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Session chair: Prof. Stefan Helgesson, Stockholm University, Stockolm (Sweden)

Individual contribution 

Lecturer Hamady Gaye, Curator of Central Library - University of Cheick Anta Diop of Dakar (Senegal)

Reappropriation of models of transmission and dissemination of knowledge in West African societies of the African Middle Ages

The cultural heritage of West Africa is a blend of Black African, Arab-Muslim, and Judeo-Christian civilizations. This syncretism has always been its source of richness and originality. Moreover, the spread of Islam will have a significant impact on people's lives. This strong influence of Islam has its origins in a long history, "more than ten centuries of spreading Islam…, borrowing its characteristic features from local cultures (Dumont and Kanté, 2012). This mixing of cultures gave rise to stone cities such as Chinguetti (or city of libraries), Wadane, Tichit, and Walata with their “sand universities and desert libraries,” as well as university centers such as Sankoré with its mosques featuring the famous Sudano-Sahelian architecture of Negro-Arabic inspiration and its Islamic libraries (Sidi Yahya). Most manuscripts are written in Adjami or Arabic. Adjami, a system of transcribing local African languages using the Arabic alphabet and well established in the education system, has always been a multicultural unifying element for the various West African communities in their quest for knowledge and scholarship, while also preserving endogenous knowledge. An unprecedented intellectual boom, Africa's intellectual golden age (10th-17th centuries)! However, since 2012, West Africa, particularly its Sahel region, has been facing an unprecedented security crisis. This context of insecurity and violence is leading to migration and forced displacement, which also has dramatic consequences for the social balance of traditional societies, endangering both tangible and intangible cultural heritage. This poses threats and obstacles to social, religious, and cultural practices, given that in Africa, communities maintain a very close relationship with their environment and territories of cultural expression. Therefore, in the face of this situation of peril to indigenous heritage and knowledge, it will be important to reinstate these dynamics of inclusion and resilient models of knowledge transmission and dissemination within the modern (often-contested) education system.

Prof. Monique Scheer,  University of Tübingen, Tübingen (Germany)

Affective Dimensions of Co-Existence in Multicultural Cities

Launched by cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy in 2004 and taken up by a group of Francophone sociologists and writers ten years later, the concept of ‘conviviality’ has been fruitful for analyzing histories of living together in difference, not overlooking economic inequity and power asymmetries, but at the same time finding commonalities and cooperations. With its echoes of the premodern Spanish concept of Convivencia, conviviality is also reminiscent of German conceptions of Geselligkeit as the basis of democracy in civil society. From these examples, it is clear that vivre ensemble involves various emotional practices, which will be the focus of this talk, based on recent research in ‘everyday multiculturalism’ in anthropology and cultural studies and linking up with Dorothee Kimmich’s talk on ‘critical proximities’. Only when we take the affective dimension of co-existence into account can we fully understand what kinds of solutions will work well. Challenging the notion that cultural and religious diversity itself presents a problem for social cohesion, causing fragmentation and conflict, the aim of this paper is to promote a new perspective on heterogeneous societies by highlighting the significance of proximity over difference. What needs to come into focus are the relational, affective practices that set the terms of co-existence.

Prof. Dorothee Kimmich,  University of Tübingen, Tübingen (Germany)

Similarity and proximity in cultural theory and research on conviviality 

We have a right to be different but must also realize that antidemocratic and racist practices flourish under the mantel of the right to diversity and segregation. Samir Amin thus correctly demands that the right to diversity and alterity must be coupled with the ‘right to be similar’. Similarity is different from the demand for generic sameness. It is the process towards equality. In this sense pluricultural and heterogeneous societies can be viewed as complex webs and palimpsests of overlapping similarities and a specific form of critical proximity. It is based on solidarity which ignores particularist bondings in order to project a pluricultural society of communication characterized by fuzzy borders and transcended boundaries. We could indeed see the signature of the pluricultural form of life in the affirmation of similarity in diversity (and not unity in diversity) as against the absolutization through homogenization. 
 This perspective makes clear that similarity-oriented thinking has an inherent ethical aspect adn requires perspectives and judgement. To not recognize similarities also often means that they are quite consciously denied. Therefore, similarity-oriented thinking requires not only analytic ability, but also the ability to judge. When similarities are disregarded in favor of differences and oppositions—which often leads to the dominance of a single group—it is not only an epistemological issue but also a political one: If religious and/or racist fanaticism is driving a campaign to divide society into categories of identity and difference, then what is necessary are alliances and thinking in similarities. 
 Similarity, however, is not a cure-all for the problems found within cultural theory and its corresponding political issues. Assimulation and forced proximity can even provoke oppression and cause conflicts. Nevertheless, similarity as a fundamental epistemological category and proximity as action guiding orientation is one of the most important tools of cultural-theoretical reflection.

Collective contribution

Prof.  Christine Le Quellec Cottier - University of Lausanne (Switzerland)

Prof. Samira Doudier - Hassan II University of Casablanca (Morocco)

Prof. Coudy Kane - University of Cheick Anta Diop of Dakar (Senegal) 

Sub-Saharan literature and its history as an intercultural and integrative relay: creation of an educational resource

The University of Lausanne is hosting the SNSF project “EthoSpatial Configuration: Towards a New Literary History of French-Language Sub-Saharan Africa,” led by Prof. Ch. Le Quellec Cottier, with a team in Switzerland and scientific partners in Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, South Africa, and France. This is a participatory approach, with joint work to articulate critical, postcolonial, and decolonial reflections in order to develop a transcontinental application relevant to various cultural areas. 

The project aims to bring together several audiences for cross-cultural transmission in an educational setting: the development of a textbook and a digital platform on Francophone literature in Africa, usable by both Europeans and Africans, in french. In Switzerland (and Europe), this literature, as defined in the research project, is very little known. Studying it allows us to consider different relationships with language and creates social and political bridges through the imagination. Her study also promotes the inclusion of migrant pupils and students. In Africa, the field of sub-Saharan literary history, depending on the region, is approached as such or in connection with Maghreb literature at university. The aim is to modify the usual criteria so as not to reproduce the essentialisms still present in the reading of the century. 

Approach: 

• Bring together three CIVIS universities and promote long-term scientific and educational exchanges (Lausanne and Dakar already linked for a CIVIS summer school on the question of engagement in literature); Casablanca, host university & specialist in the field: pedagogical and didactic transmission). 

• Inclusive reflection, through the involvement of specialists in complementary fields; promoting multiculturalism within a language. 

• Sharing values: moving beyond national borders; decoloniality of knowledge and moving away from essentialism through the creation of a corpus.

Questions for the audience

• A common and digital approach: what strategies for teaching this field outside the curriculum (in Europe), favoring non-identity-based approaches everywhere? 
• What composition to promote approaches in line with the globalized world? 
• Involvement and commitment to promoting the teaching of the humanities: what arguments in a world in crisis?