Pluralicity and Relationality: New Directions in African Studies1

Introduction

In this essay, we briefly discuss some of the dominant paradigms in the field of African studies, as well as some of the challenges the field is facing at the current juncture. We do this from the institutional perspective of African studies in Europe, and more specifically in Germany. In response to recurring questions about the future of area studies in the context of academic currents revolving around the global, we explore the concepts of pluralicity and relationality as analytical perspectives and their suitability for overcoming the limitations of conventional area-studies approaches. By coining the term pluralicity, we intend to go beyond descriptive statements of Africa’s plurality and view Africa and Africans through the lens of the complex ways in which their lifeworlds are constituted, connected, and interrelated on both the micro- and the macrolevel.

Drawing on brief examples from our respective research in the fields of religious studies and Islamic studies, we indicate some of the ways these concepts can become useful tools to study and analyze contemporary African lifeworlds. Last but not least, we argue that the new directions in African studies need to contribute to correcting the imbalance between academic researchers in the Global North and the Global South.

Changing Paradigms of African Studies

Academic depictions and perceptions of Africa—whether by Africans or non-Africans—have always been guided by theoretical models and frameworks, specific agendas, and a wide range of ideologies. Accordingly, scholarly works on Africa usually reflect the zeitgeist of the period in which they were produced. Paradigm shifts in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as political agendas and the priorities of funding agencies, have all left their imprint on the ways academics have portrayed Africa and Africans. Although North American and Western European research directions have much in common, they feature important differences, some of which go back to different legacies from the past of colonialism, slavery, and the slave trade.

In the period between World War II and the end of the cold war, two distinct, though related, approaches were dominant in the growing field of African studies, both in North America and Western Europe: on the one hand, the division of the world into areas gave birth to area studies, eagerly supported by governments that sought to extend their political influence in cold-war geopolitics; on the other hand, modernization theory as developed in the social sciences provided many of the analytical tools employed in research conducted in the emerging areas. In the course of the 1980s, when it became more and more evident that some of the basic assumptions of modernization theory failed to fulfill their promise, postmodern perspectives offered new ways of looking at the world. The emphasis on ambiguities, rather than certainties, replaced earlier teleological views of Africa’s development. The critical attitude of postmodernity toward reason implied the dismissal of modernity’s hegemony over the world. In the postmodern pluralist universe, subalterns, who ceased to be the target of modernist strivings, were entitled to occupy their place in a fragmented world.

After the end of the cold war, the age of globalization and neoliberalism brought a brief revival of the modernization paradigm. Widely viewed as a neocolonial project among intellectuals of the Global South, these developments gave a boost to postcolonial studies, whose proponents emphasized the tensions, dependencies, and power relations that continue to subject the Global South to marginalization (e.g., Connell 2007; Mignolo 2011; de Sousa Santos 2014). Other strands within area studies and the social sciences came to view the areas as part of the global village, highlighting the profound transformation processes connected to the aggregation in space and the acceleration of time that involve the Global South no less than the entire globe. The initial, rather teleological globalization paradigm was soon followed by approaches that put the focus on glocalization, the entanglement of global and local factors and influences (Robertson 1995). As the multisited, multivalent, and interactive character of local–global dynamics appeared to dissolve the boundaries of the areas, scholars employed concepts such as creolization, translation, or appropriation...