CONFERENCE: "China and Africa at a Crossroads: Revisiting the Legacy of Bandung Humanisms"

The CSSD working group Bandung Humanisms hosted the conference "China and Africa at a Crossroads: Revisiting the Legacy of Bandung Humanisms."  The event opened with Project Director Stathis Gourgouris placing humanism at the center of the "Bandung spirit” associated with non-alignment and anti-colonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. du Bois.

The first panel called attention to mid-20th century China-Africa interactions that fell from view, at least in US academic discourse, under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. Mahmood Mamdani moderated this panel, with Howard French served as discussant for Jamie Monson (“Decolonizing Translation: Gender, Intermediaries and Interpretation in China-Africa Engagement”) and Duncan Yoon ("“Africa, China and Cold War Literature”).

See photos here.

Jamie Monson emphasized the importance of gender in the interlingual encounters of the China-Africa entanglement. Her presentation illuminated the normally obscure role of Chinese and African women internationalists, whose knowledge production has not only been undervalued but was also discarded as a consequence of the global neoliberal turn. Glimpses of her archive—including as-yet unpublished photographs and interviews with African and Chinese women who were diplomats, translators, and teachers—were audibly appreciated among the audience.

Duncan Yoon performed a close reading of Ngūgī wa Thiong’s Petals of Blood as a "novel of Cold War entanglement.” In Yoon's analysis, the version of Maoism that Ngūgī deployed should be recognized foremost as a symbolic endorsement of the Kenyan writer's own project. For Yoon, Ngūgī rejects any notion of art for art’s sake by adopting an aesthetically "Chinese path” that adheres to his well-known call to "decolonize the mind.”

The second half of the workshop centered on how concepts of race and place shape the encounter between Africa and China. Lydia H. Liu acted as moderator and Stephanie Rupp as discussant for a panel with Rebecca Karl (“China and Africa: A Longer View from the Turn of the Twentieth Century”), Yan Hairong ("Chinese, Africans, 'Laziness' and Discourse of Racialization”) and Barry Sautman (“Differences at the Margin: Understanding the Chinese Presence in Africa”). The latter two papers were co-authored by both Yan Hairong and Barry Sautman.

Through texts spanning the 19th-20th centuries, Rebecca Karl explored what is effectively the reverse of Ngūgī’s gaze towards Maoism: the process whereby "Africa” came into focus in Chinese thought. Karl’s analysis traced China’s evolving concepts of the Dark Continent over the long durée of globalizing capital to show a picture of “Africa” inflected, though not determined, by the geographic and racial signifiers set into motion by global European empires.

Like Karl, Yan Hairong raised the question of the influence exerted by European colonialism, particularly the biological-essentialist notion of race. To do this, her talk offered a discourse analysis of the prevalent stereotype of locals as “lazy” among Chinese émigrés in sub-Saharan Africa. Yan Hairong argued that Chinese concepts of "laziness” differ across linguistic and historic situations with the result that, in some instances, they should not be understood as identical to stereotypes derived from European, colonial racial discourse.

The final presentation of the day by Barry Sautman widened the gaze to the bi-continental theme in itself, casting a skeptical gaze on Western media representations of China in Africa. Sautman argued that these international portrayals exaggerate China’s role compared to Africa’s other "traditional investors” and cast China’s African ventures in an unfavorable light.

Among its motives, the call for scholarly reorientation towards south-south encounters invokes the asymmetries shared by direct investment in Africa and 20th-21st century international co-operation, and the workshop raised many compelling questions well beyond the scope of a single workshop. The second panel was particularly animated by underlying epistemological questions about the unevenness of China-Africa encounters, and unsurprisingly, the presentations provoked a heated discussion. At minimum, this welcome contention over either contemporary internationalism or the intellectual, interlingual questions prompted by mid-20th century Afro-Asianism, further corrects what Yoon named as the US-Soviet bias in Cold War cultural studies.

It’s promising that between them, the two panels underlined the importance of revisiting Bandung by highlighting the analytical and ethical problems in the encounters of sub-Saharan Africa with China. Firstly, by addressing the compelling need to rethink comparative literature in terms of trans-regional, intercontinental intellectual histories beyond Europe and North America, Yoon realigned a classic exemple of postcolonial writing, and Karl plotted Chinese thought intersecting in a circular manner not unlike maritime flows of commodities with European colonialism. Likewise, Monson’s focus on the concerted effort during the last century to translate directly between Chinese and Kiswahili lent a salutary attention to discourses beyond our Anglophone medium for scholarship, an effort that was complimented by the research Karl and Yan Hairong presented.

See photos from the conference here.

Jacqueline L. Chin Discusses "Precision Medicine, Privacy, and Family Relations" on February 9

On February 9, the CSSD working group Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, and Culture will host a discussion by Jacqueline L. Chin, Associate Professor, Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, on the topic of "Precision Medicine, Privacy, and Family Relations."

Chin posits that a better understanding of genetic information not only enables the linking of genetic identity to conceptions of disease, treatment and prevention, but offers the possibility of using information mining techniques (such as comparison with bodies of data about environment and lifestyle, and stratification of information) for refining disease classifications, refining risk assessment by determining individual risk, and targeting treatment and preventive behavior. Much of the attraction of precision medicine, in Chin's view, is driven by glimpses into the complex base of human life, the desire to understand current health statuses and future health implications, and the concentration of power in big data. This evolving metaphor is bound up with other important ones, including powerful stories of people wishing to have or not have knowledge about future health, depending on how such choices and their ramifications are framed in their context. Exploring the ethical debate on ‘genetic privacy’, this lecture offered some examples of how social debates about the goals of genomics are helping to structure individual and family decisions.  Chin asks how precision medicine initiatives in different parts of the world can foster citizen participation in defining the goals of genomic medicine.

David Scott Wins Distinguished Editor Prize from the Council of Learned Journals

David Scott, Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Research in African American Studies, Columbia University, and former co-director of CSSD's Digital Black Atlantic Project, received the Distinguished Editor prize from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for his work on Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.

“Small Axe edited and published under Scott’s vision has become one of most relevant intellectual and creative publications for our current political, social and cultural climate. Small Axe continues to reflect the ‘problem space’ of the contemporary global moment," said Roshini Kempadoo, lecturer at University of Westminster.

Read more about David Scott's prize here.

Anupama Rao Publishes New York Times Opinion Piece on Indian Supreme Court Ruling

Anupama Rao, Associate Professor of History, Barnard College, and director of the recently completed CSSD project on Gender and the Global Slum, published an opinion piece in the New York Times on an Indian Supreme Court ruling that bans political appeals to identity.

"In India today, we are seeing the overturning of an order predicated on the protection of social minorities in favor of majority rights," wrote Rao. "Given current politics, will Hindu majoritarian claims be allowed, while minorities are banned from making claims to discriminated identity, or social suffering?" she wrote.

Read the full piece here.

Refugees and Gender Violence: Vulnerability and Resistance

On Thursday, February 9, CSSD presents a panel discussion on “Refugees and Gender Violence: Vulnerability and Resistance” from 4:10 to 6 p.m. in 523 Butler Library. This is the third panel discussion in a two-year series called Reframing Gendered Violence.Reframing Gendered Violence is part of the Women Creating Change initiative supported by the Dean of the Humanities and the Columbia Global Centers. The project is also linked to the project on Religion and the Global Reframing of Gender Violence, which is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Wendy Vogt, Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, will present on  “Rape Trees, State Security and the Politics of Sexual Violence along Migrant Routes in Mexico” and Chloe Howe Haralambous, Graduate Student, English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University will discuss her work with Syrian refugees on Lesbos and on “Suppliants and Deviants: Gendering the Refugee/Migrant Debate on the EU Border.” Isin Onol, Curator in Vienna and Istanbul, talks about an exhibition she curated with refugee artists called “When Home Won’t Let You Stay: A Collective Deliberation on Taking Refuge” and Diana Taylor, Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU, will speak on her work with migrants in Mexico and Central America in, “Migrants and a New Mothers’ Movement.”

Reframing Gendered Violence is an international collaboration between scholars, artists and activists that aims to recast the way violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) are currently discussed in a wide range of fields, both academic and policy-oriented, including human rights, public health, journalism, law, feminist studies, literature, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, and history.

The fourth and final event in the series, “Refugees and Gender Violence: Media and the Arts,” takes place Thursday, March 30th from 4:10 to 6 p.m. in 523 Butler Library.

See the Facebook event page for this event here.