Overview

How realistic is it to expect translation to render the world intelligible in a context shaped by different historical trajectories and experiences? Can we rely on human universals to translate through the unique and specific webs of meaning that languages represent? If knowledge production is a kind of translation, then it is fair to assume that the possibility of translation has largely rested on the idea that Western experience is the repository of these human universals against the background of which different human experiences can be rendered intelligible. The problem with this assumption, however, is that there are limits to Western claims to universalism, mainly because these claims were at the service of the desire to justify imperial expansion. This book addresses issues arising from these claims to universalism in the process of producing knowledge about diverse African social realities. It shows that the idea of knowledge production as translation can be usefully deployed to inquire into how knowledge of Africa translates into an imperial attempt at changing local norms, institutions and spiritual values. Translation, in this sense, is the normalization of meanings issuing from a local historical experience claiming to be universal. The task of producing knowledge of African social realities cannot be adequately addressed without a prior critical engagement with how translation has come to shape our ways of rendering Africa intelligible.

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9781527514133

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Jean-Bernard Ouedraogo is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, and Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris. He is former Deputy Executive Secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), and the editor-in-chief of the academic journal Method(e)s: African Review of Social Sciences Methodology and co-editor of the African Sociological Review. His publications include Violences et communautes en Afrique noire; Arts photographiques en Afrique; L'experience de la forme. La peinture de Kalidou Kasse; Global Exchanges and Gender Perspectives in Africa; and Readings in Methodology: Some African Perspectives.Mamadou Diawara is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Goethe Universitat, Germany, where he is also Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary African Studies and Deputy Director of the Frobenius-Institut. His research focuses on oral tradition and history, media, migration between Asia and Africa and development in sub-Saharan Africa. His publications include Copyright Africa. Staging the Immaterial: Intellectual Property, Piracy and Performance in sub-Saharan Africa (with Ute Roeschenthaler; 2016). Elisio S. Macamo is Professor of African Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland where he is also the Director of the Centre for African Studies and Head of the Social Sciences Department. He is the editor of the Sociology Series of the Munthu Institute, co-editor of the African Sociological Review and a member of the scientific committee of several scholarly journals. His most recent publication is The Taming of Fate: Approaches to Risk from a Social Action Perspective - Case Studies from Southern Mozambique. Dakar. CODESRIA (2017).

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