Join us for the Faculty Seminar Series at The Africa Institute on December 4, 2024, featuring Dr. Suren Pillay, A.C. Jordan Professor of African Studies and Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. Dr. Pillay will present his seminar, “Contracts, Conquest, and Modernity: Political Theory and the Genealogy of the Modern State in Africa,” (3:30 PM – 5:30 PM) in The Africa Institute – Auditorium (location map). Free admission. Register to attend.

Abstract

Predicaments of Knowledge explores the challenging questions faced by South African universities post-apartheid: Is there a difference between Africanizing a university and decolonizing it? What are the differences between deracializing and decolonizing curricula across disciplines? Through reflections on race, language, and colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial knowledge projects from Africa and Latin America, this book examines the pitfalls and possibilities for a post-apartheid generation inventing the future of knowledge. The distinctions between Africanization, decolonization, and deracialization are often conflated in the political demands placed on universities. Professor Pillay emphasizes that all three are important but distinct imperatives. If an intervention aims to decolonize the university but addresses only deracialization, it can undermine the effort to decolonize. Similarly, if an initiative to Africanize the university does not address decolonization, both processes may be undermined. Drawing on over two and a half decades of the author’s involvement in these debates, these essays seek to intervene and clarify questions and predicaments rather than offer blueprints; they are dialogical in spirit, even when polemical in tone. In conversation with existing continental African and Latin American experiences, they provide incisive reflections on current South African debates.

Speaker

Suren Pillay is the A.C. Jordan Professor of African Studies and Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research focuses on political violence, citizenship, and justice claims, and the politics of knowledge production and intellectual history. His publications examine the political and intellectual legacies of colonialism in the present. He is the principal investigator of the Mellon-funded project Other Universals: Thinking About Politics and Aesthetics from Postcolonial Locations. Before joining UCT in 2023, he was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research, a DST-NRF flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities at the University of the Western Cape. Pillay’s most recent book is Predicaments of Knowledge: Deracialization and Decolonization in Universities (WUP, 2024), and he also edited On the Subject of Citizenship: Late Colonialism in the World Today (Bloomsbury Press, 2023). He holds an MPhil and a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. He is a former editor of Social Dynamics and currently serves as an editor for Transformation and Postcolonial Studies. He is a board member of the Program for African Social Research (PASR) and has held visiting fellowships at Columbia University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Makerere University in Uganda, and Jawaharlal Nehru University in India.

Moderator

Elizabeth W. Giorgis is the Chair, Department of Humanities and Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, Sharjah. Read more.

Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute reaffirms its mission as a center for the study and research of Africa and its diaspora and its commitment to the training of a new generation of critical thinkers in African and African Diaspora studies.

The seminar will be in English.

The session is free and open to the public.