Digital Africa^*

* This is the transcript of a comment to Teju Cole's keynote speech given at the opening ceremony of the African Literature Conference on “African Futures and Beyond: Visions in Transition,” which took place on 5th of June 2015.

Abstract

These few remarks were triggered by Teju Cole's magnificent keynote lecture “Do African Digital Natives Wear Glass Skirts?” They do not constitute an answer, far from it, but rather what his words conjured for me then and there, in 2015, in Bayreuth. I was reading on the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene and the Anthrobscene and reflecting on the afterlives of our digital selves. What is the Global South saying about the digital economy that is racialized, capitalist, environmentally destructive and gendered? What are the dreams, the utopias that are being imagined today in digital Africa?

Acknowledgments

My thank to Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard for inviting me to the 2015 ALA Conference where I had the pleasure to listen to Teju Cole's keynote address and to the editors of ALA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Françoise Vergès

Françoise Vergès holds the Chair “Global South(s),” Collège d’études mondiales, Paris. Active in movements of political antiracism and the decolonization of museums and arts, she has written extensively on memories of colonial slavery and colonialism, psychoanalysis, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean world, decolonial feminism, museums and intangible cultures. She has developed the notion of a “museum without objects” to visualize the lives of the “anonymous.” Vergès has collaborated with filmmakers and artists (Isaac Julien, Yinka Shonibare, Kader Attia, etc.), and was project advisor for “Documenta11.” For the 2012 Paris Triennial, she organized the program “The Slave at the Louvre.” She is the screenwriter and director of numerous films and an independent curator. Her last book, Le ventre des femmes: Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme (Albin Michel, March 2017), analyzes the reasons and causes of thousands of unconsented abortions and sterilizations in the 1970s in Reunion Island (France), the impunity of white male doctors, the links of these policies with international programmes of birth control targeting Third-World women and the blindness of French feminism, which led to its whitening.