The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR A LATER DATE. PLEASE WATCH THIS SITE OR THE GPIA LISTSERVER FOR DETAILS.

African Postcolonies: In the Realm of the Future Anterior

The seminar will explore in a comparative way various instances of political process, conflict and social engineering in contemporary Africa, examining the interplay between past-oriented discourse (memory, belonging, autocthony, territoriality, sacredness) and future oriented claims (rights, citizenship, humanitarianism, 'development' and salvation). The linguistic mode of the future anterior emerges as a figure that captures elusive aspects of these processes, in which the aim is not a return to a pristine primordial time, but rather, the re-writing of history, by placing several interrelated pasts (imagined or real) within an impending future. The main focus will be on Mozambique, providing a case of post-Socialist, post-war state reform in which international law, humanitarian emergency and development interact in an agonistic way with the resurgence of customary law and "traditional" authority, producing new social lines of flight, subjectivities and sense of entitlements. Between the claims of a past tense –or tense past- and the dystopias of the future perfect –or perfect future- the African postcolony seems to be constituted in an impasse, a temporal, social interstice. One of the major outcomes of this condition is a localized conception of citizenship, shaped by nativist narratives and by a novel conception of justice linked to a renewal of the 'customary' and opposed to the modes of being-together enacted through the discourse of liberal rights.

Part of the Seminar Series.