Bhakti Shringarpure’s Cold War Assemblages: decolonisation to digital

Abstract

The invitation to participate in a roundtable discussion of Bhakti Shringarpure’s Cold War Assemblages: Decolonisation to Digital (2020) came in the lead up to the 5 East African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference in Lalibela, Ethiopia, 2019. The biannual conferences, as well as the affiliate regional journal, are significant interventions in addressing the power/knowledge problems in the field. Although African Literary and Cultural Studies are not at the centre of Cold War Assemblages, the monograph is an important and timely intervention for a number of reasons. It offers a compelling scrutiny of the Cold War and its afterlives in the Third World as well as postcolonial theory’s apprehensions of the struggles for decolonisation. It does so with an uncommon mindfulness and nuanced appreciation of the longstanding concerns regarding the politics of scholarship and the academy. My participation at the conference was to be on two panels convened in honour of the centenaries of Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi, and Es’kia Mphahlele. Abrahams, Jabavu, and Mphahlele, like many other South African artists who were then in exile, visited, stayed, and worked in Kenya and Uganda, so East Africa was formative in their thinking and writing. In addition, all four centenarians were actively involved in projects aimed at promoting creative/cultural work and linkages and, to varying degrees, Pan-Africanist and Third World formations. As such, foundational writers and scholars in modern African Literature were enmeshed in the discrete but the interlinked spheres of culture, history, and politics and cognisant of the limits and possibilities of national, continental, Third World, and international networks and solidarities in the struggles against racial capitalism and imperialism. Days before the start of the conference, the vagaries of religion, politics, and ideology threatened to cancel the Lalibela conference. The exact reasons are too complicated to distil in the limited space available, but they threw into sharp relief important factors. They gestured to the ever-present socio-economic, cultural, ideological, and political contradictions that bubble underneath the convening of conferences and access to/ participation in local and international professional bodies. In response to the local political and organisational developments and missteps, a reconfigured version of the conference was relocated from Lalibela to Barhir Dar. As a result, delegates either cancelled their trips, proceeded to elsewhere in the region, and some who, like me, were already in Lalibela, either decided for and against journeying to Barhir Dar.