Publications

Le but de la présente contribution est de situer la thématique des spatialités et innovations en Afrique de l'Ouest francophone dans le domaine des recherches en sciences du langage. Elle propose une réflexion théorique sur l'espace comme moteur de la variation linguistique en insistant sur l'impact du contact linguistique. Transplanté sur le continent africain vers la fin du 19ème siècle par la voie de la colonisation, le français n'a cessé d'y évoluer. Aujourd'hui, on constate une appropriation de la langue du colonisateur par ses locuteurs africains pour qui le français n'est généralement pas la première langue apprise. Grâce à des processus d'autonomisation, toujours en cours, émerge un français régional marqué par le contact avec les langues coprésentes dans son milieu et caractérisé par de nombreuses innovations à tous les niveaux de la description linguistique. La discussion se concentre sur certaines innovations pragmatico-discursives qui ont leur origine dans le transfert de techniques d'expression, de patrons communicatifs ou de modes d'énonciation et d'organisation du discours des langues premières vers le français. Enfin, la diversité des langues de contact soulève la question de savoir si, à travers l'Afrique de l'Ouest, ces innovations langagières se ressemblent et ceci malgré les écologies différentes qu'y connait le français.

This special anniversary volume of Symbolism explores the nexus between symbolic signification and the future from an interdisciplinary perspective. How, contributors ask, has the future been variously rendered in symbolic terms? How do symbols and symbolic reference shape our ideas of the future? To what extent are symbols constitutive of futures, and to what extent do they restrain communication about what is possible and the imagination of fundamental change? Moreover, how have symbolic practices shaped not only artistic representations of the future, but also scientific attempts at forecasting and modelling it? What, then, is the relevance of symbolism for negotiations of the future in cultural and academic production? In essays ranging from literary and film studies to the philosophy of art and ecological modelling, the volume seeks to lay groundwork in theorizing and historicising ‘symbols of the future’ as much as ‘the future of symbolism’.

Welcome to Utopian Studies 36.2, with this uncharacteristically short message from the Editorial Team. This is a special issue on the topic of AFROTOPIAS, compiled by Guest Editors Antje Daniel (University of Vienna), Magnus Echtler (University of Bayreuth), and Melina Kalfenis (University of Bayreuth). In following the previous issue on QUEER UTOPIAS (issue 36.1) this AFROTOPIAS issue extends the editors’ welcoming of contemporary critical perspectives that assess and challenge utopian studies as a field. QUEER UTOPIAS featured work that reconceptualizes traditional models of utopian community and of both utopian political and aesthetic theories, in light of contemporary understandings of sex, gender, the body (both gendered and racialized) and the body politic. The articles also offered alternative conceptions of temporality and history.

Stacheldraht ist in der bildlichen Repräsentation von Grenzen bis heute nicht wegzudenken. Er macht Grenzziehungen sichtbar, normalisiert oder skandalisiert sie. Anhand von Kontroversen um die Nutzung von Stacheldraht im kolonialen Kontext und in der jüngeren Migrationsabwehr argumentiere ich in diesem Beitrag, dass die emotionale Wirkmacht von Stacheldraht von der engen Verbindung des Objekts mit Gefahr einhergeht. Die Gefährlichkeit des Stacheldrahts kann entweder Angst vor den Anderen oder Mitgefühl mit ihnen auslösen – je nachdem, wie Einzelne im Verhältnis dazu positioniert sind. Die affektive Reaktion verweist damit auf gesellschaftliche Grenzziehungen zwischen sozialen Gruppen. Stacheldrahtbewährte Zäune um Lager oder an Grenzen konstruieren die Menschen auf der anderen Seite als potenziell gefährliche Andere und wirken damit auch in Gesellschaften hinein. Doch gerade die körperlich nachfühlbare rohe Gewalt durch die metallenen Stacheln kann auch zu Gefühlen menschlicher Verbundenheit über den Zaun hinweg führen. Anhand historischer Kontroversen um die emotionale Bewertung dieser wandelbaren Technik der Kontrolle von Körpern im Raum wird dabei ihrer Bedeutung in der Internalisierung von Grenzziehungen nachgespürt.

Brasilien hat sich im Lauf des vergangenen Jahrhunderts zu einem Laboratorium für die Aushandlung von Kategorisierungen wie Afrikaner*in in der Diaspora, afrodeszendente Bevölkerung oder Afro-Brasilianer*in entwickelt. Der Begriff Afro wird zunehmend von brasilianischen und ausländischen Forscher*innen untersucht, deren Arbeiten im deutschen Sprachraum kaum diskutiert werden. Unser Aufsatz bietet eine kritische Reflexion über das Feld der Afrika- und Diasporastudien in Brasilien sowie deren historische, geopolitische, intellektuelle und sozialräumliche Einbettung. Dabei erörtern wir verschiedene Herausforderungen: zum einen, sich in einem Land mit unzähligen Hautfarbenbeschreibungen als afrodeszendent zu denken; zum anderen, dynamische Identitäten in einer Gesellschaft zu erschaffen, in der starre Rassismen und soziale Ungleichheiten grassieren; und schließlich, kontroverse Debatten zwischen der Universität, der Zivilgesellschaft, politischen Akteuren und antirassistischen Bewegungen in dem Land zu führen, in dem die größte Anzahl an Schwarzen Menschen außerhalb Afrikas lebt. Anhand von Erfahrungen aus dem Zentrum für Afro-Orientalische Studien (CEAO) der staatlichen Universität von Bahia (UFBA) und dem Postgraduiertenprogramm POSAFRO diskutieren wir, wie transdisziplinäres Wissen an der brasilianischen Küste des Schwarzen Atlantiks produziert und ausgehandelt wird. Dies erfordert neben der Betrachtung von Affirmative Actions und Süd-Süd-Kooperationen ein kritisches Nachdenken über die Rolle der Wissenschaft bei der Förderung von dekolonialen und antirassistischen Transformationsprozessen. Insgesamt zielt der Beitrag darauf ab, die Reflexivität im Feld der Afrikastudien zu vertiefen, um Licht auf (geo)politische Strömungen und Kontexte zu werfen, welche die wissenschaftliche Arbeit unweigerlich beeinflussen, aber oft im Hintergrund verborgen bleiben.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is seen as a region of mass migration and population displacement caused by poverty, violent conflict, and environmental stress. However, empirical evidence is inconclusive regarding how SSA’s international migration progressed and reacted during its march to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article attempts to study the patterns and determinants of SSA’s international migration and the cause and effects on sustainable development by developing a Sustainability Index and regression models. We find that international migration was primarily intra-SSA to low-income but high-population-density countries. Along with increased sustainability scores, international migration declined, but emigration rose. Climate extremes tend to affect migration and emigration but not universally. Dry extremes propelled migration, whereas wet extremes had an adverse effect. Hot extremes had an increasing effect but were insignificant. SSA’s international migration was driven by food insecurity, low life expectancy, political instability and violence, high economic growth, unemployment, and urbanisation rates. The probability of emigration was mainly driven by high fertility. SSA’s international migration promoted asylum seeking to Europe with the diversification of origin countries and a motive for economic wellbeing. 1% more migration flow or 1% higher probability of emigration led to a 0.2% increase in asylum seekers from SSA to Europe. Large-scale international migration and recurrent emigration constrained SSA’s sustainable development in political stability, food security, and health, requiring adequate governance and institutions for better migration management and planning towards the SDGs.

Recommender systems are commonly designed and evaluated with high precision and accuracy in mind. Optimising systems for these metrics alone can, however, lead to a decrease in overall collection coverage of recommended items, and carries potential to over-emphasize popular content. Notions such as serendipitous discovery and, closely related, novelty and diversity propose that rather than replicating a user's taste or that of a cluster of others they happen to be similar to, recommendation systems should present useful suggestions to users, including novel and diverse items and thus supporting serendipitous discovery. We implement a recommender system based on a knowledge graph of musical items with serendipity, novelty and diversity in mind. Using acoustic features as contextual information for vertices in the graph, we explicitly select content dissimilar from the user's previous experience. We compare our results to a set of baseline algorithms and find that we are able to recommend diverse and novel items.

Language attitude studies form an important indicator for the acceptability of a variety in general or in particular domains like education or the media. Caribbean Creole languages have traditionally been stigmatised due to the fact that they arose in contact situations during plantation slavery. Especially when they are in continued contact with their lexifier, the Creole is often not seen as a legitimate variety of its own. Language attitudes studies in Trinidad by Winford (1976) and Mühleisen (2001) show, however, how the acceptance of Creole versus English has changed within two generations of Trinidadian schoolteachers. Ever since the publication of these quantitative survey-based studies, public opinion on language has been overwhelmingly expressed in traditional and digital media. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of language attitudes expressed in a corpus of just over 100 letters to the editor and in online forums as part of a public language debate in Jamaica will therefore update and complement the research findings in earlier studies.

This article explores the implications of the East African Community’s rapid enlargement from three to eight members – including conflict-affected countries. By assessing institutional and political consequences of the EAC’s widening, considering experiences from the European Union and ASEAN, the study argues that enlargement does not inherently impede deepening but requires strategic institutional adaptations. The EAC stands at the crossroads between its federalist ambitions and an even more intergovernmentalist model. The outcome will hinge on the management of security issues and the political willingness to pool sovereignty. Indecision risks leading the community into a widening gap between treaty ambitions and political reality.

Countries in the global South are engaging and building strong relationships with powerful global organisations and big tech corporations, based on a profitable digital cooperation. This article explains this emerging trend using the concept of biometric coloniality of power, to show how techno-capitalist biometric identification interventions in the new biometric states in the global South replicate colonial relations of dominance. It draws on Nigeria’s experience to illustrate the utilisation of social hierarchies and biometric categories in the state-sponsored exclusion and disempowerment of the most vulnerable groups. The article argues that the rise of biometric states is associated with the political instrumentalisation of personal data, resulting in social conflict. Digital subjects confront and negotiate a deeply imbricated biometric power structure through which biometric policing, fraud, exclusion, surveillance, the breach of personal data privacy and other concrete materialisations of biometric authoritarianism are institutionalised. The article concludes that biometric states are complicit in multinational corporations’ monopolistic siege of Africa’s digital market, which allows for the unrestricted capture of digital data through ongoing digital commodification and dispossession.

The Congo has consistently been a subject of wide-ranging historical and creative productions aimed at capturing its dramatic history. This has often led to the submersion of Congolese voices under exogenous and exotic depictions of Congolese realities in ways that position the Congolese subject and space as the other, void of complexity and possibility. In Koli Jean Bofane (1954) belongs to a generation of Congolese authors who “write the Congo” from within, through an inventive sensibility, an insightful worldview, and an unsettling style aimed at representing the paradoxes of the nation’s trajectory. Bofane hails from the Congolese Equateur province, a fact which perhaps explains his affinity with Isookanga, the protagonist of Congo Inc. (2014). He spent his childhood and youth in the Congo before settling in Belgium in 1993. After a series of literary works that earned him modest recognition, he rose to literary fame with the publication of Mathématiques congolaises (2008), which won the Grand prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire in 2009 and has been translated into various international languages. His award-winning novel has already marked a distinctive voice among the flurry and cacophony of representations inspired by the specific history of the Congo, a voice which is given a new profundity in Congo Inc., the text under study. The present article discusses the complexity of the Congo as represented in Congo Inc., analyzing the Congolese territory as the interface of the violent dimensions of globalization. I discuss the process through which Congo Inc. converts the ambiguous coexistence of scarcity and excess in the Congo into not only a unique text, but also into the creation of a new narrative genre which I refer to as the coltan novel.