Veranstaltungen

What if the deepest sign that a world is coming to an end were not its disappearance, but the fact that it is gradually ceasing to be necessary?

This lecture begins with a paradox. The world forged through the slave trade, slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, and European imperial expansion has by no means disappeared. Its material asymmetries persist, its hierarchies continue to take new forms, and some of its categories still shape our present. Yet something has happened to this world. There was a time when Africa had to be explained from elsewhere; when its humanity could be debated, its capacity for thought questioned, its history denied, its ability to govern itself assessed, and its future placed within a historical trajectory whose destination others claimed to know. This world did more than dominate: it claimed the authority to determine the very questions that others were required to answer.

For more than a century, however, African and Black writers, philosophers, artists, theologians, activists, and political thinkers have persistently engaged with these questions—turning them around, challenging their premises, reframing them, and sometimes abandoning them altogether. From Négritude to Afropolitanism, from controversies over African philosophy to Afrocentricity, from debates on Pan-Africanism to efforts to rethink and reinvent democracy in Africa, something has accumulated beyond victories and defeats, and even beyond answers that have since become obsolete.

Drawing on a book in progress, this lecture explores that accumulation by reconstructing the historical tradition I call Afrocritique and developing the concept of rhêgmapolitics as a way of understanding its political significance. I argue that this tradition does more than transmit ideas, concepts, or answers. Across generations, it accumulates ways of breaking free from inherited intellectual dependencies, transforming the very conditions under which subsequent generations can think, contest established assumptions, and formulate questions of their own. If rhêgma names this process of breaking free from imposed frameworks of thought, rhêgmapolitics captures the forms of political agency that emerge through it: the capacity not only to refuse questions imposed by others, but also to determine which questions matter, to act upon them, and to shape the horizons of what becomes possible. The end of the white world thus names a particular historical shift: not the disappearance of its power, but the gradual loss of its monopoly over defining what can be thought, what can be desired, and what can be imagined as possible.

What, then, remains of a world's power when those it once constituted as its objects begin to decide for themselves which questions are worth asking?

Aymeric Nyenyezi Bisoka is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Mons University, Belgium. His research engages with the political ecology of natural resources, the political economy of international interventions and an afro-critical perspective on the social sciences. His work is based in post-structuralism and a decolonial approach. His reflections on issues of epistemology, methodology, and ethics draws on his research in the African Great Lakes region, but is also informed by his ten years' professional experience in the field of development cooperation in Africa and Europe.