PostRacial Transmodernities: Afro-European Relations, Mediterranean Trajectories & Intercultural Reciprocities (2024 edition, closed)

The long relations between Africa and Europe require that we rethink the concepts of the human, the citizen-subject and community from below, at the political and cultural sites where radical transformations are taking place. Europe and Africa meet in a variety of practices and experiences that, once thought together, necessitate the decolonisation of our political and theoretical vocabulary about hospitality, migration, racisms, forgiveness and care. The course focuses on how racisms are challenged and transgressed by decolonising and creolising discourses that actively oppose xenophobia, nationalisms and ethnocentrisms. It reflects on ongoing relations between Africa and Europe by focusing on Afropean cultures that have emerged within communities of Afro-European descent across the northern and southern territories of the European continent and are interrelated with different places and temporalities in Europe and Africa.

Our programme responds to the “time of the now”. It aims to generate a framework that attends to the urgent need for discourses, aesthetics, and methodologies that destroy racisms and decolonise the ways by which we understand the human, the citizen-subject and community in the present. Decolonising our methodologies means to reckon with dominant philosophical, political, and aesthetic frameworks, and to attend to what it means to be human and live together beyond racisms in the present. 

This BIP course stems from the experience and momentum gained from a CIVIS international workshop that was organized in Athens under the auspices of a CIVIS seed funding scheme for joint projects with CIVIS' African partner universities.

Main theoretical aims:

• Contemplate postracial transmodernities that challenge and transgress the “overrepresentation of the white, bourgeois, heteronormative, Christian Man” (Sylvia Wynter)
• Explore the vernaculars that dismantle the “Great Divides” (Donna Haraway) that are othering entities such as women, transgendered identities, enslaved humans, racialized beings, servants, noncitizens, migrants, refugees, exotified others, subalterns, indigenous and native peoples
• Affirm the cultural practices that oppose what Étienne Balibar calls “differential racisms”
• Develop new methodological approaches to concepts that associate discrepant, realities/events/histories and reinvent community poetics, human and civil rights beyond ethnocentric and nationalist biases
• Construct and/or revise concepts that address artistic, political, social, cultural events and phenomena that cannot be accounted for nor reduced to race thinking
• Create a decolonial manifesto for critical practices, strategies of reading, and aesthetic creations

Moreover, the programme is connected to two of the five CIVIS themes, Cities, Territories and Mobilities and Societies, Culture, Heritage. Engaging Global South epistemologies. Building on the associations between decolonial thinking and postcolonial studies, the programme focuses on transmodern aesthetics,discourses and histories and aims at the dissemination and production of new knowledges. We address issues crucial to democracy, justice and equality, and explore the ongoing transformations in the public and political spheres in order to develop critical tools that are imperative for social change.

This programme is green and expands the discourses of sustainability into the fields of theoretical, historical and literary studies.

Main topics addressed

The course will be organized in the following strands that reflect the expertise of the teaching team:

• Migration: We will focus on the past and present histories of migration as constitutive of politics, and human rights in the long present. We will explore the histories of migritude and coolitude as well as the new forms of inhabitancy emerging in the present
• Race Thinking/Racisms: We will analyse race and racism through the histories of new and differential racisms that target new bodies and collectivities. The dissemination of minority histories and narratives that reveal the racial assemblages in the past and in the present generate creole ways of reinventing the concept of the human as being-with and becoming-with
• Forgiveness: The politics and poetics of forgiveness and justice in view of the past and present histories of disaster (including but not limited to the histories of totalitarian regimes, concentration camps, slave plantations)
• Hospitality: The politics and poetics of hospitality and interculturality centered on ethnopoetic and cultural practices that can be developed into “practices of becoming worldly” (Haraway)
• Decolonial Poetics: We will examine artistic examples that contemplate humanity as a condition that is non-linear and non-hierarchical and that places the human in a deep relationality with other species

Learning outcomes

The course offers research tools, pedagogies and methodologies against neo-racism, xenophobia and neo-nationalisms that plague democratic societies in Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa today.

By the end of the course, students will have:

• Strengthened and expanded their perspectives on trans-cultural values and practices across Europe and Africa
• Engaged research methodologies and theoretical frameworks to a wide variety of issues across national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries
• Reinforced their capability of formulating cultural responses to urgent challenges
• Developed their own research or creative project (essay, podcast, documentary film/photography, other creative work) that promotes postracial and trans-cultural research/production
• Mapped their own digital archive of concepts and of primary and secondary sources that can be used as a reference tool for the development of individual and collective research and outreach projects