Pleasure and the Pleasurable in Global African Studies : panel on Assia Djebar (Univ. of Wisconsin)

Pleasure and the Pleasurable in Global African Studies

University of Wisconsin, Madison

April 13-15, 2017

The Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison will host an international conference on Pleasure and the Pleasurable in Global African Studies. A panel on Assia Djebar will be part of the seven conference’s panels.

The conference will unite different scholarly interest areas—from languages to literature, theory, music, and popular culture—for a deeper and lively interrogation of one of the least discussed themes in the study of Africa: the idea of pleasure both in Africa and the African diaspora, plus the notion of pleasure and Africa.  That little serious study has been done on this subject is actually not surprising, given the unfortunate social and political circumstances of so many African nations in the aftermath of colonialism. In the instances where forms of popular culture are studied, scholars typically focus on what is ultimately deemed serious or resistant.  The stereotypical domain of the “pleasurable”—involving music, crime, prostitution, alcohol, cigarettes, etc.,— becomes quickly subsumed into the arena of the macro-political.  Judging from this body of thought, “pleasure” as guilt-free enjoyment and satisfaction meets Africa only when we are talking of foreign tourists and adventurers into African spaces. Pleasure, it would seem, can only be experienced as something relational, something always connected to its opposites, taking the form of the colonial and imperial relation, and in the forces of domination and violence that so commonly define that relation.  While such relational dynamics are inherent to the experience of pleasure (we cannot know what pleasure is without the addition of its lack), new researches aim to explore how we might imagine pleasure without insisting on the predictable interpretive baggage that so often goes along with it.

Assia Djebar: Poetics of Love and Desire

Assia Djebar, a celebrated figure of francophone and world literature and a major representative of the era of decolonization, died in February 2015, leaving behind half a century of novels, essays, and films through which she explored her country’s past and present in a fundamental endeavor to preserve memory and history and to challenge colonial histories and official nationalism. If her works are mainly concerned with women’s lack of agency, patriarchal domination, the ravages of colonization, and violent religious extremism, they also advocate for love. Her reflections on love and desire are necessarily linguistic, as she considers her mother tongue to be the only possible form of personal expression of deeply amorous communication, in contrast to “the aphasia of love” that characterizes the French language in her experience, but they are also corporeal, as the writer highlights the role of body language in her culture, textual, as they take on the form of letters, in all senses of this word, of written words in constant search of their destination, they are also discursive as they revisit affinities between historical accounts and personal stories, and they are prohibited, in their relation to the interdict imposed by the father, all while pointing to possible solidarity, as well as to sisterhood among women.

Through this panel, a group of leading scholars will reflect on the many aspects of Djebar’s poetics of love and desire.

Please send an abstract for either the general theme of the conference or for Djebar’s panel before June 30 to Professor Nevine El Nossery at elnossery@wisc.edu