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Central to the lectures in this series is an invitation to take incompleteness seriously in how we imagine, relate to and seek to understand a world in perpetual motion. How would we frame our curiosities and conversations about processes, relationships and phenomena with an understanding of the universality of incompleteness and mobility? The lectures draw inspiration from popular ideas of personhood and agency in Africa. For instance, in the Cameroon Grassfields where I grew up, we tend to organise and conduct our affairs around the idea that everything in the world and in life is incomplete: nature is incomplete, the suprasensory is incomplete, humans are incomplete, and so is human action, human inventions and human achievements. Despite our obsession with completeness, we are constantly reminded that the sooner one recognises and provides for incompleteness and the conviviality it inspires as the normal way of being, the better we are for it. People are not singular and unified in their form and content, even as their appearance might suggest that they are. And so are things (nature, technologies and others). Fluidity, compositeness of being and the capacity to be present in multiple places and forms simultaneously in whole or in fragments are a core characteristic of reality and ontology of incompleteness. West and Central Africa is a region where interconnections and interdependencies are recognised and celebrated, and used as the dominant and desired template for organising relationships among humans, and between humans and the natural and suprasensory worlds. How do we draw inspiration in this regard to inform our growing ambivalence about rapid advances in digital technologies (artificial intelligence (AI) in particular), as well as with 21st century nimble-footed migrants and strangers knocking at the doors of opportunities we are entitled to as citizens?
Representing Diasporas as Incompleteness in Motion
In this lecture, I argue that the meaning we accord the notion of diaspora informs our understanding of diasporic writing, literature and articulations of belonging. I explore diaspora through a framework that brings into a sustained, multidimensional and multi-layered conversation the universality of incompleteness and motion. The lecture draws on African experiences of to offer a nuanced framework for analysing diasporic cultural production and articulation of belonging because it challenges the overly nation-state-centric conceptualisation of the homeland. It demonstrates that such a confining conceptualisation sits uncomfortably with the lived realities of those with multiple-layered identities and belongings mediated by interconnecting geographies and hierarchies within and beyond states, and at local and global levels. The discussion wrestles the conception of diaspora from its longstanding fixation on the whims and caprices of nation-states and broadens its incompleteness in motion by arguing that in the contemporary world, there are as many diasporas as there are homes and dislocations. Thus, events such as the ongoing wars and liberation struggles within and between nation-states have proven that one person’s hometown is simultaneously another person’s diaspora and one person’s home village is concomitantly another’s diaspora respectively. The discussion cautions writers and analysts of diasporic literature and cultural production more broadly to constantly remember that within, beyond and outside the nation-state, frontier homes and frontier diasporas sit side by side complementing each other and facilitating interconnections and interchanges in the manner of a spaghetti junction.
Негізгі бет "Incompleteness, mobility and conviviality" (2/4) - Francis B. Nyamnjoh - Jensen Memorial Lecture 23
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