An Auspicious Initiative
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
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Let me first congratulate you, Pius, for this great initiative, for setting up this wonderful forum of intellectual conversation. My congratulations also to your first guest, Ato Quayson, an exemplary scholar whom I hold in the highest regard for the depth and breadth of his intellect; for being an engaged and engaging scholar, for his passionate commitment to academic excellence and social justice, to an unapologetic and principled pursuit of a global African epistemic presence. And thanks to both of you for giving us such a sumptuous meal of ideas and insights, and for allowing me to comment. Where does one begin? There is so much to say, yet so little to add.
Perhaps let me begin with the atmospherics of the conversation, its tone. This may seem either irrelevant or obvious, but I think it is important. This is a serious conversation, a respectful conversation, one marked by mutual admiration and the conviviality of intellectual familiarity, of having closely read each other’s work. I can only imagine how different it would be in circumstances many of us often find ourselves, those annoying interrogations we periodically face at conferences from colleagues who rarely read our work, or who lazily skim through it for some imagined African voice, for a convenient footnote. Your conversation flows freely, comfortably, unentangled by the intellectual pretensions and tensions that characterize Africanist discourses. It is a palaver between brothers. It speaks to the need to engage each other’s work, to take each other seriously as we build transnational scholarly communities that we can call our own.
All the issues discussed in this conversation are important; they touch on critical questions concerning knowledge production on Africa, the institutional and intellectual dynamics of African studies in Euro-America, the construction of Diaspora Studies and the role of the African Diaspora; the changing theoretical architecture of literary studies, and the political economy of African development and democratization, including the perils and prospects of Africa’s enigmatic giant, Nigeria! Incidentally, Ato’s informed comments on Nigeria underscore what few of us do: seriously studying other African countries besides our own. Space only allows me to dwell on the constitution of African studies and the role of Diaspora studies. I hope my colleague, Kunle, will focus on the literary aspects of the conversation.
As you know, I have been preoccupied with the politics and sociology of knowledge production in general and African Studies in particular for many years, partly because of my fascination with intellectual history—both the history of ideas and of knowledge producing institutions—and also because as transnational, some would say, cosmopolitan or Pan-African intellectuals, we encounter, straddle and traverse multiple scholarly cultures and communities which we have to negotiate and make sense of. This can engender acute self-reflexivity or lead to intellectual paralysis. For some of us this condition provides a productive and powerful space to question the self-referential normativity of particular knowledge systems, especially the specious universality of Western thought: epistemic hegemony is about power, not analytical probity, let alone universal “truth”.