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The African Studies Workshop at Harvard continues this year with a new and exciting schedule of presenters. The presenters' papers explore Africa’s changing place in the world - and the new economies, legalities, socialities, and cultural forms that have arisen there. We shall also interrogate the claim that the African present is a foreshadowing of processes beginning to occur elsewhere across the globe; that, therefore, it is a productive source of theory and analysis about current conditions worldwide. At each workshop, a scholar presents a paper on one facet of the rapidly changing position of Africa in the global political economy and the impact of that change on global distributions of wealth, well-being, and power. Then a discussant provides commentary followed by an open discussion, in which students are given the floor first, followed by anyone else in attendance. Workshop presenters are scholars of high international repute as well as up and coming Africanist intellectuals.
This semester's workshop commences with On the Dangers of Descartes' "I" and Mistranslating African Philosophy as "I Am Because We Are" with Panashe Chigumadzi.
Panashe Chigumadzi is the author These Bones Will Rise Again (2018), a historical memoir reflecting on Robert Mugabe’s military ouster through the spirits of anti-colonial heroine Mbuya Nehanda and her grandmother Mbuya Chigumadzi, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize for Non-fiction. Her 2015 debut novel Sweet Medicine (Blackbird Books) won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. Chigumadzi was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. A former columnist for The New York Times, and contributing editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has featured in titles including The Guardian, Chimurenga, Transition, Africa is A Country, Washington Post and Die Ziet.
Chigumadzi is a doctoral candidate in Harvard University’s Departments of African and African American Studies and History. She has been the Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, a Fellow-in-Residence at Iowa University’s International Writers Program, and a Ruth First Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2023, Chigumadzi delivered the 2023 ZAM Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Amsterdam International Theatre and the 2015 Ruth First Lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand Great Hall. In 2016, Chigumadzi was the inaugural curator of Soweto’s Abantu Book Festival, South Africa’s most important gathering for black readers and writers.
We encourage all of our friends in the Cambridge area to join us in-person in the CAS Seminar Room. For those who would like to join online, please register for the Zoom link.