Expulsions: Knowledge, temporality, and materiality in Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACTExpulsions remake knowledge and experience of time, space and the body. However, they have largely been studied and theorized through histories of Europe or within contemporary global racial capitalism, sheared off its longer global histories. This special issue anchors the study of expulsions in historical experiences and conceptualizations from a variety of African contexts over time. Expulsions are tightly entwined with the formation of knowledge and power-including area studies and academic disciplines, national citizenship and the making of nation-states. This introduction charts the ways expulsions as time-bending and chronology-blurring processes are integral to the naturalization of communities, groups and the body as subjects of scholarly and political work. At the same time, it argues that expulsions are relational, violent processes that defy temporal bounding, move across spatial scales and dislodge epistemological logic. Material landscapes are key sites through which expulsive processes are mediated, embedded and remembered, even as they are impinged upon by the violence of expulsions. This special issue argues that the study of expulsions opens conceptual questions about how knowledge, time and material forms are constituted.KEYWORDS: Expulsionviolencearea studiescolonialismAfrica AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in South Africa for supporting this project in its early phases. We would like to thank all of the participants at the conference in Johannesburg and at the African Studies Association annual meeting in Atlanta. We would also like to appreciate Pamela Ballinger, Christian Williams, James Brennan for their critical feedback on an earlier version of this introduction.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Recent work has taken a similar approach to exile (Carpenter and Lawrance Citation2018; Ricci Citation2016; Williams Citation2015).2 Benjamin Kedar made this point most forcefully, contending that state-sponsored expulsion is ‘an unclaimed offspring … of Western European civilization’ (Citation1996, 166, 179).3 We thank Pamela Ballinger for this point.4 Archaeologist Astrid Lindenlauf (Citation2004) describes the role of the sea as an ‘away-place’ in ancient Greece, and links this to contemporary conceptions of ‘away-places’ for discarding waste.5 When expulsion is entangled with expatriation, however, it may expose the impermanence or misrecognition of an ostensible homeland.6 On 'interscalar vehicles’, see Hecht (Citation2018).7 The CISA conference organized by Taylor, ‘Expulsions: Histories, Geographies, Memories’, was supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. The ASA panels organized by Taylor and Rijke-Epstein were titled ‘Expulsions and the Materiality of Place-Making’. We thank all of the participants in these occasions, including the late Pier Larson.