INVITATION: Reading Group for African Critical Thought
Danai Mupotsa
The Reading Group for African Critical Thought (RGFACT) is an interdisciplinary intellectual platform whose mission is to advance rigorous research, innovative inquiry and critical public conversations about African Critical Thought and more broadly, including African Diaspora thinkers. “Critical African/Black thought” has been consistently transnational in its imaginative power and scope. Therefore, the reading group takes Africa and its Diasporas as important, and insufficiently explored geo-cultural sites of knowledge production.
“Critical African/Black thought” is a diverse mode of thinking that aims to unsettle multiple orthodoxies. In questioning orthodoxies, our reading group seeks to engage thinkers who have challenged hierarchies and practices of domination and exploitation that have been profoundly shaped by the last 500 years. The reading group focuses its analytical lens on the challenges confronting African communities. We believe that the knowledge so produced is critical in that it takes the particularity of African experiences as the grounds of its analysis. In short, the reading group aims to clear the space for other forms of knowing. This decolonizing knowledge asserts that European global domination was not just imperialism and colonialism, but rather, as Quinjano has elaborated, that modernity/coloniality enacted and enacts epistemic violence that structures and reproduces modes of knowledge production which remain largely subject to imperial relations. Importantly, the reading group attempts to reclaim the “African world” as a site of knowledge production that has and continues to produce critical thought, which contributes substantively to the challenges of the African world and the rest of humanity.
The African Critical Thinkers Reading Group deliberately attends to various forms of knowledge production from Africa and the Diaspora not only to advance innovative inquiry and disseminate information and ideas, but also to help engage with the political, economic, and cultural questions at the nexus of race, ethnicity, and gender in South Africa and Africa more broadly. The Reading group will bring together scholars from various disciplines to examine Critical African Thought that explores culture, domination, hierarchy, power relations, modes of resistance, the production of social identities and the formation of political communities.
We plan to meet for the first time on Wednesday 23 May, at 4pm. Our first reading will be Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the HUman, After Man, It's Overpresentation - An Argument.
We would therefore like to invite you to join our reading group and our nascent network of scholars at Wits who share similar interests and concerns. If you would like to join us, please send an email to africancrit...@gmail.com and we will send you a copy of the reading.
Kind regards,
Danai
www.africancriticalthought.com