Dr. Cassandra Mark-Thiesen and Dr. Noemi Alfieri on anti-colonial networks in African literature
Abstract
- Abstract
- Cluster fellow Dr. Noemi Alfieri talks with her host and Junior Research Group Leader Dr. Cassandra Mark-Thiesen about her latest research project "Mapping anti-colonial networks through literature. Transnational connections of African thinkers in the reconfiguration of space and thought (1950s - 70s)"
Description
- Transcript
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[music]
Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Cluster Conversations. My name is Cassandra Mark Teason. I am leader of the Junior Research Group African Knowledges and the History Publication, and I'm here with the current research fellow at the Africa Multiple Cluster, Noemi Alfieri of the New University of Lisbon. Welcome, Noemi.
Speaker 2: Hello, glad to be here and thanks Cassandra for being my host during my fellowship at the cluster.
Speaker 1: So Noemi, one of the reasons that we're here, a topic that brought us together, is our joint interest in journals that were published on the African continent around the nineteen sixties and seventies. In my work, I've been looking at post-independence history journals that were produced by different historical societies and also in different academic centers across the continent. You have been looking at literary journals in your work that were, by the way, also published in the African diaspora. Could you say a few words about your interest in literature from Africa?
Speaker 2: Yes. So actually I was initially trained in modern languages and literatures at the University of Turin, which is the city in which I was born. And at the time when I did my degree and my master, I was mainly studying, I would say European languages and literatures. So I was focusing on Spanish and Portuguese and in a course that was called Iberian and Ibero-American cultures and literatures, I guess. So this was really traditional course. I spent one year of my master in Italy, then the second in Portugal. That was where I started reading novels dealing with liberation movements, decolonization and especially with the Angolan context. And it's interesting because this mainly happened outside the university. In the university I was still studying much more about classics of the Western canon and traditional Portuguese literature and so on. And I became interested in Third Worldism, transnational solidarity, prison writing. So I started to read and research more and to develop a PhD project that would deal with resistance, liberation and censorship, especially in the Angolan and Mozambican contexts. My master thesis was on Ngonga's Adventures. That was a short novel by Pepetela that was used during the liberation for the alphabetization of freedom fighters and the general population. And I would say since then my perspective kind of shifted and changed. There are a few topics I've been thinking about, like the fact that for example in the last decades, I would say African literatures have been used by European societies mainly to think about themselves and to deal with their colonial past. And I don't see these as a problem, but I would say there's a kind of instrumentalization of African literatures. And I think this is a question we should take into account when we make research or deal with our projects, especially in the European context.
Speaker 1: Very interesting. I think there definitely is a lot of work that needs to be done on this topic of instrumentalization. But if we could just take a step back maybe, I mean, I think even when it comes to just working with print material in the African context, there have been so many tensions within the field of African studies. And I think especially now there is even more attention paid to kind of moving away from print or perhaps being more inclusive in terms of different forms of media. So maybe you could say a few words about how you've experienced these tensions, the tensions of working with print, especially amidst the current decolonization debate.
Speaker 1: So thanks for the question. Maybe I should start answering by speaking a little bit on how my project began. So how I thought I would develop my project here at the cluster and how it actually it was actually developed. So I've been working on a project that is called Mapping Anticolonial Networks through Literature, in which I see transnational connections of African thinkers and intellectuals in the reconfiguration of space and thought, as you were saying, between the nineteen fifties and nineteen seventies. My aim at the beginning was to dwell on intellectual displacement and also on the mobility of objects and ideas through the networks that were established within Africa and its diasporas by writers and intellectuals. And I was thinking about doing that starting from three literary journals that were Mensagem printed in Lisbon, Présence Africaine printed in Paris and Dakar, and L'Écho africain that was printed in Ibadan. So at the beginning, I actually thought I would work mainly with literature and poetry especially. So the I would say the exchanges with the colleagues here led my research to shift into a different methodological and theoretical reflection. And I soon came to focus on the differences in the production of the three editorial projects, on the matter of authority in those very publications and in the role of translation and critics. I would say in those projects there was a challenging of Eurocentric visions. And this what made not just through theory and through the discourse, but also with the idea of joining in the different journals and publishing in the journals poetry, then works of the visual arts, and then essays and articles about living conditions, for example, in the suburbs of Luanda. This was happening with Mensagem and Cultura. I have tried to make an effort to problematize the imbalances that characterize those publications in different ways. I think this is important to me as I consider this reflection in a way as a critical thinking on the present, as we were talking of the decolonization debate. And this also has to do with positionality. So I would say it is essential to reflect on global entanglements, that I guess it's something you do with your own research and within the junior research group you're leading. But it is also important to not to forget the local context, the peculiarities, and it's also relevant to think how we as researchers relate to those complexities. So which might be our view, our approach, what do we consider as archives and also those limitations and these tendencies of putting and separating the different artistic practice in boxes. So to make a distinction between what is literature, what are the visual arts, which is the language used. That is something that was not so important in those publications. So it was not definitely a concern, I would say, neither nor of the artists, neither of the editors in some cases.
Speaker 2: I'm glad that you show the variety that print can contain, varieties of genre, of languages, et cetera. I'm also glad that you talked about the present. Of course, I would say that another important let's say period related to decolonization is the future and future making. So as you already know, Melanie Bujhi and I recently hosted a panel on future making in African media studies, and you happened to be one of the panelists that spoke. And so I'd be curious to know what you took from that discussion or maybe just more generally, what do you have to say about future making in the printworks that you are currently analyzing?
Speaker 1: Yes, so this was really exciting.
Speaker 1: Pana, and I think the work you've been leading with the Liberian TV archives is inspiring in the sense that it shows us a lot about knowledge, culture, popular culture, and what we do consider as valuable knowledge. For what concerns future making, I would say this is for sure, as the panel demonstrated, one of the points in which our research converge. So even if you work and have been working especially on future making and knowledge production in post-independence journals, and I've been mainly dealing so far, especially after the PhD, with pre-independence journals and literature, I would say this exchange has been vital to think about some topics. For example, as we were mentioning in another occasion, for sure there is a clear line and a cut after political independences, but most of the fights for the decolonization of knowledge, epistemic justice, et cetera also have a continuity even in the academic journals you've been working with. So on my side, I've been approaching literary and artistic ways of imagining, conceiving and representing those African futures. Doing my PhD, for example, I tried to dive into some of those possible representations of futures that, as I was saying, were mainly expressed through poetry, novels and short stories in the context of the so-called Portuguese-speaking African productions, even if I am against the term 'productions'. So I would say works. Just to cite some writers, I would mention Alda Espírito Santo, Rogério Neto, António Jacinto, Noémia de Sousa, for example. And it's interesting to me to underline that prominent political figures such as Amílcar Cabral also focused on the poetic production. And here at the cluster, I've also focused on the role of translation and networks and transpositions from one African context to the other as a way of imagining and building the future. So this is why, for example, Black Orpheus mainly decided to focus on translations at the beginning. From the translations themselves, you can also see which were the networks, and then there is this transposition from one language to the other. For example, there is very good transposition of an important anti-colonial novel, A Vida Verdadeira de Domingos Xavier, that was written by Luandino Vieira, and Sara Maldoror in her movie Sambizanga decided to film, to make her own interpretation, her own representation and her own view of this novel. I've tried to highlight the use of local national languages in those productions and the fact that those liberation efforts, so those ways of imagining futures, liberated futures from the different African territories, actually went beyond the idea of the national. So cultural journals, the bulletins like Mensagem, the literary pages of periodical newspapers, I would say with a focus on those that were printed in the continent, they were committed to the construction of, as we said, monolithic conception of arts and cultures. And I would say it's interesting because as I've been focusing on the on the transits of mainly Brazilian Angolan and Mozambican writers, poets, intellectuals and artists in publications that were not using as a main language Portuguese, but they were using as a main language, for example, French or English. Speaking about the futures and this topic of African futures, I would say in those publications it went beyond the national, so it was granted by strong transnational Pan-Africanist or negritudinist networks. And this transposition between languages, it's also interesting. I've been working mainly with Angolan, Brazilian and Mozambican writers, artists and intellectual in translation. And I think it's interesting to me to see which was the role, I would say, of political repression, because those intellectuals
Speaker 1: were published in the context of the so-called francophone or English-speaking context, and they were facing different constraints in a way because they were living under strong political repression with political persecutions by the police of the regime, of the colonial regime. And we can see in those works that the idea of future was focused on liberation, but that this liberation went actually beyond the idea of of the national.
Speaker 2: So maybe for a final question, let's move away from post-independence politics to talk about a current concern about the future which I think interests both of us. That would be digitization and of course how digitization is currently transforming the study of printed publications from Africa. So actually it might be interesting to think about how your work concerning political struggles actually informs how you think about current concerns over digitization. Is that something you've given any thought?
Speaker 1: Yes, for sure. I would say that there is a strong digital recirculation of anti-colonial literature, films, poems, et cetera. One of the points we're seeing in the panel you've organized recently, for example, one of the examples I took was a transposition of Luandino Vieira's novel A Vida Verdadeira de Domingos Xavier into a movie that was made back in the seventies by Sara Maldoror. She turned the novel into a great transposition that is that was Sangue Zangalê. And these kind of productions are being featured, displayed, taught and reorganized in the digital space nowadays. As we were saying, the fact that online newspapers, blogs and networks are recirculating those anti-colonial and pan-Africanist productions can tell us a lot about our presence. For example, I would mention projects like Chimurenga Revolutionary Papers or The Funambulist, but these are just those are just examples. There for sure there are more and you could mention them. All those publications I mentioned are digital publications. They are referring to anti-colonial and pan-Africanist journals, newspapers, films, movies, poetry as useful tools to think about our present. I am sure we will go through more examples because this will be the topic of the postdoc working group we will co-convene with our colleagues Lamidoumbia and Bilianotundo. And there are other things happening in cultural productions, cultural production nowadays that have connections with the digital obviously. I would say when it comes to present days, I can speak more about the contexts of Portugal and Italy because those are the two contexts I know better personally. And because one is the country I've been living here for ten years and the other is the country in which I was born. So when we speak about literature, the arts and poetry and presence in the online digital space nowadays, in those spaces the contestation of past and present is happening on several political and social levels and is having a direct impact in artistic and literary production in general. And I would say most of the creators, writers, poets and artists with diasporic or migrant backgrounds do have a strong presence online in the digital space. And this happens in my view for several reasons. One first reason might be because it is an easy way of connecting with home in case home is not the country they are living here and to have a presence, a strong presence and visibility that would be difficult to have otherwise. So it's a way of counteracting exclusions and some difficulties of access to, I would say, the classic mainstream environments. Discourses on cultural and social misrepresentation as well as on the decolonization of the public space are present in, I would say, in these countries that I would define as southern European countries. Those discussions entangle with discussions on capitalistic oppressions, of economic injustice, et cetera. And those countries in a way refuse to have a public discussion of of the colonial past and on the consequences of and on coloniality in a way because they see themselves
Speaker 1: At least this is a discourse they lead as subaltern countries when it comes to the comparison with other European countries with the colonial past. So usually the digital space is useful to be able to spread those discussions, to be able to create a safe space. The digital space became in a way in those contexts first spot, first place in which it is possible to start discussions on social and economic justice, on cultural topics and to start discussions on the use of the public space that would be difficult otherwise. The digital space is becoming in a way a place in which literary and artistic encounters are possible, a place which is complex but at the same time in which discussions about cultural heritage, knowledge, knowledge production in general and discourses on the use of the public space can start and then can be led outside in a way.
Speaker 2: And at the same time we of course have to be concerned about the negative interactions that can happen in that space as well. And when it comes to printed publications, of course things like what happens to the materiality of these objects as we start to rely more and more on digitized material, et cetera. But as you already stated, this is going to be an ongoing conversation between the two of us and our postdoc working group here at the Africa Multiple Cluster. So thank you Noemi for your time and for sharing.
Speaker 1: Thank you Cassandra.
Speaker 2: And thank you all for listening and until next time.
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- Title
- Dr. Cassandra Mark-Thiesen and Dr. Noemi Alfieri on anti-colonial networks in African literature
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
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Cluster Conversations
- Date
- August 25, 2023
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- 22 minutes, 21 seconds
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- 12
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