Achille Mbembe & Felwine Sarr 
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.

Jadual kandungan

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

Mengenai Pengarang

Achille Mbembe is a Research Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Felwine Sarr is Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University