Performing African Studies at El Colegio de México: neoliberal colonialism and the globalectical South

ABSTRACT

By analysing a talk by Ngugi wa Thiong’o at Colmex in Mexico City as an academic performance, and his memoir of the early 1960s at Makerere University in Kampala, I explore different ways of engaging with Africa as subject/object of knowledge, in classic colonialism and neoliberal colonialism, in Latin America and in Africa. In my first case study, analysing the Colmex event as an academic performance means to approach it as a set of naturalised rituals, which turn out to be symptomatic of neoliberal colonialist epistemic outlooks. In my second case study, I analyse Ngugi’s memoir as a set of narrative strategies that critically engage with classic colonial education in Africa. In each case study, I concentrate on the relation between place and perspective, a relation central to Ngugi’s theoretical formulations in Globalectics. The analysis of performative, literary and theoretical instances of the relationship between place and perspective allows me to interrogate the implications of the Colmex African Studies programme as placed in the global South but without a global South perspective. Travelling between continents, epochs and genres, I aim to assess the role of ‘neoliberal colonialism’ for a global South study of Africa today.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• colonialism
• African Studies
• global South epistemologies
• Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This is not to say that Ngugi had not drawn earlier on a multiplicity of referents at a global scale – his engagement with Caribbean intellectuals in Homecoming ([1972] 1981b) and in his discourse at large or with the Irish experience in Something Torn and New (2009) are cases in point. However, referent multiplication as methodological basis in Globalectics does mark a shift in his approach beyond the more classically Africanist and even beyond the pan-Africanist ways of operating of works such as ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’ ([1968] 1995; also printed in Homecoming) or the essays collected in Decolonising the Mind ([1986] 1994).

2 On discursive scenarios that create the realities they map, with emphasis on the role of direct and indirect addressees, see Radhakrishnan’s discussion of Nehru’s inaugural speech on the brink of Indian independence (2023, 351–352).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa Campus, Mexico City.

Notes on contributors

Paulina Aroch-Fugellie

Paulina Aroch-Fugellie engages in the critique of ideology from a global South perspective, especially from Africa and Latin America. Her work is informed by contemporary critical theories from the global South, the dialectics of the Frankfurt School and the ‘travelling concepts’ methodology in which she was trained at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (The Netherlands). She combines the tools of cultural and discourse analysis, psychoanalytic theory, political economy, theatre and performance studies, postcolonial and decolonial critique. Her three main lines of inquiry are: (1) ‘Global South Critical Theories’, including her 2019 book Shylock and African Socialism: Julius Nyerere's Postcolonial Shakespeare; (2) ‘The Body as Site of Emancipation’, with work in progress in which she interrogates the production of the contemporary politicised body combining theatrical methods, critical theories and the Latin American tradition of critical pedagogy; and (3) ‘Commodification of Contemporary Thought’, including her 2015 book Unrealised Promises: The Subject of Postcolonial Discourse and the New International Division of Labour. She is a former Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (USA), now tenured at the Humanities Department, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa Campus in Mexico City, and funded as CONAHCYT National Researcher II (Mexico).