Using a variety of sources and secondary readings, this workshop explores who passed as other, how they were represented, and to what effects, in the context of the relationship between colonized and formerly-colonized Africans and Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This necessitates examining the notions of ‘representation’ and ‘the other’ themselves: why are representations considered powerful, and how they sort ‘us’ from ‘them’?
While the relation between Africans and Europeans was and remains hierarchical and asymmetrical throughout this period, a great many different notions have been involved in making these hierarchical distinctions, including but not limited to ‘civilization’, ‘race’, ‘modernity’ and more recently ‘integration (of immigrants)’. Drawing on such grand terms, representation as other happens also through barely-noticed everyday objects and practices.
The workshop seeks to examine how these concepts, discourses and practices have interacted and continue to interact to mark ever-shifting boundaries. This entails breaking up the big distinction of colonizer vs. colonized, to examine how different, more situationally defined groups on both sides of the divide – for example, educated Africans vs. traditionalists, missionaries vs. settlers - interacted with this relationship.
While the relation between Africans and Europeans was and remains hierarchical and asymmetrical throughout this period, a great many different notions have been involved in making these hierarchical distinctions, including but not limited to ‘civilization’, ‘race’, ‘modernity’ and more recently ‘integration (of immigrants)’. Drawing on such grand terms, representation as other happens also through barely-noticed everyday objects and practices.
The workshop seeks to examine how these concepts, discourses and practices have interacted and continue to interact to mark ever-shifting boundaries. This entails breaking up the big distinction of colonizer vs. colonized, to examine how different, more situationally defined groups on both sides of the divide – for example, educated Africans vs. traditionalists, missionaries vs. settlers - interacted with this relationship.
Felicitas Becker is Professor of African History at Ghent University, Belgium. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge and has previously worked at SOAS, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and Cambridge University. Her specialization is in modern East African history. She has published monographs on the growth of Muslim congregations in rural Tanzania (OUP, 2008) and the long-term dynamics of developmental failure in rural Tanzania (CUP, 2019). She is particularly interested in religious history, the history of rural poverty and attempts to reduce it, oral and women’s history. She is currently running a five-year research project on the aftermath of slavery in 20th century mainland East Africa. Articles by her have appeared in African Affairs, the Journal of African History, Africa, and Journal of Religion in Africa among others.
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Chloé Conickx is a PhD Researcher in early modern intellectual history at Ghent University, Belgium, after obtaining a master’s degree in Historical literature and linguistics, followed by a master’s in History. She is member of the GEMS, Sarton, and IEMH research groups. Her BOF-funded project “Mesmerist spirituality in the Society of Universal Harmony (1783-1787)” (2019-2023) examines late eighteenth-century Parisian mesmerism as a socio-epistemic imaginary, and aims to contribute to an alternative genealogy of Enlightenment science and self-conduct. In 2019, she received the André Schaepdrijver award for the best master’s dissertation of 2018 (History department), in which she examined late-medieval Christian ritual praxis in the Hammer of Witches (1486). The thesis has recently been turned into an article ready for publication (Handelingen 2020). Her research interests include intellectual history, history/philosophy of science, religious history.
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WORKSHOP IMAGE
Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu, "Simba Bulaya" ("Lions of Europe"); Lubumbashi, Haut-Katanga, DRC, 1973. Oil on canvas.
Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu, "Simba Bulaya" ("Lions of Europe"); Lubumbashi, Haut-Katanga, DRC, 1973. Oil on canvas.