As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is
undergoing a major historical shift: Africa, and the Global South more
generally, is increasingly becoming a principal theatre in which the
future of the planet plays itself out. But not only this: Africa is at
the same time emerging as one of the great laboratories for novel forms
of social, economic, political, intellectual, cultural, and artistic
life. Often arising in unexpected places, these new forms of life
materialize in practices that draw deeply from collective memory while
simultaneously assuming distinctly contemporary, even futuristic,
guises.
In November 2017, the second session of the Ateliers de la pensée -
Workshops of Thought - was held in Dakar, Senegal. Fifty African and
diasporic intellectuals and artists participated and their debates
unfolded along numerous thematic lines, approached from the standpoints
of many different disciplines. This volume is the result of that
encounter. Among the many topics discussed were the concurrence and
entanglement of multiple temporalities, the politics of life in the
Anthropocene, the project of decolonization, and the preservation and
transmission of different ways of knowing. At a time when the world is
haunted by the specter of its own end, the contributors to this volume
ask whether one can, by taking Africa as a point of departure, seize
hold of other options for the future - not only for Africa, but for the
world.
The Politics of Time and its companion volume, To Write the Africa
World, will be indispensable works for anyone interested in Africa -
its past, present, and future - and in the new forms of critical thought
emerging from Africa and the Global South.
