+

Travelling Disciplines and the Global South Harry Garuba University of Cape Town

+ What Happens When Disciplines Travel?

Although the underpinnings of the divisions within the social sciences were clearly crystalizing in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was only in the period 1850-1914 that the intellectual diversification reflected in the disciplinary structures was formally recognized in the principal universities in the form that we know them today.

n  Wallerstein et al (1996). Open the Social Sciences, p. 12.

***Note Cleavage: Disciplines of Modernity and Disciplines of Difference

+ Disciplinary Dispersal

n  in the dispersal of the disciplines in the colonies, difference could appear at all four levels: in the formation of objects, in the modalities of enunciation, in concept formation, and in the thematic choices….The differences that occur in the course of conceptual translations are perhaps the most intricate of all.

Partha Chatterjee, “The Disciplines of Colonial Bengal” in Texts of Power, p.24: emphasis added.

+ Knowledge Encounters

The Discipline and a Different World –

n  Disciplined and “Undisciplined” Knowledges

n  Knowledge Convergences and Divergences

n  Knowledge Domination and Subjugation

+ The Discipline and Different Subjects and Objects

n  Translating Objects of Study

n  Translating Subjects of Knowledge

n  Translating Concepts

n  Conceptual Deficits/Disciplinary Deficits

n  Creation of New Field: Catching Up Studies

+ The African Studies, UCT Experience

in so far as the academic discourse of history – that is history’ as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university – is concerned, ‘Europe’ remains the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Chinese,’ ‘Indian,’ ‘Kenyan,’ and so on.

Dipesh Chaktabarty, Provincializing Europe (emphasis added)

How do we think the disciplines from below? From the point of view of the excluded?

+ Problematizing the Study of Africa

n  Interrogating the disciplines at various levels

a)  The object of study

b)  The formation of concepts

c)  The disciplinary canon

d)  The disciplinary apparatus – protocols of inquiry, methodologies, legitimate questions, modes of evidence and validation, theories, etc.

e)  The institutional practices and infrastructure – departments, universities, journals, associations, etc.

+ Interventions of the UCT African Studies Course

n  Disciplinary continuity and coherence as Illusion

n  Making the place of Africa in the making of disciplinary knowledge a question of theoretical (rather than empirical) interest

n  Rethinking the sovereign theoretical subject of each discipline

n  Centering the implications of such a change of optic

n  Asking new questions

n  Convening new transdisciplinary interlocutors, archives, etc. for research