18th-20th August 2016

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Hosted by  Migrating Violence Platform of the DST-NRF Flagship in Critical Throught in African Humanities, Centre for Humanities Research University of the Western Cape, South Africa

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When the Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani posed the question of the problem of postcolonial Africa as not only the question of how Europe underdeveloped Africa, but how ‘Europe ruled Africa’ it broke new ground in contemporary scholarship on violence in post-independence Africa. It turned our attention to the political question of citizenship and belonging as central to making sense of seemingly intractable conflicts. The centrality of historicizing citizenship, difference, secularism, majority and minority distinctions remains even more germane to making sense of the contemporary postcolonial world. We are reminded that promises of liberal freedom remain hegemonic but also intensely chimerical and inadequate both to think with and to construct political community out of. This colloquium honors this seminal book by inviting you to join a group of scholars from across the world to critically reflect on the limits and possibilities of the questions that Citizen and Subject raised.