts with a discussion of the recent debates provoked by a restructuring of African studies and related disciplines at the University of Cape Town. To understand the resonance of these debates, beyond the context of one university and country, they will be placed, firstly, in the international context of African studies and, secondly, in the national context of debating the function and place of the humanities and the social sciences in South Africa. Both contexts highlight the importance of producing critical theory (instead of applying theory produced in the West). Hence, the following three subsections of this article will examine works by South African scholars that, produced within various disciplines (history, sociology and cultural studies), interrelate the insights of these disciplines and, in so doing, initiate new theoretical approaches. Using its crossroads position, African studies in South Africa can become a "laboratory" in which new critical approaches can be interrelated and debated. Opened up to dialogue with African studies in Africa and worldwide, it can become a theoretically invigorating space, nationally and internationally.Keywords: interdisciplinaritytheory-makingpraxispostcolonial critiquepublic spaces AcknowledgementsFor ideas developed in this article I am indebted to conversations with Lungisile Ntsebeza, Ari Sitas, John Higgins, Kylie Thomas, Sergio Alloggio and other colleagues at the University of Cape Town during my stay as a visiting researcher at the Centre for African Studies in summer 2013. I am grateful for the financial support of this stay to my home institute at Leiden. Furthermore, I would like to thank Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe for inviting me to contribute to this special issue of Social Dynamics and for insightful suggestions provided by him and the two anonymous reviewers on the earlier drafts of the article.Notes1. According to the enquiry into the history of African studies at the UCT, conducted by the current director of the Centre for African Studies Lungisile Ntsebeza, the School of Bantu Life and Languages established at UCT in 1920 with two chairs – in Bantu Philology and Social Anthropology, was the first university centre on the African continent that would focus on African studies (Ntsebeza Citation2012, 4).2. Articles with this title appeared on several online platforms including the Mail & Guardian (www.mg.co.za), Pambazuka News (www.pambazuka.org), and the blog Concerned CAS Students (www.concernedcasstudents.wordpress.com) created by students of the CAS.3. I am referring to the Department of African Studies at the University of St Petersburg where I received my first academic degrees. My current research and teaching "home" at the University of Leiden has brought me in contact with the African studies as being practised at the African Studies Centre in Leiden.4. This is certainly a generalised statement that points out only a tendency without taking the entire diversity of institutional contexts and circumstances into account. Centres that combine anthropological, historical, sociological, linguistic and literary studies research, and where these disciplinary practices become discussed and interrelated do exist, but, as a recent phenomenon, they are very few (some examples from the European context are the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, the Department of African Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the inter-institutional collaboration between the African Studies Centre in Leiden and the programme "African Languages and Cultures" at the University of Leiden).5. This split is itself artificial and obscuring the heterogeneity of histories and realities in Africa as well as the partaking of African people and their intellectual and material products in global historical and cultural processes.6. This undisciplining spirit is akin to Edward Said's notion of "worldliness" – the idea of an intellectual being engaged not only in his/her particular, often insular, area of specialisation, but also being in touch with the realities of social and political life, with the whole "world" of ideas and actions that connect various times and places (Citation2001, 56–61). This spirit of involvement and of Saidian anti-specialisation, manifested in the debates around CAS, might prove to be invigorating for a field of research and teaching that wants to transcend the boundaries between institutions and to speak across lecturing desk and public platform.7. The entire issue of restructuring had been on the agenda for several years, having resulted in the publication of the Consensus Study on the State of the Humanities in South Africa (Academy of Science of South Africa Citation2011) and the Charter for Humanities and Social Sciences (Department of Higher Education and Training Citation2011) in 2011.8. The case in point is the National Research Foundation's (NRF) complete neglect of the humanities when allocating its funding to the 60 new research chairs.9. Interestingly, at this point the author refers to Jacques Derrida's conviction that tradition ("inheritance") is never given, but is always set as a task to be achieved (Sitas Citation2005, 112). Thus, the meditation on the emancipatory potential of thinking through oral narratives as dynamic, contemporary yet "grounded" media intersects with a deconstructionist vision of intentionality and mutability of everything that is codified as "tradition."10. For a theoretical discussion of the artificial split between the oral and the literary, and the assumptions of "originality" and "evidence" regarding oral narratives, see Isabel Hofmeyr's essay (Citation1995).11. A study that continues this practice of interdisciplinary enquiry (academic, personal and engaging public discourses at the same time) into the "obscure" narratives of "the subaltern" in South Africa has been published as the book titled There was this Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (Krog, Mpolweni, and Ratele Citation2009).12. These research perspectives, innovative as they are, often draw on the work of revisionist Marxist historians during the 1970s and 1980s that focused on the links between colonialism and apartheid in South Africa in terms of capitalist extraction and the organisation of labour (Wolpe Citation1972, Citation1975; Legassick Citation1974; Marks Citation1986; Marks and Trapido Citation1987).13. As mentioned before, the publications I am discussing in this section are but a few examples, representative as they are, of the directions recently taken by the humanities and social sciences in South Africa, in an ongoing dialogue across national borders

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