To Write the Africa World

In October 2016, thirty intellectuals and artists from Africa, its diasporas, and beyond gathered together in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa in the midst of transformations that are sweeping through the contemporary world. The aim was to take stock of the renewal of Afro-diasporic critical thought and to discuss the new perspectives emerging from the ongoing projects constructing political, cultural, and social imaginaries for and from the African continent. 

This book brings together and makes available to the English-speaking world the material presented at the 2016 Ateliers de la pensée – Workshops of Thought – in Dakar. The authors deal with a wide range of issues, including decolonization, the development of social utopias, and the pursuit of new forms of political, economic, and social production on the African continent. Running throughout is a constant concern to interrogate the categories and frames of meaning that have served to characterize the dynamics of the African continent and a shared desire to produce new frames of intelligibility through which to see Africa’s present realities and its future. The contributions also attest to the view that there is no African question that is not also a global question, and that the Africanization of the global question will be a decisive feature of the twenty-first century.

To Write the Africa World and its companion volume The Politics of Time will be indispensable for anyone interested in Africa – its past, present, and future – and in the new forms of critical thought emerging from Africa and the Global South.

Thinking for a New Century

Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr



I



(European?) Universalism: put to the test by indigenous histories

Mamadou Diouf



Laetitia Africana: philosophy, decolonization, melancholia

Nadia Yala Kisukidi



For a truly universal universal

Souleymane Bachir Diagne



Migrant writers: builders of a balanced globalization of Africa/Europe

Benaouda Lebdai



II



For what is Africa the name?

Léonora Miano



Epistemological Impasses around the object Africa

Maurice Soudieck Dione



Reinventing African modernity!

Blondin Cissé



What is a postcolonial author?

Lydie Moudileno



III



How can one be African?

Hourya Bentouhami



Re-discovering meaning

Bonaventure Mve-Ondo



Esteem For Self:
Creating One’s Own Sense/Carving Out One’s Own Path

Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux



Dictionary for lovers of the African continent: two entries

Alain Mabanckou and Abdourahman Waberi



Emancipatory utopias

Françoise Vergès



IV


Martiality and death in sexual relations in Cameroon

Parfait D. Akana



Confronted with demographic challenges and technological mutations: does a good paying-job have a future in Africa?

Ndongo Samba Sylla



Healing the in-common

Abdourahmane Seck



V

Paths of the universal

Sami Tchak



Re-enchanting the world: Husserl in the post-colony

Nado Ndoye



Writing the humanities from the vantage point of Africa

Felwine Sarr



Thinking the world from the vantage point of Africa

Achille Mbembe



Notes

Index

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