Cheikh Anta Diop: The social sciences,humanities, physical and natural sciences and transdisciplinarity

ABSTRACT

This article presents a critical exposition of the contributions of Cheikh Anta Diop to a scientific understanding of ancient African history, race, and the study of culture. It sets out the history of Diop's successful struggle against flawed Eurocentric scholarship which sought to deny the contributions of ancient black Egyptians to world civilisation. Diop's intellectual odyssey across physics, linguistics, through anthropology, ethnology, genetics and history is recounted here to demonstrate the limitations of mono-, inter- and multidisciplinarity and clearly identifies him as a pioneer of transdisciplinarity in the field of knowledge production.     

Confronting disillusionment: on the rediscovery of socialist archives in recent South African cultural production

In recent years, South African literature, art, and cultural criticism have been registering the feelings of disappointment, nostalgia, and of a general impasse that signify a crisis of postapartheid imaginations. At the same time, we can observe a turn in cultural production toward reexamining South Africa’s socialist archives and reconnecting them to the present-day predicaments and emerging social movements. Reading these processes in Imraan Coovadia’s latest novel, artworks by Haroon Gunn-Salie, and an exhibition by the Stellenbosch Open Forum, this article argues that they confront the feelings of postapartheid disillusionment by critically re-invoking memories of the 1970–80s socialist practices in South Africa and the transnational frameworks they involved. It argues that these changing approaches to the socialist archives can be read as a decolonial critique, which links the described trends in South African culture to other “post-dependence” (and specifically, post-socialist) contexts worldwide.     

A personal issue: feminist standpoint theory,epistemologies of ignorance,and perceptions of HIV transmission among northern Tanzanian wildlife conservation professionals

Drawing on ten months of qualitative research from 2009/10, we present a case study of situated HIV transmission knowledge claims among wildlife conservation actors in northern Tanzania. Utilizing feminist standpoint theory and epistemologies of ignorance, this article explores why a single professional group consistently articulated divergent explanations of the causal forces shaping on-going HIV transmission dynamics. Elite respondents were more likely to consistently attribute viral transmission to individual-level behaviors, while non-elite conservation actors more often situated HIV transmission dynamics in relation to extra-personal structural forces. This case study reveals the experiential grounding of HIV-related knowledge claims; illuminates the partiality of authoritative knowledge and the intersections of practices of power, embodied understandings and socio-structural location with hierarchical matrices of status and privilege; disrupts the presumed accuracy of certain forms of knowledge by foregrounding the insights of those in positions of subordination; and exposes ineffectual HIV/AIDS interventions in northern Tanzania.     

Choctaw Tales: An Interview with LeAnne Howe

LeAnne Howe, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, plays, creative non-fiction and critical essays. Her work is primarily concerned with the experiences and the perspectives of American Indian people and communities. Howe’s latest book, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013), which she describes as ‘three parts memoir, one part tragedy, one part absurdist fiction, and one part “marvellous realism”’, received the inaugural Modern Language Association Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures and Languages in 2014. Along with being the recipient of a United States Artists Ford Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Howe also received the 2015 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award. Howe’s writing could easily be described as enlivening, eclectic and often hectic, and, more often than not, she brings together a plethora of stories concerning the historical and contemporary experiences of the Choctaw Nation. Various geographical, spiritual, familial and narratological spaces are revealed or plotted during the course of Howe’s narratives, and, as a consequence, images that relate to the act of mapping, the basis of storytelling, and the subject of community and place become recurring motifs throughout her writing. Concerned with the ways in which Choctaw lifeways have been mapped out across time, Howe appears to be especially interested in the representation of travel, exchange, contact and consumption not only in the pre-contact and post-contact United States, but also within the global village.