Seminars
Studies in Contemporary Africa
Year Founded 1956
Seminar # 435
StatusActive
The seminar provides a lively forum for scholars engaged in the advanced study of Africa. Faculty and visiting scholars from Columbia University, Barnard College, and neighboring institutions actively participate in the regular series of sessions. Seminar discussions focus on theoretical and comparative approaches to the study of colonial and contemporary states, built environments and ecologies, gender, the arts, media, cultural studies, and processes in political mobilization and leadership.
Chair/s
Casey McNeill
Rhiannon Stephens
Rapporteur/s
Mylkah Djacko
External Website
Conference Registration
Meeting Schedule
Scheduled
Faculty House
“A Model C School in the Township”: Cape Town’s Marketplace of Schools and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism
Speaker/s
Amelia Simone Herbert, Barnard College-Columbia University
Abstract
While transition-era concessions that protected privileges in South Africa’s formerly white public schools were rationalized on preventing white exodus to private schools, the resulting maintenance of a bifurcated public system has produced a recent boom in “low-fee” private schools driven by Black exodus from township school conditions unconducive to aspirations for social mobility. In this talk, I draw on long-term ethnographic research in and around a low-fee private school in Cape Town’s oldest township to explore the complex maneuvering Black youth and families do to navigate the city’s racialized, competitive marketplace of schools. I show how, in their efforts to work toward competing aspirations for both mobility and equity, Black students and families are burdened with a double bind between school “choice” and education crisis. I argue that the coupling of school desegregation with devolution and marketization has ostensibly deracialized access to privilege without fundamentally dismantling racial capitalism, enabling the persistence of apartheid schooling geography and limiting the redistribution of educational resources, despite the advent of nonracial democracy.
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Past Meetings
Scheduled
Faculty House
Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War
Speaker/s
Nana Osei-Opare, Rice University
Abstract
Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of colonialism across the African continent and the world's first Black socialist state. Utilising materials from Ghanaian, Russian, English, and American archives, Nana Osei-Opare offers a provocative and new reading of this defining moment in world history through the eyes of workers, writers, students, technical-experts, ministers, and diplomats. Osei-Opare shows how race and Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana's transformational socialist, Cold War, and decolonization projects to achieve Black freedom. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Scheduled
Faculty House
Mistaking Order for Anarchy Territory, Mobility, and Security in the Sahel
Speaker/s
Casey McNeill, Fordham University
Abstract
Mistaking Order for Anarchy: Territory, Mobility and Security in the Sahel challenges the common sense that territorial governance is a necessary foundation for international security. The book examines statebuilding projects in the West African Sahel, from the 19th to 21st centuries, as a context in which the territorial spatial logics of modern international order can be put into relief. Like other arid zones, order and security in the Sahel have depended more on the preservation of mobility through space than control over space. By examining relationships between political order, security, and the production of space, the book shows not only that stable forms of social and political order do not necessarily require territorial control or definition, but also that the territorialization of order is itself a transformative political process whose relationship to security is variable and contingent. This has important implications for contemporary theories and practices of international security. McNeill argues that understanding and responding to global security conditions requires delinking security, conceptually and practically, from the project of territorial control and containment.
Scheduled
Faculty House
An Interspecies Contact Zone: Locusts and Humans in Colonial Burundi (1924-1939)
Speaker/s
Benoît Henriet, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Abstract
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.
Scheduled
Faculty House
Sediments of Meaning: A Military History of Mapungubwe National Park, 1932-Present
Speaker/s
Jacob Dlamini, Princeton University
Abstract
This presentation is about the archaeological and political history of South Africa's Mapungubwe National Park, with a particular focus on the reserve's role during apartheid as a rehabilitation camp for gay military conscripts and recreational drug users. The talk examines the much-neglected role of the apartheid military in fashioning a notion of normalcy founded on arbitrary distinctions between black and white, gay and straight, as well as 'normal' and 'abnormal.'
Scheduled
Faculty House
Who Will Use Your History? How Will It Be Interpreted in Future Years?
Speaker/s
Winifred Armstrong
Lauren Stark, New York University Libraries
Lydia Walker, The Ohio State University
Abstract
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.
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