Cultural studies and the African Global South

ABSTRACT

Cultural studies exhibits multiple derivations from different historical conjunctures and places. This essay examines three instances of cultural studies emanating from within Africa, in relation to the field in the North Atlantic. What a “Southern” lens offers the North are different ways of making sense and a transnational framework that enables peer-to-peer conversations. This transe/trance quality is explained via a discussion of the scientifically unexplainable, superstition, and the noumenal. The immateriality of money and its associated human performances as reified by New York stock exchanges is the example through which transnational theoretical hybridity is examined.

KEYWORDS:

• Southern
• noumenal
• Africa
• surreality
• cultural studies
• superstition
• transnational

Notes

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4 Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, IAMCR bid document, South–North Conversations IAMCR Conference, July 2012. SACOMM-UKZN, 7 June 2011, p. 1, https://iamcr.org/iamcr-2012-programme-online.

5 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1869).

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7 See Aelred Stubbs, ed., Steve Biko 1946–1977: I Write What I Like (London: Bowerdean Press, 1978).

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10 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Language (London: James Currey, 1986).

11 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Continuum, 2005). See also Emma Durden and Keyan G. Tomaselli, “Theory Meets Theatre Practice: Making a Difference to Public Health Programmes in Southern Africa—Professor Lynn Dalrymple: South African Scholar, Activist, Educator,” Curriculum Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2012): 80–102.

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20 Van der Smit, “Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Kenyan Theatre in Focus,” cccxi–cccxi.

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29 Stoller, The Cinematic Griot, 205.

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31 Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989): 54.

32 Stoller, “Eye, Mind and Word in Anthropology,” 110.

33 Charles Sanders Peirce, Adirondack Lectures, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Vol. 1, in eds. Hartshorne Charles and Weiss Paul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), paragraph 284.

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37 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 292.

38 See, e.g., Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1990): 163–4.

39 Lana Swartz, “What was Bitcoin? The Techno-Economic Imaginaries of a New Money Technology,” Cultural Studies 32, no. 4 (2018): 623–50.

40 Bill Maurer, Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reasoning (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005): 85.

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