The course highlights ongoing relations between Africa and Europe and explores postcolonial and decolonial discourses and practices. Our aim is to equip students with a renewed political and theoretical vocabulary about hospitality, migration, race thinking/racisms, forgiveness, and care.
The long relations between Africa and Europe require that we rethink the concepts of the human, the citizen-subject and community from below, at the political and cultural sites where radical transformations are taking place. Europe and Africa meet in a variety of practices and experiences that, once thought together, necessitate the decolonisation of our political and theoretical vocabularies about hospitality, migration, racisms, forgiveness and care.
This course builds on the success of the programme that was last year and focuses on how racisms are challenged and transgressed by decolonising and creolising discourses that actively oppose xenophobia, nationalisms and ethnocentrisms. It reflects on ongoing relations between Africa and Europe by focusing on Afropean cultures that have emerged within communities of Afro-European descent across the northern and southern territories of the European continent and are interrelated with different places and temporalities in Europe and Africa.
Our programme responds to the “time of the now”; it aims to generate a framework that attends to the urgent need for discourses, aesthetics, and methodologies that destroy racisms and decolonise the ways by which we understand the human, the citizen-subject and community in the present. Decolonising our methodologies means to reckon with dominant philosophical, political, and aesthetic frameworks, and to attend to what it means to be human and live together beyond racisms in the present.
Main topics addressed
1. Migration: We will focus on the past and present histories of migration as constitutive of politics, and human rights in the long present. We will explore histories of ‘migritude’ and ‘coolitude’ as well as new forms of inhabitancy.
2. Race Thinking/Racisms: We will analyse race and racism through the histories of new and differential racisms that target new bodies and collectivities. Minority histories and narratives reveal the racial assemblages in the past and in the present generate creole ways of reinventing the concept of the human as being-with and becoming-with.
3. Forgiveness: The politics and poetics of forgiveness and justice in view of histories of disaster (including but not limited to the histories of totalitarian regimes, concentration camps, slave plantations).
4. Hospitality: The politics and poetics of hospitality centered on democratic and trans-cultural practices.
5. Decolonial Poetics: We will examine writing and art that contemplate humanity as a condition that is non-linear and non-hierarchical and that places the human in a deep relationality with other species.
This programme is connected to two of the five CIVIS themes, Cities, Territories and Mobilities and Societies, Culture, Heritage. Engaging Global South epistemologies. Building on the associations between decolonial thinking and postcolonial studies, the programme focuses on transmodern aesthetics, discourses and histories and aims at the dissemination and production of new knowledges. We address issues crucial to democracy, justice and equality, and explore the ongoing transformations in the public and political spheres in order to develop critical tools that are imperative for social change.
This programme is green and expands the discourses of sustainability into the fields of theoretical, historical and literary studies.
The course carries 6 ECTS and comprises a range of training activities, summing up to 160 hours distributed as follows:
- 40 hours of theoretical-practical classes guided by professors (lectures, seminars, plenary discussions, workshops) that would represent 20 hours online and 20 hours on-site in Athens
- 8 hours of tutoring
- 2 hours of evaluation activities
- 110 hours of individual learning and teamwork projects developed together with other international students
Learning outcomes
The course offers research tools, pedagogies and methodologies against neo-racism, xenophobia and neo-nationalisms that plague democratic societies in Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa today.
By the end of the course, students will have:
a. Strengthened and expanded their perspectives on trans-cultural values and practices across Europe and Africa;
b. Engaged research methodologies and theoretical frameworks to a wide variety of issues across national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries;
c. Reinforced their capability of formulating cultural responses to urgent challenges;
d. Developed their own research or creative project (essay, podcast, documentary film/photography, other creative work) that promotes postracial and trans-cultural research/production;
e. Mapped their own digital archive of concepts and of primary and secondary sources that can be used as a reference tool for the development of individual and collective research and outreach projects.
Professors
Stéphane Baquey is a poetry critic and an Associate Professor in Modern Literature at Aix-Marseille Université. He has published widely on French, Francophone, and Arabic poetry, modern and contemporary. For the last five years, his research has known a new inflection towards the poetics of the place telling from an ecopoetics perspective.
Stamatina Dimakopoulou teaches US literature and culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at New York University and has guest-lectured at Paris-Nanterre. She has published transatlantic avant-gardes across literature and the visual arts. She is a founding member and co-editor of Synthesis, an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies. She has co-founded Transitive Modernities and participates in the CIVIS projects, CARE, and PostRacial Trans-Modernities. With Vassilis Vlastaras (Athens School of Fine Arts), she co-organised practice-based workshops to be followed by an exhibition at Atoposcvc. Currently working on a manuscript on home/lessness.
Saliou Dione is an Associate Professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, in Senegal, where he teaches African and Postcolonial Studies. His research interests cover and include publications on Pan-Africanism, the Diaspora, postcolonialism, African literature (oral and written literatures), gender, sexuality(ies), migration, race issues, and development issues. He has been a Senior Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Rutgers-based Center for African Studies (State University of New Jersey, USA). As part of the Fulbright Outreach Lecturing Fund Award, he has delivered lectures at Coastal Carolina University, Horry Georgetown Technical College, in South Carolina, Ohio Wesleyan University, Denison University, in Ohio, and at Rutgers. He has presented papers at international conferences and has been a CODESRIA Gender Fellow at the CODESRIA Gender Institute for gender and African Sexuality(ies). Dr Dione is currently Head of the English Department and Director of the African and Postcolonial Studies Laboratory at Cheikh Anta Diop University.
Stephen Forcer is a Professor of French at the University of Glasgow. His publications include Modernist Song: The Poetry of Tristan Tzara (Legenda 2006) and Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda 2015), which was shortlisted for the 20016 Gapper Book Prize. In 2020-2021 he was a co-investigator on an AHRC research grant into the use of comedy and other performing arts in tackling sexual and gender-based violence, supported by NGOs in Sierra Leone and South Africa. He also participates in the CIVIS project on PostRacial Trans-Modernities.
Astrid Franke is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at University of Tübingen. She is the author of Keys to Controversies: Stereotypes in Modern American Novels (1999) and Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America (2010) as well as articles on popular culture, poetry, and injustice, and the contemporary American novel. She is a principal investigator in the interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center Threatened Orders with a project on the resilience of the racial order in the US. She also participates in the CIVIS project on PostRacial Trans-Modernities.
Mina Karavanta is Associate Professor of Literary Theory, Cultural Studies and Anglophone Literature in the Faculty of English Studies of the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She specializes in postcolonial studies, gender and race studies and comparative literature and has published articles in international academic journals such as boundary 2, Callaloo, Feminist Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Symplokē, Journal Of Contemporary Theory.
She is a founding member and co-editor with Stamatina Dimakopoulou of the peer- reviewed electronic journal Synthesis that promotes transcultural and interdisciplinary research (https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/synthesis).
Danai Mupotsa is senior lecturer in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She holds a BA in Africana Studies and Women’s Studies (Luther College), a B. Soc. Sc. (Hons, First Class, UCT) in Gender and Transformation, an M. Soc. Sci in Gender Studies (UCT), and a PhD in African Literature and Cultural Studies (PhD). She specialises in gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect and feminist pedagogies. Danai is a member of the editorial collective of Agenda Feminist Media, and recently co-edited the Agenda special issue “Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics” (2021) with Moshibudi Motimele. Danai has edited several other volumes, including a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled “Time Out of Joint: The Queer and the Customary in Africa” with Neville Hoad and Kirk Fiereck. Danai was part of the research team working in collaboration with Urgent Action Fund – Africa that recently published IDS Working Paper 576 (2022), Contextualising Healing Justice as a Feminist Organising Framework in Africa. In 2018, she published her first collection of poetry entitled feeling and ugly. The Portuguese translation, feio e ugly was published in 2020 by Editora Trinta Zero (Maputo). Danai has performed on several poetry stages, including the Poeta’s D’Alma Festival Internacional de Poesia e Artes Performativas in Maputo in 2018, and the Poetry Africa Festival hosted by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2021. Danai is a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality.
Joan Anim-Addo, is Emeritus Professor and Director of the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London). She is a poet, librettist and scholar. Her writing includes Janie, Cricketing Lady (poetry); Imoinda (libretto); Longest Journey: A History of Black Lewisham and Touching the Body: History, Language and African- Caribbean Women’s Writing. She is Associate Editor of Callaloo, Journal of Diaspora Arts and Letters and a Senior Fellow, HEA. She is a member of the editorial board of Transition Magazine (Harvard). Her recent publications include the co- authored This is the Canon: Decolonize your Bookshelf in 50 Books (Greenfinch 2021).
Stephanos Stephanides is a poet, essayist and memoirist, translator, ethnographer, and documentary filmmaker and former Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus. He began his academic career teaching literature at the University of Guyana for six years, where he developed a deep interest in Caribbean Creole and Indian diasporic communities, and thereafter a lifelong engagement with India. He was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus until 2017. Selections of his poetry have been published in more than twelve languages. He is a Writing Fellow of the International Writers Program of the University of Iowa. He was awarded first prize for poetry from the American Anthropological Association, 1988, and first prize for video poetry for his film Poets in No Man’s Land at the Nicosia International Film Festival. He has served as judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (2000, 2010, 2022). He is a Fellow of the English Association, and Cavaliere of the Republic of Italy. Representative publications include Translating Kali’s Feast: the Goddess in Indo- Caribbean Ritual and Fiction (2000), Blue Moon in Rajasthan and other poems (2005), and most recently The Wind Under My Lips/«Ο Άνεμος κάτω απ’ τα χείλη μου», a bilingual anthology with Greek translation by Despina Pirketti (Rodakio: Athens, 2018).
Physical mobility
The on-site part of the course will take place from 7 to 11 April 2025 and will be held in Athens University History Museum, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
The offline component will consist of sessions that will further elaborate on the thematic component of the webinars and will be delivered by the academic staff, as well as by invited artists and cultural practitioners. The aim is for the students to create a hybrid archive of research material and practices that will include the creation of a digital mapping of key concepts and texts, the organization of cultural practices such as documentary art/photography exhibits with work done by the students, and the presentation of short research projects.
Virtual part
The online part of the course is composed of the following eight webinars that will focus on the themes of the course from February 3 2025, to March 31 2025.
- Introduction to the Course: Main Aims and Themes
- Migration
- Race Thinking/Racisms
- Forgiveness and Care
- Hospitality
- Decolonial Studies
- Post?Racial Narrations, Anti-racist Imaginaries
Requirements
This course is open to Master’s and PhD students enrolled at CIVIS member universities with an academic backround/studies in the scientific fields: Global Anglophone Studies, African and Postcolonial Studies, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. Transnational and Comparative American Studies, Theory and Philosophy of Language, Gender Studies, Image/Visual Studies, Migration Studies.
Participants should also prove: Critical Thinking, Interdisciplinary Research Methods, Digital Humanities, Research and Writing Skills.
NB: Visiting Students – Erasmus Funding Eligibility
To be eligible for your selected CIVIS programme, you must be a fully enrolled student at your CIVIS home university at the time you will be undertaking the programme. Click here to learn more about the eligibility criteria.
This course is also open to students with the same academic profile, who are enrolled at a CIVIS strategic partner university in Africa. Please check here, if you can apply and this particular course is open to applications from your university. Successful applicants will receive an Erasmus+ grant covering travel and subsistence costs during their stay. Applicants should be willing to extend their stay at the host university for 1-3 weeks for additional research and/or training purposes.
Application process
Send your application by filling in the online application form by 31 Oktober 2024. Don’t forget to also include:
- CV
- Motivation Letter
- Language/English (according to CEFR)
Applicants will be selected on the basis of their CV,, academic background, motivation letter and the language level (English C1).
Assessment
Drawing on the success of last year’s BIP edition (February 2024-April 2024), we will implement the following good practices to reinforce the students’ participation and performance:
a. Student presentations relevant to the ongoing research (thesis and dissertations) organized in panels (physical part)
b. Roundtable discussions (physical part)
c. Classroom exercises (online and physical part)
d. Blog posts/discussions
Moreover, the assessment of the students is based on the following:
a. Questionnaire with open and closed questions
b. Roundtables of responses of students to seminars
c. Open forum for discussion and debate at the end of the sessions (online and physical parts)
d. Blog posts
Blended Intensive Programme
This CIVIS course is a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP): a new format of Erasmus+ mobility which combines online teaching with a short trip to another campus to learn alongside students and professors across Europe. Click here to learn more about CIVIS BIPs.
GDPR Consent
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