Columbia University Seminar
STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA
invites you to our events & seminars for AY 2024-25
This year's seminar is dedicated to our dear colleague, Elleni Centime Zeleke,
author of Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016
Kusoma Pamoja / Books in Dialogue
Robyn D’Avignon and Anooradha Siddiqi in dialogue with Laura Fair
About A Ritual Geology: Set against the ongoing corporate enclosure of West Africa’s goldfields, A Ritual Geology tells the untold history of one of the world’s oldest indigenous gold mining industries: Francophone West Africa’s orpaillage. Establishing African miners as producers of subterranean knowledge, Robyn d’Avignon uncovers a dynamic “ritual geology” of techniques and cosmological engagements with the earth developed by agrarian residents of gold-bearing rocks in savanna West Africa. Colonial and corporate exploration geology in the region was built upon the ritual knowledge, gold discoveries, and skilled labor of African miners even as states racialized African mining as archaic, criminal, and pagan. Spanning the medieval and imperial past to the postcolonial present, d’Avignon weaves together long-term ethnographic and oral historical work in southeastern Senegal with archival and archeological evidence from Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali. A Ritual Geology introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for African studies, environmental history, and anthropology. The book received the Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society, the Julian Stewart Award of the Anthropology and Environmental Society of the American Anthropological Association, and the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association—all for the year 2023.
About Architecture of Migration: Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration, a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration.
Robyn d'Avignon is Associate Professor of History at NYU. Her first book, A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke UP, 2022) tells the untold history of one of the world's oldest indigenous gold mining industries and introduces geological formations as a new regional framework for African history. It won four major book awards in the history of science and social sciences, environmental anthropology, and African studies. She is currently working with Senegalese colleagues on an endangered geological archive project and a history of anthropology in southeastern Senegal.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, Theory in Forms, 2024), on the spatial politics, visual rhetoric, ecologies, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. Siddiqi is the co-editor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence. Her book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva analyzes the politics of heritage environments through the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier.
Laura Fair is a historian of twentieth-century urban East Africa and the author of several award-winning books. Her scholarship focuses on gendered social and economic change, and urban popular culture in Swahili-speaking communities. Most recently, Fair published Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in 20th Century Urban Tanzania (Ohio University Press, 2018). The book combines a business history of Tanzanian exhibition and distribution practices with a nuanced analysis of the intimate meanings of films. Fair’s current research focuses on foodways along the Swahili coast, examining connections and contradictions between the culinary creativity of cooks, state power and the growing burdens of non-communicable diseases.
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