Wellbeing and Futurity

Wednesday 08 July / 14:00 - 16:00 (CEST)

Round table discussion with introduction podcasts (linked in the names of participants):

Prof. Sarah Nuttall, Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Prof. AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, UK

Prof. Danai Mupotsa, Senior Lecturer at the department of African Literature at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Prof. Véronique Tadjo, Writer, Academic, Artist; Senior Lecturer amongst other at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Prof. Ernst Wolff, Professor of Philosophy at the KU Leuven, Belgium

Moderation: Prof. Russ West-Pavlov (University of Tübingen)

Recording of the Panel:

In a memorable if typically vitriolic turn of phrase, V. S. Naipual once characterized a (fictionalized) Zaïre (and by extension the then Third World) as a ‘place where the future had come and gone’ (Naipaul 2002: 30). With these words he implicitly ratified European notions of civilization and progress and relegated the Third World to the trash-can of history. Yet today great swathes of the Euro-American world itself are tumbling ‘backwards’ into the sort of Dickensian decay that always belied its claims to modernity. Happiness, once the touchstone of Enlightenment values, now recoded as ‘wellbeing’, is seemingly on the retreat globally in the face of COVID-19 (and its probable successors) and global climate change—to mention only two of the most salient current threats to the integrity of the planetary community, whether human or trans-human. With increased global hardship for the majority most likely just around the corner, the question of how to guarantee future wellbeing, enshrined as it is in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, is worth posing anew.

It is significant that thinkers, activists and artists across the South have refused to be locked into a putatively immobile past or to passively accepting the burdens of colonial and postcolonial illbeing. Might these dual refusals be linked to one another, and what positive affirmations might they entail? How might the reinvention of futures go hand in hand with the reinvention of life-quality?

With adventurous notions such as ‘accelerated underdevelopment’ (Álvarez qtd in Chanan 2004: 228), ‘indigenous modernity (Muecke 2004) or ‘envelopment’ (Sarr 2016: 21-8), actors from the South have sought ways of (re)‘mak[ing] time’ (Mbiti 1969: 19), and with it, the texture and quality of lived experience itself.

What temporal schemes dovetail with technologies of wellbeing such as ‘Buen vivir’?

Are such futures qualitatively different from those projected by paradigms of exponential growth (e.g. the de-growth movement)?

Do we need to recalibrate our notions of wellbeing to make them future-fit?

Can concepts such as ‘bricolage’, ‘informality’ or ‘improvisation’ serve us in imagining and implementing future wellbeing, or are they part of the problem of illbeing?

Which actors are envisaged as future partners in futures of wellbeing?

How can specifically Southern knowledges concretely contribute to future wellbeing (e.g. indigenous climate smart knowledge)?

What is the role of education in the twinned questions of wellbeing and futurity?

Biographies of Speakers

Sarah Nutall

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Postapartheid, editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, and co-editor of many books including Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa; Senses of Culture; Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis and Loadshedding: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa. Recent essays include ‘Mandela’s Mortality’; ‘Secrecy’s Softwares’; ‘Surface, Depth and the Autobiographical Act’; ‘The Redistributed University’; and ‘The Earth as a Prison?’ She has given more than thirty keynote addresses around the world, and published more than sixty journal articles and book chapters. Her work is widely cited across many disciplines. She has taught at Yale and Duke Universities and in 2016 she was an Oppenheimer Fellow at the DuBois Institute at Harvard University. For seven years she has directed WiSER, the largest and most established Humanities Institute across the Global South.

AbdouMaliq Simone

AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. He works on issues of spatial composition in extended urban regions, the production of everyday life for urban majorities in the Global South, infrastructural imaginaries, collective affect, global blackness, and histories of the present for Muslim working classes. He is also a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, visiting professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, research associate with the Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta, and research fellow at the University of Tarumanagara.

For three decades he has worked with practices of social interchange, technical arrangements, local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African and Southeast Asian cities are lived. He has worked on remaking municipal systems, training local government personnel, designing collaborative partnerships among technicians, residents, artists, and politicians.

Danai Mupotsa

Danai Mupotsa is senior lecturer and HOD of the department of African Literature at Wits, where she completed her PhD. She holds a BA in Africana Studies and Women’s Studies from Luther College, a BSoc.Sci (Hons) in Gender and Transformation and an M.Soc.Sci in Gender Studies from the University of Cape Town. She writes on a range of issues related to race, sex, gender, desire and difference. She is working on a few projects that include a collection of poetry titled feeling and ugly, and a book titled White Weddings.

Véronique Tadjo

Véronique Tadjo is a writer, academic, artist and author of books for young people. Born in Paris, she grew up in Abidjan (Côte d´Ivoire) where she attended local schools. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Abidjan and a doctorate from the Sorbonne, Paris IV, in African American Literature and Civilization. In 1983, she went to Howard University in Washington, D.C. on a Fulbright research scholarship.

In 1979, she chose to teach English at the Lycée Moderne de Korhogo (secondary school) in the North of Côte d´Ivoire. She subsequently became a lecturer at the English department of the University of Abidjan until 1993 when she took up writing full time.

She began writing and illustrating books for children in 1988 with her first book Lord of the Dance, an African retelling. She was prompted by the desire to contribute to the emergence of literature for children in Africa. Her second book, Mamy Wata and the Monster won the Unicef Award in 1993 and has been published into 8 dual language editions. It is also on the list of the 100 Best African Books of the Century.

In the past few years, she has facilitated workshops in writing and illustrating children´s books in Mali, the Benin Republic, Chad, Haiti, Mauritius, French Guyana, Burundi, Rwanda and South Africa.

She has also been a member of judging panels for several literary international prizes and has been a facilitator in creative writing workshops.

She has lived in Paris, Lagos, Mexico City, Nairobi and London. After 14 years in South Africa where she was Professor and head of French and Francophone Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (2007-2015), she now shares her time between London and Abidjan