Contemporary African Cultural Productions

13. Afterword: A Meditation of the Convener

13 Afterword A Meditation of the Convener V. Y. Mudimbe One Not a preface, this is a testimony in accompanying voices in African studies. They are of the participants in the Durban, South Africa, Social Science Campus of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) of 17-21 December 2007. An afterword, it expresses an attitude. For a Convener arriving directly from meetings in Bogota (Colombia) which were devoted to intercultural perspectives for agendas of pedagogical institutions, the attitude meant a journey in obedience. This qualified itself from precautions in listening to participants’ explorations. It implied working at merging two ways of acquiescence, a ‘thinking with an intellectual tradition’, in terms of methods; and, on the other hand, a ‘thinking it within an intercultural perspective’, in terms of ethics. The first motion signified an attention to disciplinary procedures; and, in a climate dominated by the so-called ‘Afro-pessimism’, the second meant a teleological awareness for necessary distinctions in evaluating pre-moral or moral wrongs vis-à-vis the programme of the Campus on cultural productions. This collection brings together the proceedings of the seminar. The membership of the seminar included twelve CODESRIA laureates from different countries. Conceived and written in three languages (English, French and Portuguese), the contributions were empirically oriented, and dealt with issues in the field of contemporary African cultural productions. Expected to relate to insights and judgments on African issues of identity, the economy of thematics coheres interventions on cultural performances (mainly videos and music), anthropology of art, literature, religion and development. Contemporary African Cultural Productions 302 After the Campus, participants reworked their contributions in line with three goals: (a) to uniformize their system of reference according to principles inspired by The Modern Researcher (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2004) of Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff; (b) to make an informed exploitation of the seminar exchanges; (c) to consider a good usage of the Africa centred bibliography prepared by CODESRIA. These recommendations were points for a common style. They premised questions on assumptions that concerned the framing of research, the relation to an intellectual configuration, and the bibliography of the seminar. On cultural dispositions about research framing, no formal discussion took place on the validity of the BarzunGraff . Defining modes of inquiring and exposing results, its precepts were however to accompany some fundamental questions, including what telling metaphors such as the ‘searcher’s mind and virtues’ or ‘handling ideas’ convey. Dealing with topics at the crossing of traditional attributions and contemporary injunctions, all the projects had to take also into account a series of conflictual demands apropos intellectual filiation, interdisciplinary scenarios, and politics of cultural identities. Thus, the centrality of the notion of conflict, and the exceptional measure for addressing it in a dispassionate language. This discerning exercise on questions of method could not but be an exercise on the inherence of conflict in socio-cultural researches. In principle, the consented discipline in approaches was a matter of governance. In practice, to conceptualize arguments meant to actualize specific rules in a particular framework, in relation to the necessity of a more general structural governance. On the general idea of governance, as Allen Hammond of the Washington DC World Resources Institute, had put it ten years before in Which World? Scenarios for the 21st Century (Island Press, 1998), the fact of the matter was that ‘[t]ranscending all other issues, including population growth, environmental degradation, poverty, and economic stagnation, is governance – in a broad sense, including not just the national government but the judiciary, state and local governments, and other institutions that form African society’s collective decision-making and managerial process’ (op.cit.: 191). In our analyses and interpretations of conflicts and modernity, the seminar was dealing with issues related to governance. On the other hand, their renderings were not detachable from questions of method on how to speak about cultural events, or discourse; and, how to handle political or religious dissent. Unifying the disciplinary angles, political economy theories helped reduce the Mudimbe: Afterword – A Meditation of the Convener 303 complexity of debates to manageable grids by focusing on imports of ethnicity and gender. On this, one would agree with the essential of chapters on social formations in Postmodernism, Economics, and Knowledge (Routledge, 2001), edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Armariglio, and David Ruccio, and particularly with its impeccable critique of presuppositions in all the big humanisms. In fact, JeanFrancois Lyotard’s...