african studies

Professor Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi examines the ways in which universalism in academia distorts our understanding of African cultures, especially in relation to race and gender. In this podcast, Professor Oyèwùmi talks about age, seniority, and respect, about unscrupulousness and academia, dispossession and spirituality. She considers the oxymoron of the notion of “single mother” from the point of view of Yoruba culture, and she also notes how observance of community practices from non-Western cultures may be a necessary step as we face the planetary challenges to come.

In this podcast, architect, curator, and thinker Mpho Matsipa talks about Black urbanism, African mobilities, the uneasy legacies of modernism, racialized ecologies, and the extraction of Black time through regimes of waiting and migration. We also think with Mpho’s reading of Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe’s 'distributed university', where museums, salons, and independent art spaces and networks become infrastructures for redistributing knowledge and resources beyond elite institutions. Above all, we return to the salon –as a space of intimacy, care, and beauty– as an infrastructure for imagining other futures.

In this podcast, queer feminist thinker Neo Sinoxolo Musangi invites us into their spiral of fragmented, present, embodied thought. We talk about writing as performance, about poetry, and about a rigorous orality. We turn our attention to the small, irrelevant stories, silences, and gaps in the archive. And we examine borrowed vernaculars and harmful acronyms, as well as the tensions and overlaps between categories such as queer, Blackness and Africanness–and what it means to think from within them.