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University of Minnesota International African Studies Conference

“Fault Lines: Rethinking Temporal and Disciplinary Traditions in African Studies”

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Campus April 21-23, 2016

Hosted by:

The African History Graduate Student Collaborative

Sponsored by:

Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World (CSPW, University of Minnesota), Institute for

Advanced Study (IAS, University of Minnesota), Department of History (University of Minnesota),

Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC, University of Minnesota), African

Studies Initiative (ASI, Title VI - Department of Education, University of Minnesota), Institute for Global

Studies (IGS, University of Minnesota), Department of Theatre Arts & Dance (University of Minnesota),

Department of African American and African Studies (AA&AS, University of Minnesota), Department of

Anthropology (University of Minnesota), Department of Curriculum and Instruction (CEHD, University

of Minnesota), Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development (CEHD, University

of Minnesota), Department of Sociology (University of Minnesota), and the Program in the History of

Medicine (Medical School, University of Minnesota)


Conference Theme

The inaugural University of Minnesota International African Studies Conference, “Fault Lines,” will

bring together graduate students, junior and senior scholars concerned with how existing systems of

knowledge production have shaped the contours and limits of the varying disciplines that cohere

around African Studies.

This international conference aims to encourage dialogues and debates about various “fault lines” in

African Studies - thought simultaneously as the tenacity/obstinacy of disciplinary reason and

Western conceptualizations/assumptions, and as enabling the possibility for critique/critical

engagement along the breaks, slippages, overlaps, and variations therein. The opportunities opened

up by a rethinking of these fault lines advance our belief that sustained critical scholarship is

necessary in order for the various disciplines under the umbrella of African Studies to remain

dynamic. There is a need to (re)ignite discussions provoked by questions addressed to the critical

humanities and other theoretical positions by postcolonial thought and from the Global South.

“Fault Lines” extends from discussions in a research workshop, titled “The Problem of Time in

African History,” funded by the CSPW, that concluded by emphasizing time and temporality as

problems, or fault lines, rather than historical facts. While the historical convention is to divide the

history of the continent into three distinct temporal categories - the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-

colonial - this understanding of African pasts places the West as the referent and predisposes any

form of knowledge production to Western understandings of African history, with the consequence

that Africa is continually reproduced as the subject ‘other’ of disciplinary reason/practice. The

workshop critically examined history, resonating across disciplines, themes, and in particular the idea

of the nation-state, engaging with debates not only about time in Africa, but also in regards to diverse

methodological approaches. As such, this conference aims to interrogate how these questions of

history and historiography have implications outside the discipline of history, how they play out in

other disciplines, as well as to examine the limits various disciplinary conventions place on, and the

conceits implicated in, an authoritative “knowing” of Africa.

The African History Graduate Student Collaborative is pleased to welcome scholars from around the

globe to the Twin Cities for our inaugural International African Studies Conference at the University

of Minnesota to expand our discussions of “Fault Lines” in African studies and create new spaces for

dialogue across both disciplinary and geographic boundaries.


Conference Schedule

Thursday April 21st

8:00-8:45 Registration and Check-In (12th

Floor Heller Hall)

9:00-11:00 Welcome Address and Open Discussion (1210 Heller Hall) Delivered by: Dr. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Department of History, University of

Minnesota, Dr. Gary Minkley, SARChI Chair in Social Change, University of Fort

Hare, and Paul Vig, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Recommended Reading: Luis de Miranda, “Is A New Life Possible? Deleuze and the

Lines,” Deleuze Studies No. 7, Vol. 1(2013): 106–152.

11:00-11:15 Coffee Break (1210 Heller Hall)

11:15-12:25 Queer African Studies Roundtable (1210 Heller Hall) Recommended Reading: Keguro Macharia, “African Queer Studies,” Gukira With(Out)

Predicates (blog), August 24th 2014, https://gukira.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/african-

queer-studies/ and “On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint,” GLQ: A Journal

of Lesbian and Gay Studies No. 2, Vol. 2(2016): 183-189.

12:30-2:00 Lunch (Provided by AHGSC for all Conference Participants in 1210 Heller

Hall)

2:00-3:00 “Usakos: Photographs Beyond Ruins,” curated by Paul Grendon, Giorgio

Miescher, Lorena Rizzo and Tina Smith (Regis West Gallery, 1st Floor)

Introductory comments from exhibition curators, Dr. Giorgio Miescher and Dr. Lorena

Rizzo, followed by a brief Q&A session.

4:00-6:00 “‘Newes from the Dead’: an unnatural moment in the history of Natural

Philosophy,” as part of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Thursdays at

Four Lecture Series (Crosby Seminar Room, 240 Northrop) Delivered by: Dr. Jane Taylor, Wole Soyinka Chair of Drama and Theatre Studies at

the University of Leeds

Recommended Reading: Laura Gowing, “Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-

Century England,” Past & Present, No. 156(1997): 87-115.

Friday April 22nd

8:00-8:45 Registration and Check-In (12th

Floor Heller Hall)

9:00-11:00 Panel 1A: 1210 Heller Hall

(Post)Colonial Presents and the

Reproduction of Racialized Space

Panel 1B: 537 Heller Hall (ICGC)

Archival Disruptions: Exploring the

Temporalities of Medical and

Ethnographic Archives in Africa



11:15-12:45 Panel 2A: 1210 Heller Hall Disciplinary Cartographies:

Interrogating the Imperatives of World

History and Area Studies, Co-presented

with the Early Modern Atlantic CSPW

Research Workshop


Experiencing Race: (Re)Deployments of

Racial Constructions, Depictions, and

Registers


Hall)


Ethnography to Sociology: African

Grids of Intelligibility and Social

Thought


After the Event: Power, Memory and

Violence

4:00-6:00 Keynote Address, delivered by Dr. Jane Taylor (West Bank Union Auditorium aka

West Bank 20, Willey Hall), with reception to follow (1210 Heller Hall)

Saturday April 23rd


Thinking with Space in Historical

Analysis


Multimodal Mixing: Interdisciplinary

Methods to Exploring Identity, Orality

and Power for Black/African diasporas



Archival Disruptions: Interrogating the

Mnemotechnics of Conventional

Historical Imaginaries


Making ‘Space’ for Gender: Alternate

Narratives and the Pursuit of New

Theories and Praxis


Hall)


Orality and the Geography of Texts 6B: Roundtable - 537 Heller Hall

(ICGC) – An “Ethical Pedagogy”:

Exploring the Fault Lines of ‘Best

Practice’ Teaching

4:00-5:30 Final Reflections Roundtable (1210 Heller Hall)

6:00 Conference Dinner (Provided by AHGSC for all Conference Participants in 1210

Heller Hall)


Detailed Panel and Roundtable Descriptions

Queer African Studies Roundtable (1210 Heller Hall)

Synopsis: Is “queer” a useful analytical category in African Studies? This roundtable reflects on the

developments and trajectories in the burgeoning field of Queer African Studies. Born out of artistic,

activist, and scholarly networks of sexual and gender non-conforming persons, Queer African

Studies, Zethu Matebeni contends in Reclaiming Afrikan, “opens up a conversation for us to rewrite

the ways in which we exist as people who move around this continent and beyond.” But, do “we”

need to identify as queer to join in on these fruitful discussions? Through debating the usefulness of

intellectual fields emerging, on the surface, from identity politics, roundtable participants discuss the

limits and potential for Queer African Studies to expose the tensions born out of colonialism and

playing out in the various academic spaces that make up African Studies.

Roundtable Participants: Elliot James, Department of History, University of Minnesota; Danai S.

Mupotsa, African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand; Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, Department

of English and Writing Studies, University of Western Ontario; Jigna Desai, Department of Gender,

Women and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota

Recommended Reading: Keguro Macharia, “African Queer Studies,” Gukira With(Out) Predicates

(blog), August 24th 2014, https://gukira.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/african-queer-studies/ and “On

Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies No. 2,

Vol. 2(2016): 183-189.

Panel 1A – 1210 Heller Hall: (Post)Colonial Presents and the Reproduction of Racialized

Space

Panel Chair: Paul Vig, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Melanie Boehi, Basel Graduate School of History and Centre for African Studies, University of

Basel

“Gardening with Rhodes, Dinosaurs and African Huts: the Making of Space, Time and Museums

at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden”

Sarah Godsell, Department of History, University of the Witwatersrand

“Belonging to Bantustans: Language and Exclusion in Apartheid and Democratic South Africa”

Alicia Lazzarini, Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota

“Spaces of Leisure and Pleasure: The Role of ‘The Club’ in the Lusophone Postcolony”

Danai S. Mupotsa, African Literature, School of Language, Literature and Media, University of

the Witwatersrand

“The White Wedding”

Nqobile Zulu, Development Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

“Contemporary Game Farming: A Colonial Present”


Panel 1B – 537 Heller Hall: Archival Disruptions: Exploring the Temporalities of Medical

and Ethnographic Archives in Africa

Panel Chair: Jessica Farrell, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: Leslie Witz, Department of History, University of the Western Cape

Sinazo Mtshemla, Department of History, University of Fort Hare

“Can there be African Time? Working Uncomfortably with the Concept Time and its Rhythms

of Irregularities in Archiving of African Music”

Julia Cummiskey, History of Medicine & African History, Johns Hopkins University

“Disparity and Decrepitude in the Archive”

Marissa Mika, Department of History, University of San Francisco

“Living Archives and Dying Wards at the Uganda Cancer Institute”

Panel 2A – 1210 Heller Hall: Disciplinary Cartographies: Interrogating the Imperatives of

World History and Area Studies – Co-presented with the Early Modern Atlantic CSPW

Research Workshop

Panel Chair: Gabriale Payne, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: Katharine Gerbner, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Leslie Witz, Department of History, University of the Western Cape

“A Re-View of Africa [not] in World History: Transnational History, and a Return to Anniston,

Alabama”

Jessica Farrell, Department of History, University of Minnesota

“The Politics of Periodization: The ‘End’ of the Atlantic World and The Critique of History”

Thomas Wolfe, Department of History, University of Minnesota

“The Uses and Abuses of Continents”

Panel 2B – 537 Heller Hall: Experiencing Race: (Re)Deployments of Racial Constructions,

Depictions, and Registers

Panel Chair: Janeke Thumbran, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, Department of English and Writing Studies,

University of Western Ontario

Ana Cláudia dos Santos São Bernardo, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies,

University of Minnesota


“Race and Representation in Mozambique: an Analysis of Mia Couto's ‘The Barber's most

famous customer’”

Bryan Schmidt, Department of Theatre Arts & Dance, University of Minnesota

“The Play’s the Thing at Grahamstown: The Intersection of Aesthetic Production and Economic

Displacement”

Elizabeth Williams, Department of History, University of Minnesota

“The ‘Jews of Africa’ vs. the Jews of Europe: Indian Opposition to Jewish Settlement in Kenya,

1938”

Panel 3A – 1210 Heller Hall: Ethnography to Sociology: African Grids of Intelligibility and

Social Thought

Panel Chair: Virgil Slade, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: Lorena Rizzo, Centre for African Studies, University of Basel

Jonathan Schoots, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago

“An African Sociology? The Sociological Imagination of S.E.K. Mqhayi”

Louisa Rice, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

“New Disciplines: The Institut Francais D’Afrique Noire at the End of Empire in West Africa”

Christopher Kirchgasler, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Wisconsin-

Madison

“Historicizing Transnational School Reforms in Kenya (Or, Why Not and Ethnography?)”

Panel 3B – 537 Heller Hall: After the Event: Power, Memory and Violence

Panel Chair: Elliot James, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: Njeri Githire, Department of African American & African Studies, University

of Minnesota

Ahmed Sh. Ibrahim, Cultural Anthropology, City University of New York

“The Temporality of Youth in Somalia”

Lidwien Kapteijns, Department of History, Wellesley College

“Fault Lines in Somali History – Historical Spin, Communal Violence, and ‘Dangerous

Memories’ in Somalia”

George Agbo, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape

“Challenging the Frivolities of Power: The Ubiquitous Camera and the Nigerian Political Elites”


Panel 4A – 1210 Heller Hall: Thinking with Space in Historical Analysis

Panel Chair: Janeke Thumbran, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: Kate Derickson, Department of Geography, Environment and Society,


Julia Büchele, Centre for African Studies, University of Basel and Visiting Scholar in the

African American and African Studies Department, Harvard University

“(Im)mobile Privileges: Navigating Time and Space in Kampala’s Traffic”

Noah Gasser, History and Philosophy, University of Basel, and Dominic Westhoff, Centre for

African Studies, University of Basel

“Exploring Spaces – Thoughts from Fieldwork in Usakos (Namibia)”

Giorgio Miescher, Namibian and Southern African Studies, Centre for African Studies,

University of Basel

“Drawing the Line: Architecture and the Historical Geography of a South African Town”

Panel 4B – 537 Heller Hall: Multimodal Mixing: Interdisciplinary Methods to Exploring

Identity, Orality and Power for Black/African Diasporas

Panel Chair: Paul Vig, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: Shaden Tageldin, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative

Literature, University of Minnesota

Hawa Y. Mire, Environmental Studies, York University

“Re/Writing a National Imaginary Through Orality”

Suban Nur Cooley, Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing, Michigan State University

“Gurigey meeye? (Where is my home?): Nomad Seeking the Sensation of Home”

Shewonda Leger, Rhetoric and Writing, Michigan State University

“Fixing The Standard: The Black Women's Reclamation Of Power”

Panel 5A – 1210 Heller Hall: Archival Disruptions: Interrogating the Mnemotechnics of

Conventional Historical Imaginaries

Panel Chair: Jessica Farrell, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: JB Shank, Department of History, University of Minnesota


Heather Wares, South African Heritage Resources Agency

“Finding Meermin: An Exhibition without Objects”

Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Department of History, University of Minnesota and Gary

Minkley, SARChI Chair in Social Change, University of Fort Hare

“From the Eastern Cape as a ‘Hemispheric Fault Line’: Speaking Crows and Ships that Sail Into

the Amatolas”

Adam A. Blackler, Department of History, University of Minnesota

“‘Mein lieber Theodore’: Hendrik Witbooi and German Perceptions of Colonial Namibia, 1884-

1905”

Panel 5B – 537 Heller Hall: Making ‘Space’ for Gender: Alternate Narratives and the

Pursuit of New Theories and Praxis

Panel Chair: Virgil Slade, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: Sonali Pahwa, Department of Theatre Arts & Dance, University of Minnesota

Tasoulla Hadjiyanni, Department of Design, Housing and Apparel, University of Minnesota

“Infusing People-Environment Questions in African Diaspora Discourses – The Domestic

Experiences of Somalis in Minnesota”

Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, Department of English and Writing Studies, University of Western

Ontario

“Rethinking Coming-Out Labors in African Queer Memoir”

Tara Reyelts, Department of History, Michigan State University

“Gendering the Anti-Colonial Struggle in Igboland, Nigeria, 1914-1929”

Panel 6A – 1210 Heller Hall: Orality and the Geography of Texts

Panel Chair: Gabriale Payne, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Panel Discussant: Patricia Lorcin, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Kevin Huselid, Hispanic Literatures and Cultures, University of Minnesota

“Towards a Literary Geography of Zoning Practices in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique”

Xavier Guégan, Department of History, University of Winchester


“Writing History in the Aftermath of Algeria’s Independence: La Revue d’Histoire et de

Civilisation du Maghreb, 1966-1976”

Satty Flaherty-Echeverría, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of

Minnesota and Denise Malauene, Department of History, University of Minnesota

“Ngoma Yethu: Understanding the ‘I’ via Time, Rhythm and Religion in Mozambique”

6B: Roundtable - 537 Heller Hall: An “Ethical Pedagogy”: Exploring the Fault Lines of

‘Best Practice’ Teaching

Synopsis: This roundtable will open with a presentation delivered by Wesley Lummus and Virgil

Slade from the University of Minnesota’s Department of History. Their presentation will explore the

interplay between materiality, the conceptual, and the performative in fostering an “ethical

pedagogy.” Though they will ground their discussion in the African particular, their paper aims to

extend the discussion more broadly to encompass other regions and historiographies. Popular

perceptions of Africa, in addition to other sites in the Global South, often regard these spaces as

“tragic,” “unthinkable” and “exceptional.” This is in direct contrast to European history, which

remains unmarked in this manner and able to articulate the universal. While not wanting to re-

inscribe or perpetuate these labels, their paper will delve into one “tragic” and “unthinkable” moment

of the African past, the deaths of two Guinean teenagers—Yanguine Koita and Fodé Tounkara—in

order to raise questions of how an “ethical” pedagogy would tell their story. This roundtable is not

interested in exploring a ‘best practice’ teaching model as such. Simply put, our opening presenters

reject this idea outright and argue that a ‘best practice’ teaching philosophy presupposes the ability to

annunciate a universal understanding of what constitutes ‘good ethics’. Instead, this roundtable seeks

to enable a discussion which will explore what kind of questions an “ethical pedagogy” demands the

scholar to consider, both in terms of the composition and performative of the lecture.

Roundtable Participants: Wesley Lummus, Department of History, University of Minnesota; Virgil

Slade, Department of History, University of Minnesota; Elliot James, Department of History,

University of Minnesota; Tracey Deutsch, Department of History, University of Minnesota

ICGC Final Reflections Roundtable (1210 Heller Hall)

Synopsis: Participants on this roundtable – all scholars affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Center for

the Study of Global Change (ICGC) – will reflect on the numerous discussions they were privy to

throughout the conference and offer potential lines of flight for ensuing conversations. The focus will

be to sketch some of the opportunities opened up by a rethinking of various “fault lines” in African

Studies as they have been interrogated and presented within the panels, roundtables, and discussions

that have taken place thus far and which we hope will continue to evolve after the conference has

concluded.

Roundtable Participants: Paul Vig, Department of History, University of Minnesota; Gabriale Payne,

Department of History, University of Minnesota; Virgil Slade, Department of History, University of

Minnesota; Janeke Thumbran, Department of History, University of Minnesota


Welcome Address and Opening Remarks

“Deleuze and Guattari,”by haruka-K

Title: “It began with Graves in Dimbaza: Thinking with Fault Lines, Lines of Flight and Flights

of Sail”

Delivered by: Dr. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Department of History, University of

Minnesota, Dr. Gary Minkley, SARChI Chair in Social Change, University of Fort Hare, and

Paul Vig, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Minnesota

Abstract: Can we pretend that no critique has been advanced of the discipline of History? Does

the continent that had no history according to Hegel and other European philosophers, call into

question our assumptions about history and its epistemologies? Do we need to think about the

disciplines’ relation to the exercise of power and their contribution to and complicity with the

regimes of truth and modes of evidence that underwrote slavery, colonialism and other modes of

rule and exploitation whose racialized and gendered legacies haunt the present? In this

introduction to “Fault Lines: Rethinking Temporal and Disciplinary Traditions in African

Studies” we will argue for a critical engagement with (African) history as well as with the

epistemological and methodological implications of disciplinary reason and knowledge

production. We will attend to the possibility that an African humanities and postcolonial

criticism – in drawing lessons from colonialism and the post-colonial – might enable a better

understanding of what it means to be human in a time of rapid technological change, in the face

of the challenges of globalization, the pervasiveness of neo-liberal (global) economics, the

legacies of colonialism and apartheid, and in the context of human activity having become the

most significant influence on climate and the environment (the Anthropocene), leaving us with

an ecological and economic present perhaps irreparably damaged.

Recommended Reading: Luis de Miranda, “Is A New Life Possible? Deleuze and the Lines,”

Deleuze Studies No. 7, Vol. 1(2013): 106–152.


Keynote Address

Title: “Varieties of Secular Experience”

Delivered by: Dr. Jane Taylor, Wole Soyinka Chair of Drama and Theatre Studies at the

University of Leeds

Abstract: My subject takes its title from William James’s important study, Varieties of Religious

Experience. I have worked for some years on performance, puppetry and the subject/object

threshold. I will be using this opportunity to reconsider some of the critical concepts around

established discourses on Magical Thinking, Possession, and Witchcraft. My thinking is

informed in ways by Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Fraser’s Golden Bough, and is in a dialogue

with the work on ‘occult economies’ of Jean and John Comaroff. The paper arises through the

making of a new work of object-based theatre, and so that ‘frame’ will structure my talk, about

puppetry arts, prosthesis, and imagination.


The exhibition

highlights a traumatic

moment in the town’s

history, when in the

early 1960s the apartheid

administration began to

remove African residents

from what was then

called the old location

into newly built

townships

geographically removed

from those parts of the

town henceforth

reserved

for “whites.”

This exhibition

centers on three private

photographic collections

owned by four female

residents of the small

town in central Namibia

called Usakos: a hub of

first the German colonial

and later the South

African railway system.

Most images were taken

by local or itinerant

African photographers.

Usakos Photographs Beyond Ruins

The Old Location Albums, 1920s to 1960s

April 5–23, 2016 Regis West Gallery

Regis Center for Art


Remarks by Lorena Rizzo

April 7, 5:15–6:15 pm

Regis West Gallery

Remarks by Giorgio Miescher

and Lorena Rizzo

April 21, 2:00–3:00 pm

InFlux Space

Regis Center for Art

Curators: Paul Grendon, Giorgio Miescher, Lorena Rizzo, Tina Smith

Project Partners and Funders: Carl Schlettwein Stiftung Basel • Centre for African Studies, University of Basel • District Six Museum Cape Town • Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel • Max Geldner Stiftung Basel • Pro Helvetia Johannesburg • Stiftung Mercator Schweiz • Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation

University of Minnesota: Organized by the African Studies Initiative, a Title VI National Resource Center funded by the U.S. Department of Education; cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and the Department of Art. http://africa.umn.edu


The Institute for Advanced Study

Presents:

Dr. Jane Taylor, Wole Soyinka Chair of Drama and Theatre Studies at the

University of Leeds

“Newes from the Dead”:

an unnatural moment in the history of Natural Philosophy

Thursday, April 21, 2016, at 4:00pm

Crosby Seminar Room, 240 Northrop

Abstract:

In 1650 Oxford is in the midst of the Bloody civil war, in which divine and secular authority are

both at issue. A young woman, hanged for infanticide, is given over to the university scholars,

for an anatomy lesson. Shockingly she ‘comes back to life’ on the anatomy table. This paper

raises a series of meditations about philosophy, the history of science, relations of gender,

knowledge, and power. Suggested background reading from Prof. Taylor: Laura Gowing, “Secret

Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England”.

For more information, visit: http://ias.umn.edu/2016/04/21/taylo


About AHGSC

The 2016 Inaugural University of Minnesota International African Studies Conference (IASC) is the

brainchild of the African History Graduate Student Collaborative (AHGSC). Our “collaboration” began

during a research workshop, titled “The Problem of Time in African History”, funded by the Consortium

for the Study of the Premodern World (CSPW), which critically examined the disciplinary practices that

have often led historians to reproduce Africa as the subject ‘other’ of the West and predisposed all

systems of knowledge production to Western understandings of African histories. AHGSC firmly

believes that this critical work is essential to all disciplinary approaches to the study of Africa and has

thus organized this conference with the intention of bringing together Africanist scholars from around the

world in order to create new opportunities for discussion and collaboration between Africanist scholars

across disparate geographical spaces. Our aim is to produce lasting relationships and conversations

among Africanist scholars working within various institutions nationally and internationally.

AHGSC Members and Bios

Jessica Farrell, IASC Co-Chair and PhD Candidate in African History

Jess received her BA from Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in anthropology and political

science and minoring in history and writing. Her dissertation, “(Re)Capturing Empire: A Reconsideration

of Liberia’s Precarious Sovereignty and American Empire as Exception in the 19th

-Century,” focuses on

the relationship between the Liberian government, the American Colonization Society, and the United

States government in the mid-19th

century. Specifically, her work places the recaptured Africans

(individuals freed off illegal slaving ships by the US Navy and sent to Liberia) at the center of analysis in

order to interrogate the concepts of Liberian sovereignty and American empire.

Elliot James, PhD Candidate in African History

Elliot currently holds a Diversity Pre-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship at the University of Minnesota,

Morris, where he is also completing his dissertation, "Sithutha Isizwe ('We carry the nation'): Gender and

the (un) Making of the Taxi in South Africa, 1908-Present." At UMM he teaches Africa Since 1700 and

Gender & Sexuality in African History, and serves on the African and Black American Studies

curriculum committee. Born and raised in the Bronx, NYC, his 11-year engagement with intellectuals and

institutions in South Africa shapes his approach to African History. His teaching and research additionally

benefit from 15 years of social justice work in U.S. queer people of color communities.

Gabriale Payne, PhD Candidate in African History

Gabriale received her BA in History with a minor in Anthropology from the University of Colorado at

Denver. Her dissertation, titled “Making ‘The Cut’: Kikuyu Conceptions of the Body, Gender, and

Ethnicity, and the Invention of Modern Gender/Sexuality, Kenya c. 1895 to the Present” traces the

intertextual reconstruction of competing discourses on Female Genital Cutting (FGC) among the Kikuyu

in multiple knowledge sites in order to examine the relationship between discourses on FGC, broader


discourses on gender/sexuality, and the ‘invention’ of ethnicity in colonial and post-colonial Kenya (c.

1895 to the present). She argues that the Kikuyu case can help us to better understand global re-

conceptions of gender in the ‘modern’ age, revealing the complex ways in which colonialism and colonial

re-conceptions of gender/sexuality are intimately related to the construction of modern conceptions of

race/ethnicity and what it means to be properly ‘modern.’

Virgil Slade, IASC Co-Chair, PhD Candidate in African History

Virgil received his undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the University of the Western Cape (UWC)

in Cape Town, South Africa. Prior to pursuing his doctoral degree at the UMN, Virgil spent two years

working as a researcher on three sport related exhibitions at the District Six Museum in Cape Town where

he was able to combine his two primary interests – history and sport. Whereas the thesis he completed for

his Master’s degree interrogated how the native subject is overdetermined by the colonial archive, his

doctoral research is focused upon the relationship that sport in post-apartheid South Africa has with the

racial identity politics associated with the previous regime. This project privileges the body as a site of

knowledge production in order to circumnavigate the confines of ‘what can be said’ imposed by the

discipline of history and its continued reliance on the archive as hegemonic source.

Janeke Thumbran, PhD Candidate in African History

Janeke received her undergraduate degree from the University of Pretoria. She holds a Master’s degree in

Information and Communication Sciences from Tilburg University, The Netherlands as well as a Master’s

in History from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her dissertation “Community by Design: Self-Reliance

and Trusteeship at the University of Pretoria, 1948-2012” is on a former all-white university in South

Africa. It examines the university’s attempts to create community during the apartheid period by

conceiving of itself as a trustee of black neighborhoods in and around Pretoria. Looking specifically at

how the disciplines of sociology, social work and architecture were used as the mechanisms for

community and trusteeship during apartheid, Janeke argues that the university’s policy of community

engagement serves a similar function in the post-apartheid period.

Paul Vig, PhD Candidate in African History

Paul received his BA in History and Religion from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. Prior to

beginning the doctoral program in History at the University of Minnesota, Paul spent two years in South

Africa as a volunteer with the United States Peace Corps where he worked as a Primary Education

Consultant at two primary schools in the Waterberg District community of Ga-Seleka. This work

cultivated a desire to more fully understand the conditions that produced the inequalities constituted in the

Waterberg between the Tswana and Pedi communities and the surrounding Afrikaner and English owned

game farms, prompting Paul’s return to graduate research at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation

project examines the history of hunting in South Africa and its entangled relationships to the organization

and deployment of notions of race and development. Specifically this project explores the Waterberg

District and the space of the game farm as sites for analyzing these connections and histories, as well as

how history as a discipline is complicit in these relationships.

university of minnesota international african studies ... · introductory comments from exhibition...

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