Paper/Proposal Title
Keynote 1 — The Unfinished Black/African Struggles for Liberation
Location
Marshall Room
Start Date
11-2-2023 9:00 AM
End Date
11-2-2023 10:00 AM
Abstract
The ongoing Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, Indigenous people, and Black women/feminist movements among many other subaltern formations are clear signifiers of the unfinished struggles for liberation, reverberating within Global Africa. The unfinished struggles include the abolitionist, anti/decolonial, Black womanist/feminist, Indigenous people, civil rights movements and initiatives aimed at delivering development for dispossessed and destituted peoples. At the centre of the unfinished struggles has been overlapping historical (a people denied of history, dismemberment & Black condition), existential (coloniality of being & antiblackness), material (dispossession & destitution), epistemic (cognitive empire & coloniality of knowledge), and identity (self-definition & selfdetermination) concerns and questions. These are constituent elements of initiatives aimed at reworlding the world from the vantage point of Global Africa. This keynote address revisits the fundamental unresolved concerns and issues of the Black/African struggles for liberation and reflects on the trajectories of liberation struggles as it simultaneously critiques notions of human rights, discourses of development, and limits of decolonization of the 20th century as they continue to fail to deliver Black lives which matter.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.
Keynote 1 — The Unfinished Black/African Struggles for Liberation
Marshall Room
The ongoing Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, Indigenous people, and Black women/feminist movements among many other subaltern formations are clear signifiers of the unfinished struggles for liberation, reverberating within Global Africa. The unfinished struggles include the abolitionist, anti/decolonial, Black womanist/feminist, Indigenous people, civil rights movements and initiatives aimed at delivering development for dispossessed and destituted peoples. At the centre of the unfinished struggles has been overlapping historical (a people denied of history, dismemberment & Black condition), existential (coloniality of being & antiblackness), material (dispossession & destitution), epistemic (cognitive empire & coloniality of knowledge), and identity (self-definition & selfdetermination) concerns and questions. These are constituent elements of initiatives aimed at reworlding the world from the vantage point of Global Africa. This keynote address revisits the fundamental unresolved concerns and issues of the Black/African struggles for liberation and reflects on the trajectories of liberation struggles as it simultaneously critiques notions of human rights, discourses of development, and limits of decolonization of the 20th century as they continue to fail to deliver Black lives which matter.
