As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is undergoing a major historical shift: Africa, and the Global South more generally, is increasingly becoming a principal theatre in which the future of the planet plays itself out. But not only this: Africa is at the same time emerging as one of the great laboratories for novel forms of social, economic, political, intellectual, cultural, and artistic life. Often arising in unexpected places, these new forms of life materialize in practices that draw deeply from collective memory while simultaneously assuming distinctly contemporary, even futuristic, guises.

In November 2017, the second session of the Ateliers de la pensée Workshops of Thought was held in Dakar, Senegal. Fifty African and diasporic intellectuals and artists participated and their debates unfolded along numerous thematic lines, approached from the standpoints of many different disciplines. This volume is the result of that encounter. Among the many topics discussed were the concurrence and entanglement of multiple temporalities, the politics of life in the Anthropocene, the project of decolonization, and the preservation and transmission of different ways of knowing. At a time when the world is haunted by the specter of its own end, the contributors to this volume ask whether one can, by taking Africa as a point of departure, seize hold of other options for the future not only for Africa, but for the world.

The Politics of Time and its companion volume,To Write the Africa World, will be indispensable works for anyone interested in Africa its past, present, and future and in the new forms of critical thought emerging from Africa and the Global South.

Achille Mbembe is a Research Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Felwine Sarr is Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University

Preface

Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr



I



From Thinking Identity to Thinking African Becomings

Souleymane Bachir Diagne



Notes for a Maroon Feminism.
From the Body Double to the Body as such

Hourya Bentouhami



Weaving, A Craft for Thought.
Writing and Thinking in Africa, or the Knot of the Worlds Great Narrative

Jean-Luc Raharimanana



II



Africa and the New Western Figures of Personal Status Law

Abdoul Aziz Diouf



Rethinking Islam,
Or, the Oxymoron of Secular Theocracy

Rachid Id Yassine



The Impossible Meeting.
A Free Interpretation of J. M. Coetzees Disgrace

Hemley Boum




III



Circulations

Achille Mbembe



On the Return.
The Political Practices of the African Diaspora

Nadia Yala Kisukidi



Reopening Futures

Felwine Sarr



IV



Un/learning.
Rethinking Teaching in Africa

Françoise Vergès



The Bewitchment of History:
Mohammed Dibs Who Remembers the Sea


Soraya Tlatli


Currency, Sovereignty, Development.
Revisiting the Question of the CFA Franc

Ndongo Samba Sylla



V



Memories of the World, Memory-World

Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux


Cum patior Africa: The Political Production of Regimes of the Nigh

Nadine Machikou



The Sahara: A Space of Connection within an Emergent Africa,
From the Anthropocene to the Spring of Geo-Cultural Life

Benaouda Lebdai



Migrations, Narrations, the Refugee Condition

Dominic Thomas



VI


Humanity and Animality: (Re)thinking Anthropocentrism

Bado Ndoye



The Tree Frogs Distress

Lionel Manga



To Speak and Betray Nothing?

Rodney Saint-Éloi



The Paths of the Voice

Ibrahima Wane



Notes

Index