"Knowing With" New Rhodes Board Navigates Collaboration, Intimacy, and Solidarity

Rhodes University (or UCKAR),¹ based in Makhanda, South Africa, joined the African Arts editorial consortium in 2016 and its first journal issue—vol. 50, no. 2—was published in 2017. Initially the board was run by Ruth Simbao, with the aim of developing collaborations with other scholars, particularly those based on the African continent and within the global south (Simbao 2017: 1).² For the second Rhodes issue (Summer 2018), Simbao worked with Guest Board Member Amanda Tumusiime from Makerere University, and for the third Rhodes issue (Summer 2019) she collaborated with Stephen Folárànmí from Obáfémi Awólówò University, Ilé-Ifè, Nigeria, who at the time was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes.

In 2019, Rhodes launched a new editorial board made up of five scholars who are all associated with the university: Rachel Baasch, Emi Koide, Stephen Folárànmí, Angelo Kakande, and Ruth Simbao. Three of the new Rhodes University board members are currently based elsewhere in Africa and the global south: Folárànmí is at Obáfémi Awólówò University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, Kakande is at Makerere University in Uganda, and Koide is at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB) in Cachoeira city in Bahia, Brazil.³

The transnational approach of this board grows partly out of necessity, as our university structures differ to those in the United States, where the other three editorial boards are based. However, it also offers us

1.

Jelili Atiku, "Enítere Èjitere" performed at the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies (IADS) at the University of Lagos in Nigeria in November 2019.

Photo: Ruth Simbao

the opportunity to serve African Arts in a particular way, as we grapple with issues of collaboration, intimacy, and solidarity in our own contexts and in our respective processes of creating knowledge.

Collectively, our regions of research in Africa include Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Senegal, and some of our work situates Africa within the broader global south, in particular in relation to Brazil, China, Palestine, Cuba, and Mexico. While our research continues to engage with the global north, it employs "strategic southernness" (Simbao in Simbao et al. 2017: 29) as a way of writing new art histories that draw from spaces that share historical and contemporary narratives of colonialism, forced migration, and hybridization and that register resistance to these narratives. Recognizing that "resistance … is fragmented" (de Sousa Santos 2019: 117), we strive for collaboration, intimacy and solidarity as a new editorial board as well as in our work with the present and future communities of scholars that create knowledge for African Arts.

COLLABORATION AS "KNOWING WITH"

In October 2019, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, sociologist and author of Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (2014), visited Rhodes University as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative seminar program.⁴ In his presentation on the need for knowledges of justice, he stressed the importance of "knowing with" rather than "knowing about." Breaking down the distance between those who conduct research and those who are researched, the concept of "knowing with" creates a form of collaboration that stresses mutuality, understands intersectionality, and demands humility.

In the book Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (2020), which de Sousa Santos edited with Mozambican scholar Maria Paula Meneses, de Sousa Santos wrote a manifesto titled, "Toward an Aesthetics of the Epistemologies of the South." In this manifesto he argues that, "The tragedy of our time is that domination operates as a coordinated totality, while resistance against it is fragmented" (de Sousa Santos 2020: 117). The three core forms of domination that we live with, he explains, are capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, and they are "so intimately interconnected that none of them operates in isolation" (de Sousa Santos 2020). As he elaborates, the problem is that,

[T]he social forces that have been resisting against modern...