Seminars

In interwar Burundi, successive waves of gregarious locust swarms preyed on fields and grazing grounds, exacerbating the vulnerability of its (non)-human inhabitants. The locusts also constituted an acute governance issue for the Belgian colonial administration, which struggled to devise efficient modes of acridian containment and destruction. By using the locusts being-in-the-world as a vantage point, this paper proposes to study the complex interactions between insectile hazards and the segregated human communities who had to face them. The 'interspecies contact zone’ can function as a framework to make sense of multilayered more-than-human encounters occurring in the fraught context of colonial societies.

Rarely do archivists meet the people who provide their archives, or historians the individuals who created the documents they study, and too infrequently do the archivists who provide order to the files discuss their contents directly with the scholars who make use of them. This meeting will be a conversation between all three— and with the audience, many of whom are researching subjects that will provide future perspectives on current history. This conversation will feature elements of the life, work, and archives of Winifred Armstrong, an early member of the African Studies Association and a long-term participant in the Columbia University Seminar, Studies in Contemporary Africa, from the perspective of an archivist who catalogued some of her collections, a historian who worked in them, and the woman in question herself.

This talk will outline ongoing work on African urbanism developed through research platforms such as Where Is Africa, tapestries and installations that study quotidian spaces in Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam, and a book project in process, tentatively titled Animist Urbanism. By exploring notions of non-human aliveness, practices that frame inseparable relations between people and the environments they inhabit, this talk articulates how African cities make critical interventions on the global study of urbanism.

This talk is part of a larger project that imagines a history of space exploration centering Africa as a crucial site for humanity’s first steps off the planet. During the Cold War, when the United States, the Soviet Union, and many Western European nations first began to explore space, they stationed considerable ground infrastructure on African soil to track, communicate with, and launch satellites into orbit. Largely invisible in popular accounts of space exploration, these technoscientific stations, strewn across the African continent, produced a wide range of entanglements with local populations and environments, usually in the form of displacements of local populations or damage to the local ecologies. The talk offers a (re)reading of the imprint of this enormous infrastructure through the voices of Africans, many of whom viewed the siting of such technology in their countries as extensions of older forms of extractive colonial violence but rendered now under the cloak of scientific 'progress.'