Annual Themes

The events of the Plenary Colloquium (Thu 2 to 6 p.m.) of the Knowledge Lab are dedicated to a general theme during one academic year and are coordinated by a group consisting of PIs, postdocs and other participants, as well as the team of the Vice-Dean of Research.

The annual theme group establishes the programme for the plenary and for the annual cluster conference, which takes place on the respective annual theme in the summer semester. The group also prepares an edited volume on a topic derived from the annual theme, which has the character of a key publication for the cluster.

Annual Theme “Temporalities” (October 2024 to July 2025)

Contact persons: Anthony Okeregbe

For a wider-ranging understanding of temporalities, profound articulation of the concept of time is necessary. Time has been construed in controversial terms as both an objective feature of the universe and as a subjective experience of a human condition. In one sense, time is a concept by which the motions of things and events in existence are marked, and as such it indicates an ordinal movement of past and future events or states of affairs captured in the present through intellective memory. In another sense, beyond the linear conception of past, present and future that accentuates time’s assumed materialist teleology, time could also be understood as a continuum in the cycle of eternal recurrence. Temporality is how persons, societies and social movements feature in all of this despite the different conceptions of time.

As a special theme relevant to the re-cognition of Africa, temporality is a way of reviewing Africa as an unfolding agglomeration of social movements operating as both inner directed and outward-going vectors. In other words, temporality provides a kaleidoscope to see Africa in the state of becoming through the different ways in which time is experienced, perceived, related with and understood in African societies. Thus, it is a decolonial epistemic angle to processing Africa’s historical teleology. In all this, the idea of Western ordinal time as the ontological setting for the ‘creation/invention of Africa’ and also the yardstick for historizing Africa’s existentiality demands dispassionate engagement. Such engagement would be launched by such hard questions as: where does time begin for Africa and African self-experiencing if the periodization of African history is to be set prior to Western contact? What or whose idea of time does the researcher on Africa have in mind when they speak of the perception and experiencing of time? This will take the form of inter/transdisciplinary engagements with concepts such as polychronicity, polyrythmicity and cyclicality.

Temporal conditions are also implicated in the entanglement of timescapes and in the socially activated consciousness of some anticipated or desired temporal spaces through which the revisioning of history and envisioning of progressive belonging operate. Cases in point would be, for example, how discursive rhetorics of ethnic uttering (Byron, Lovejoy and Bryant, 2014) in antiquity resonate in contemporary society through media and political discourses; or the attempt within Africa’s intellectual geography to reconstitute time through techno-media agencies as in Wakanda in the movie Black Panther.

Beyond how the concept of time has influenced the history of Africa, investigations could be made about the varied nature of time-consciousness in African societies, how the perception of time impact on the socio-economic and political structures and landscapes, and how it affects African identity and modes of belonging, how it is socially organised as well as the role of temporality in African literature, art and religious life.

Based on interrogations emanating from Africans’ time-boundedness, issues in African temporality may gravitate from the hackneyed discussions on temporalities of waiting and waithood, to exploration of emerging subjects such as following: affective temporalities, whose various disciplinary intersects and varied modalities express the reality of the contemporary African urban worlds; temporalities of belonging, which investigate not only what it means to be related to an age-determined social category, but also eschatological relatedness; temporalities of infrastructure, whereby social conditions are processed through the timescale of relatedness with some infrastructure; temporalities of transitional and post-conflict societies by which contemporary African societies are being questioned about their experience, management and understanding of time; and subversion of temporalities by which temporal states or conditions are altered through the velocity of social movements.

Annual Theme: Spatialities (October 2022 to July 2023)

Contact persons: Eberhard Rothfuß, Matthias Gebauer

Further group members: Iris Clemens, Martin Doevenspeck, Susanne Mühleisen, David Stadelmann, Alexander Stroh-Steckelberg

The annual theme of the 2022-23 academic year, Spatialities, calls for an exploration of the multiple spatialities of entangled African lifeworlds. Connecting to debates in critical area studies, the heuristic angle of spatialities invites us to focus on the relational processes of construction and constitution through which ‘areas’ emerge, change and de-/re-territorialize. Such perspectives help cast a fresh view on African interconnections and the dense presence of Africa in the world as well as of the world in Africa. Other possible synergies with the annual theme may include inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to co-create new imaginaries and innovative productions of multiple social, material, and artistic spaces.

Former Annual Theme: Medialities (October 2021 to July 2022)

Contact person: Ivo Ritzer

Further group members: Ute Fendler, Ulf Vierke, Cassandra Mark-Thiessen

All forms of cultural production are decisively shaped by a respective medium: they only come into being through that very medium (mediality). In other words, cultural production is always medially constituted, i.e. coming into existence through processing, storage and transmission of certain data. Due to this mediation, cultural productions can and do permanently change throughout history, constantly adopting to the material and technical resources at disposal in a state of flux. In that relation, mediality means the general presupposition or condition under which cultural production and any art form is able to take shape at all: within mediality the specific circumstances of culture are negotiated. Thus, the concept of the medium not only refers to all domains of cultural exchange, which in itself is medially determined. Media encompass, but are in no way limited to means of mass communication, including everything from languages to numbers, cars to light bulbs, clothes to guns. Mediality therefore applies to all cultural production and is thus relevant to all disciplines. The challenge is to pay attention to a given medium's genuine structure as a particular disposit if but not fall into some kind of hardware-determinism leveling all differences. To put it another way, our task is to consider culture beyond textuality, and still not reduce it to the sheer materiality of data at the same time. The concept of the medium can be used here to stress the processual and performative character of all culture, whose multiplicity of practices and phenomena (cultural techniques) perpetually interacts with the mediality of the medium in question.

Former Annual Themes: Modalities, Relationality

Modalities (October 2020 to July 2021)
Contact person: Clarissa Vierke

In the center of the knowledge lab´s concern during the academic year 2020/21 is the concept – or perspective – of modalities. How, and in which modalities is multiplicity thought, imagined, lived and produced? Which modes of relationality do we find empirically and how can we grasp them?   What makes modalities so productive in producing and shaping multiplicity?
Next to temporalities, spatialities and medialities, modalities serve as a heuristic angle to get a grip on the Cluster’s main concerns: relationality and reflexivity, from a multiple perspective. Modalities will help us to work across disciplines by offering perspectives to zoom into the multiple dimensions of relations and reflexivity.
During the academic year 2020-21, the angle of modalities makes us consider various ways and processes of relating, like, for instance, forms of dependence, conflict, exchange, cooperation, resistance and denial, as well as their outcomes and properties. In line with the dynamic view on multiplicity, we are interested in the infinite processes of change and becoming, i.e. how modes of relation and those in relation change over time and vary across different contexts.
Modalities helps to systematize our research findings, but also to discover and compare a variety of theoretical concepts like, for instance, meshwork, networks, entanglements or rhizomes.

Relationality (Summer semester 2020)
Contact person: Erdmute Alber

Africa is neither unitary, nor isolated, but rather is, and always has been, constituted through its ever-changing relations, globally entangled and in flux. This understanding calls for a new conceptual framework that allows us to grasp the dynamic interrelationship of diversity and entanglement and to study “Africa multiple” in coherent and systematic research formats. Rethinking older notions of diversity or plurality and connectivity, the concept of multiplicity shifts the focus from diverse, discrete entities that have connections towards the continuous relational processes involved in their production. Transcending the limitations of both conventional area studies and global studies, this conceptual approach allows us to capture the simultaneity of heterogeneous and mutually influential African ways of life and world-making emerging in multi-directional and multi-layered processes of relating. Accordingly, the concept of relationality will serve as our primary analytical tool for the study and conceptualisation of multiplicity.