Institut für Afrikawissenschaften, Universität Wien

Preparing for the next u:africa-lab podcast season at the Medialab... stay tuned, we're coming back in october!
Thank you Lisa Tackie, Viola Innerhuber and Rémi Tchokothe!

Save the date for the next Poetry Slam! on June 25th! Interested in reading/performing your poems? Contact: [email protected]
The three winning poets receive a prize!

Beim 3. Prozesswochenende der „Wiener Prozesse“ von Milo Rau im Rahmen der „Wiener Festwochen“, das am Sonntag zu Ende ging, war Birgit Englert vom Institut für Afrikawissenschaften am 16.6. als eine von 7 Zeug:innen vorgeladen. Zur Debatte stand die Frage, ob die Wiener Festwochen Fördermissbrauch betrieben hatten.
Schaut euch diese spannende Performance an (1'49'')!
https://www.derstandard.at/jetzt/livebericht/3000000224278/wiener-festwochen-verhandeln-die-heuchelei-der-gutmeinenden?responsive=false

Today we are glad to welcome Heike Becker from the University of the Western Cape at our department for her talk: "Decolonising the Public Space: Contestations of public memory and memory activism in postcolonial Germany". We're looking forward to welcoming you and to a fruitful academic exchange!

June is being quite an intense month this year! Under the supervision of Arno Sonderegger, the department successfully hosted last week and in cooperation with the McKinney School of Law of Indianapolis the 8th Conference: SLAVERY PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE with more than 25 speakers! Thank you Lisa Avalos, Emmanuel John A. Awine, Caroline M. Bailey, Amisah Zenabu Bakuri, Cecily Banks, Lisa Bratton, Karen E. Bravo, Eric Brewer, Tiffany Williams Brewer, Kevin Brown, David W. Bulla, Nuno Coelho, Raymond T. Diamond, Christoph Ehland, Gabriela Salcedo Figueira, Alicia Heys, Daniel Moser, Asude Oruklu, Ulrich Pallua, Samuel Rhymes, Rachael Scally, Christoph Singer, Arno Sonderegger, Sarah S. Spratt, Eurnice Wangui Stuhlhofer, Eva Veldhuizen-Ochodničanova and Catherine Lee Wilson for making this event unforgettable!

On May 6th, students, teachers and researchers gathered at our department for a day dedicated to South Africa. Read Kirsten Rüther's enthusiastic report on this special and instructive event on our research neewsfeed!

May 2024 – this is an important moment in South Africa's past and present. It looks more than likely that this moment will matter for the country's future. Not only has it been 30 years since the democracy's first free elections. On 29 May South Africans will determine who will govern for the next few years. A lot has changed since 1994 and there are great anxieties, frustrations and a certain amount of weariness that feed into this year's elections. (...)

Full text: https://afrika.univie.ac.at/forschung/aus-unserem-forschungsalltag/

Save the date for the next online u:africa talk with Abdoul-Malik Ahmad and Katharina Fritsch: "The Comorian diaspora in Marseille - Book presentations & discussion" on June 25th, 5:15 pm. This talk will take place online only!

The conference “Women and the history of state building in Africa” ended joyfully on friday after two days of intense and thrilling presentations, discussion and reflection.
Thank you Phoebe Musandu, Yusra Abdullahi, Lucile Dreidemy, Olufunke Adeboye, Tracey Muradzikwa, Mamaye Idriss, Daniela Atanasova, Arthur K. Muhia, Martina Kopf, Mariam Sharif, Silvia Bruzzi, Kirsten Rüther, Kara Moskowitz, Edidiong C. Ibanga, Sara Panata, Eva-Maria Muschik, Derek Roberts, Miles Tendi, Maria Bacilio, Marius Kothor, Simos Batzakis, Chenai Murata and Aline Robin!
We also thank the City of Vienna (Stadt Wien), ÖAW, FWF and the University of Vienna for supporting this event!

We are all set for the start of the conference “Women and the history of state building in Africa” at Marietta-Blau-Saal. Don’t hesitate to join us!

Save the date for our next u:africa talk with Heike Becker from the University of the Western Cape. It will take place on Tuesday, June 18th at 5:15 pm in our seminarroom 1 and online! We're looking forward to welcoming you!

The new u:africa-lab episode is now online!

Dominik Frühwirth is a researcher and doctoral candidate who is currently working on the project Rastafari Reasonings on Africa in Historical Perspectives, which is a project mainly concerned with the connections between Rastafari, a movement emerging in the 1930 during the Jamaican colonial period, and the Rastafari movement´s long held identification with Africa and longing to return to Africa amongst Rastafarians.

In this episode, Dominik speaks: the necessity for researchers to amplify the voices of the collaborators in their research, defining and clarifying what Rastafari Studies are, and as well as a peer into the history of the Rastafari movement in Austria - grounded by an overview of the interactions between politics or “ Politricks “ and the Rastafari movement.

Host: Elisabeth Knittelfelder

Don't miss Anna-Leena Toivanen's talk today: Afroeuropean mobilities in Francophone African literatures: Mobile subjects, mobile poetics.
See you at 5:15pm at our department!

The international conference "Women and the history of state building in Africa", organized by Anaïs Angelo in the frame of her FWF Project - A history of African female parliamentary pioneers will take place on the 6th and 7th of June 2024 at the University of Vienna. The programme is already online, registration is needed.

Die 4. Ausgabe der Tage der afrikanischen Literaturen in Graz wird heuer am 14. und 15. Juni stattfinden. Organisiert von dem Verein Chiala und moderiert von Rémi Tchokothe.
Mehr Informationen und das ganze Programm findet ihr unter:https://chiala.at/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CHIALA_tdal-2024_programmheft.pdf

Save the date for our next u:africa talk with Anna-Leena Toivanen from the University of Eastern Finland on "Afroeuropean mobilities in Francophone African literatures: Mobile subjects, mobile poetics". Tuesday 28. May at 5:15pm in our seminar room 1 and online. See you there!

Lize Kriel's u:africa talk is taking place today at 5:15 pm in the seminar room 1 of the department of african studies!

Missionary Ethnography: Indigenous Knowledge and/or African Christian Modernity?

Between 1904 and 1934 Missionary Carl Hoffmann collected enough material from African evangelists and pastors of the Berlin Mission Church in northern South Africa to fill a dozen articles published in Hamburg University’s journal for African languages. In 2015 these articles were annotated and translated from German into English as “Sotho Texts from the Woodbush Mountains”. A lot remains to be unravelled from these texts. This presentation focuses on the frequent references to the treatment of visitors, guests, travellers, fugitives, intruders, and strangers in the African interlocutors’ discussions. While the texts explain a lot about African practices (past, present, idealised), they also remind the missionary-ethnographer and his readers (past to present) of their own visitor-status as they try to imagine the Woodbush world and its people in a previous century.

more information and the zoom link are availble on our website: https://afrika.univie.ac.at/en/events/einzelansicht-veranstaltungen/news/uafrica-talk-missionary-ethnography-indigenous-knowledge-andor-african-christian-modernity/?no_cache=1&cHash=88e9722d2babb44705b77b62c8157e09

Save the date for our next thrilling u:africa talk with Thompson Kwarkye from University College Dublin. This talk will take place online, we're looking forward to e-welcoming you!

Today, meet our colleague Alexander Angsongna who arrived last semester as a post-doc researcher in linguistics at our department. We are so glad to have him in our team!

My name is Alexander Angsongna /alɪɡzandə ǎŋsʊ̀ŋná/ (Alex for short). I am from Sombo in the Nadowli-Kaleo district of Upper West Region, Ghana. I have been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of African Studies (Linguistics & Literatures) since September 2023.

I hold a bachelor’s in Linguistics and English from the University of Ghana, a masters in Linguistics from the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada and PhD in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. My master’s research explored complex sentences such serial verbs, multi-aspects and coordination in Dagaare (Mabia language; Ghana/Burkina Faso) and my PhD dissertation examined some aspects of morphology and phonology in Dagaare (e.g., vowel harmony, tone, inflectional morphology).

My current teaching focuses on two main areas: (i) language diversity involving phonological patterns, morphological and grammatical structures, language in context, study of meaning and many more (ii) Language and politics in Africa which encompasses the language of politics (e.g., political discourse, language of political campaigns, language of persuasion, language of insults etc.) and the politics of language (e.g., language policy, language development, promotion etc.).

My current research is a continuation of my PhD research but goes beyond Dagaare – investigating phonological morphological and syntactic patterns in Mabia languages (spoken majorly in northern Ghana). My research also extends to language documentation through folktales and proverbs, language and politics with much focus on Africa. For more information about my research, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/alexanderangsongna/home

When I am away from linguistics, I like to watch or play football!

Save the date! In less than two weeks takes place a new u:africa talk with Lize Kriel from the University of Pretoria "Missionary Ethnography: Indigenous Knowledge and/or African Christian Modernity?". See you on Tuesday, May 7 at 5:15 pm in seminar room 1 or online!

Last Friday, 19 April 2024, Josephine Besha, Daniel Stephen, Aklan Majaliwa and Seif Hilal from the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) visited Vienna. Together with Daniela Waldburger and Rémi Tchokothe, they paid a working visit to the International Office to discuss organisational matters relating to the MoU in particular. It was great that the colleagues were also able to visit our department.

Tulifurahi sana kuwakaribisha wageni wetu, Josephine Besha, Daniel Stephen, Aklan Majaliwa and Seif Hilal, kutoka Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) Ijumaa iliyopita. Tulikuwa na kikao pamoja na International Office kuhusu maswali yanayohusu haswa MoU.

The u:africa talk with Isabella Villanova is taking place today at 5:15 pm at our department. See you there!

The new episode of u:africa-lab with Olusegun Titus is now online!

Olusegun Titus visited our department in November 2023 to give a lecture on the Niger Delta of Nigeria. In this episode, he explains how the 2011 flood in Ibadan led him to discover the discipline of African ecomusicology and the role music can play in raising awareness for the climate crisis. Furthermore, Olusegun talks about poisoned land, the lack of clean water, and the silencing of protesters in the Niger Delta. He also discusses the need for funding and updated curricula in African universities. And he sings in Yoruba. If you ask him whether he is an academic or an activist, he will answer: “Both!”, of course.

Host: Chenai Murata

Listen on Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uafrica-lab/episodes/Olusegun-Titus-Ecomusicology-and-the-issue-of-the-Niger-Delta-of-Nigeria-e2idr0u

Listen on our website: https://afrika.univie.ac.at/forschung/uafrica-lab-the-podcast/

So many interesting webinars have already been organized by Dominik Frühwirth in the frame of the FWF project "Rastafari Reasonings on Africa in Historical Perspective". You can watch them all on youtube if you missed them!

Save the date for our next u:africa talk with Isabella Villanova: "Anglophone African Women’s Fiction: Gender, Resistance, Affect and the New African Diaspora in the United States" on tuesday, 23. April. This will be a hybrid event: more information on our website.
We're looking forward to welcoming you!

Don't forget the opening of the exhibition "Rwanda 1994: Humanity’s collective Memory(cide): 30 years later" today and the u:africa talk with the organizing students! We're looking forward to welcoming you!

Don't miss the first u:africa talk of the semester on Tuesday, april 9th at 5pm, right after the Easter break. This talk will open the exhibition in commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (1994) organized by the students of comparative literature of the University of Vienna at our department. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

This course offers an introduction to South African theatre and performance and looks at some of the most important South African theatre productions, including plays by Ameera Conrad, Athol Fugard, William Kentridge, Koleka Putuma, or Buhle Ngaba. South African theatre is an art form of fierce political engagement and ranks among to most influential and renowned expressions of theatre in the world. Tracing back the development and impact of the institutionalised racial segregation known as Apartheid as well as of colonialism, this course explores the relationship between arts and politics in a South African context and critically investigates theatre as protest, theatre as social criticism, theatre as witness, and theatre as ongoing discourse to negotiate and (re)-shape South Africa’s national narrative(s). The texts discussed address racism, colonialism, political oppression, gender, gender-based violence, environmental justice, and individual as well as collective trauma. Students will gain a better understanding of South African theatre and culture by exploring its diversity, colonial impact, and new emerging hybrid art forms.

Course Number: 141059
ECTS: 4.00
When: Thursday: 15:00 – 16:30pm
Where: African Studies Department, Seminar Room 2

In order to sign up for the course, contact: [email protected]