In partnership with the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, the Centre for African Studies cordially invites you to its distinguished Carl Schlettwein Lecture and the subsequent reception.

The return, more than sixty years after the first wave of decolonization, to a demand to decolonize knowledge in our contemporary world demands returning also to a postcolonial debate: what are the legacies of colonialism in the present? There is an intimate and complex relationship between the past and the future, making the anticolonial impulse at the heart of a decolonizing endeavour a fractious one. There remains, in this view, decolonizing work to do of an anticolonial nature to create postcolonial futures. This lecture explores these debates from a Southern African vantage point after the end of apartheid. It works through a genealogy of five predicaments that constitute the historical-conceptual grounds from which new horizons of postcolonial freedom are being enacted inside of practices of institution-making, in the sense that the future is now. By working our way through these predicaments, more as political less as philosophical, we encounter the ways in which transgression and dissolution are imagined, where race figures either as supplement or displacement of the colonial itself, where new ways of knowing returns to archives of ethnology, and where universality and particularity present themselves in both new and familiar guises.

Prof Suren Pillay holds the AC Jordan Chair in African Studies, and is Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research focusses on political violence, citizenship and justice claims; as well as the politics of knowledge production, and intellectual history. His publications have been concerned with the political and intellectual legacies of colonialism in the present. He has also explored a number of themes through the visual medium of photography. Between 2018 to 2024 Pillay was the principal investigator of the Mellon-funded project Other Universals: Thinking About Politics and Aesthetics from Postcolonial Locations, which linked scholars in a consortium across five universities in the global South. Pillay’s most recent publication is Predicaments of Knowledge, Decolonization and Deracialization in Universities, Wits University Press (2024), and the edited volume On the Subject of Citizenship, Late Colonialism in the World Today (Bloomsbury Press: New York 2023).

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