[Sugarman] FW: Getting started on the Sugarman collaboration

[achille mbembe]

Dear Keith,
 
I hope you are having a great time in the United Kingdom. Not much to report from here. I am sure you have been reading the news on Internet. 
 
Great things are starting to move.  I am particularly interested in the following themes:
 
[1] Interrogating neoliberalism as idea and explanation
[2] The global South as an idea and a source of theory
[3]  Province and diaspora in African intellectual history
[4] The perils and possibilities of digital humanities in Africa
 
There is a great number of colleagues at Wits who are interested in these issues and it would be quite easy to
mobilize them. For each of these, it might be very possible to test the waters by organizing 4 'exploratory one-day workshops'.
during which we would unpack the themes and agree on a number of axes and modalities of inquiry. 
 
These 'exploratory workshops' would cost nothing. They would help us to form small teams here at Wits, while
waiting to hear from our Michigan colleagues.
 
Achille,
 
Date: Sun, 19 May 2013 23:33:43 +0100
Subject: Getting started on the Sugarman collaboration
From: keith at breckenridge.org.za
To: kaskew at umich.edu; drpeters at umich.edu; hechtg at umich.edu; Sarah.Nuttall at wits.ac.za; cath at burns.org.za; achillembembe at hotmail.com
CC: najibha.deshmukh at wits.ac.za


Dear friends,

[This message has not gone to the list -- only to Kelly, Derek, Gabrielle, Sarah, Achille and Catherine.   It's a draft of an email to get us started, please let me know if you can see anything that needs to be added or changed.]


We should now begin to assemble the people, ideas and projects that will carry this project for the next five years.   Our proposal is clear about the themes we have in mind, and we had to adjust theme to meet Mellon's objections, so we should try, very hard, to stick to them.   It might be necessary, and interesting, to set up subsets within each of these themes, narrow or expand them, but let's see how far we can get before we do that.   


To begin with we have in mind workshops in Johannesburg in our late Summer (timed to coincide with the Michigan Spring Break), and workshops in Ann Arbor in the Fall, probably in September.  (The exact dates will have to be worked out by the workshop committees).  


Our first object should be to assemble committees around the themes we have selected, and to do that the easiest way to begin will be for people to indicate in which of the themes (at the bottom of this message) they'd be interested to participate.    


Please reply to the list (yes, that will generate a bit of mail) explaining your interests.   For many people at both institutions this will be a useful way to meet potential collaborators.  WISER and the ASC will use those replies to assemble the committees.


WISER will support the project vigorously throughout, intellectually and politically, but the committees will be responsible for at least the following things (and I'm sure that there will be more):


1) Assembling a group of thirty interesting people, including about a dozen who will fly from one side of the world to the other.   Most of those people, but not all, should come from (or have very close links with)  Wits or Michigan.  


2)  Chose readings, and works in progress from participants, to ensure that the workshops produce new kinds of arguments and advance what we know and think about each of the problems. 

3)  Plan for publication of some of the work, ideally as a special edition in one of the journals well matched to the problems. 


4)  Think carefully through a program of events -- workshops, lectures, exhibitions, visits -- that will (again) produce new and stronger insights in to each problem area. 


The proposed themes include:
    Legacies of the imperial archive in post-colonial history, museums and performance    Textual analysis, visual culture and the state in the making of African publics
    Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation    The politics of literacy, legibility and expert knowledges in Africa    Narrative, visual forms and biopolitics in the medical humanities
    Cultural studies of science and technology in Africa    Intellectual property and curatorship in the digital humanities    Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the desegregating city
    Vernacular literatures in the making of transnational movements and subjects    The Global South as an idea and a source of theoryIn addition, we have six themes mentioned in the proposal which we might reasonably adapt or (ideally) join to the list above.

The perils and possibilities of the digital humanities in AfricaSocial History after Edward ThompsonThe politics of heritage Province and diaspora in African intellectual history
The cultural politics of science and technologyThe cultural politics of performance and mediaMany thanks, Keith
-- 

Keith Breckenridge  W I S E R - The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand | Pbag 3, PO Wits,  Johannesburg, South Africa, 2050 | Tel: +27117174272  | Fax: 0867654213 | Web: wiser.wits.ac.za


 		 	   		   		 	   		  
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