Concurrences in Postcolonial Research E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Beyond the Social Sciences
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 569

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The concept of concurrences is a blanket term for challenging dominating statements of the past and present. Concurrent stories have varying claims to reality and fiction, as well as different, diverging, and at times competing claims to society, culture, identity, and historical past. Dominant Western narrations about colonial power relationships are challenged by alternative sources such as heritage objects and oral traditions, enabling the voice of minorities or subaltern groups to be heard. Concurrences is about capturing multiple voices and multiple temporalities. As such, it is both a relational and dynamic methodology and a theoretical perspective that undergirds the multiple workings of power, uncovering asymmetrical power relations. Interdisciplinary in nature, this anthology is the outcome of scholarship from the humanities and social sciences with an interest in the multiple temporality of postcolonial issues and engagements in various places across the world.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Contributors

Towards Global Connections and Multiple Entanglement

Concurrences as a Multifaceted Concept: Temporality and the co-production of the past

Homophobia and the transnationalization of homosexuality

Entanglement and Colonial Encounter

Towards Global Histories or the History of Connections?

Conclusion

References

Concurrent Subjectivities and Coevalness in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother

I. Travel and the distance of the past

II. Writing the slave into presence

Works Cited

Autofiction as a Postcolonial Strategy: Guilherme Mendes da Silva’s The Moods of Mister Utac (De humeuren van meneer Utac) and Junot Díaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Introduction: From autobiography to autofiction

Utac or the changing moods of a return migrant

Cape Verde: lusotropicalism and changing colonial tides

Multiplying the Autofictional Self: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Conclusion

References

Moments of Suffering, Pain and Resilience: Somali Refugees’ Memories of Home and Journeys to Exile

Introduction

Brief historical context and theoretical framework

Research journey and data collection

Nostalgic memories of home and the meaning of belonging

Their journeys to exile and the development of survival strategies

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

References

Homosexuality as “UnAfrican”: Heteronormativity, Power, and Ambivalence in Cameroon

Introduction

Methodological, Theoretical and Analytical Framework

The Religious Context of Homosexuality in Cameroon

Pronatalism, Homosexuality and Christianity

A Heterosexual Cameroon Nation?

Reactions to the homosexuality “epidemic”

Double Appropriation of the Concept of Privacy and Individual Autonomy?

Ambivalence as a Political Practice

Conclusion

References

Concurrent Contestations: Framing, and Naming the ‘Queer’ in Art from Africa

Introduction

Queerness in the Global Contemporary

Discursive dichotomies: Framing and naming same-sex intimacies in Africa

‘Sexuality marketing’. Appropriating queerness in activism and art

Artistic strategies and their (global) circulation

Ato Malinda

Igshaan Adams

Links

Bibliography

Queer Visibility and Visual Resistance against Homophobia at Dak’Art, The Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary African Art in Dakar 2014

1. Introduction

2. Queer visibility

3. Homophobia in Africa

4. Visual resistance against homophobia in Africa

5. Dak’Art, the Biennial Exhibition of Contpemorary African Art

Andrew Esiebo

Milumbe Haimbe

Ato Malinda

Jean-Ulrick Désert

6. Precarious Imaging: Visibility and Media Surrounding African Queerness

Conclusions

Bibliography

Entangled Voices, Lived Songs. Mwambwambwa, a Cokwe Song recorded in 1954 at Colonial Lunda, Angola

1. Introduction

1.1. The colonial complexities

1.2. A theoretical and methodological proposal

2. Colonial Lunda

2.1. The context

2.2. Collecting native folk songs

3. Mwambwambwa song

3.1. Fleeing from cipale

3.2. Why you should not flee from cipale

4. Final remarks

Bibliography and Sources

Interviews/Conversations

Angola

Portugal

Archives sources

A Contradictory Encounter: Swedish Missionaries and the Local Population in the Congo Free State

Introduction

The Congo Free State and protestant missions

Imbalances in the depictions of the encounter

The character of the encounter

Early missions and hybridization

First meetings in Kibunzi

Conflicts at Diadia

Ambivalence and contradictions within the missionary encounter

The missionaries and colonial power

Civilization and brotherhood

Humble origins and white supremacy

Optimism and despair

Concluding remarks

Bibliography

Archival and unpublished sources

Printed sources

Secondary sources

“Lest the punishment of Ahab fall upon you”: The Psychic Impact of Concurrent Narratives in the Hawaiian Missionary Legacy

Introduction

Cooke Family

Bibliography

Policy Lending or Imposition: An Assessment of the World Bank’s Education Policy influence on Development in Africa

1. Introduction

2. Post-Colonial Higher Education in Africa

3. World Bank Education Policy Lending/Transfer on Africa

3.1 Universal primary education in Africa

3.2 The knowledge for development (K4D)/ knowledge economy (KE) and economic development

4. Outcomes of policy imposition on developing African countries

4.1. The entrepreneurial university and academic capitalism

4.2. Partnership and Collaboration in University entrepreneurialism/academic capitalism

4.3 Implementation and Management of Borrowed Policies

5. Policy learning from Finland

6. Conclusion

References

Beyond the Social Sciences

Copyright

Dedication

To all martyrs fighting for the restoration of the independence of the former British Southern Cameroons (BSC), aka Ambazonia

Those imprisoned in bunkers for no crime other than being Anglophones,

Those speaking truth to power and standing up against the Frenchification, and in defence of their Anglo-Saxon identity as they engage the French-backed Yaounde puppet regime in concurrent discourses in their quest for the restoration of the independence of the BSC.

Acknowledgements

On behalf of the co-organizers—Margareta Wallin Wictorin and Hans Hägerdal—of the interdisciplinary conference ‘Concurrences in postcolonial research-perspectives, methodologies, engagements’, which took place 20–23 August 2015 at Kalmar, held by the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies of Linnaeus University (LNU), Sweden, I would like to fervently thank the following sponsors—the Swedish Research Council, The Crafoord Foundation and the Vice Chancellor at LNU for their generous sponsorship. We, the organizers are equally grateful to all the participants of the conference as well as the contributors to this volume for their patience in responding to comments and bringing this work to fruition. We would also like to unreservedly thank Åse Magnusson, the Centre’s coordinator for enthusiastically taking care of the general organizational aspects of that great come together. I would personally like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their forensic scrutiny of multiple versions of various papers that make up this collection and the authors for their patience in reworking their various contributions.

Ernest A. Pineteh would like to sincerely thank the American Council of Learned Societies through its African Humanities Program for sponsoring the broader research project on Cape Town-based Somali victims of xenophobia that forms the basis of his contribution. His contribution was put together during a one-month visiting research fellowship at the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at LNU in Sweden. During the fellowship, he received financial support and was provided with office space, the internet and library access. He would like to express his deepest gratitude to the Centre for hosting him.

Cristina Sá Valentim is immensely grateful to all her interlocutors, in Portugal and Angola, especially to Catele Jeremias and Mateus Segunda Chicumba for their generosity and friendship in helping her with the complex meanings of one of the Angolan national languages—the Cokwe language. This chapter is drawn from her ongoing research done for a PhD dissertation at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. A visiting fellowship at the Center for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, LNU, Växjö from August to September 2015 that preceded the conference afforded her a chance to rework her article for publication. She extends a profound gratitude to Åse Magnusson and Professors Gunlög Fur, Hans Hägerdal and Margareta Wallin Wictorin, for all kindness, hospitality, and logistical support at Växjö, as well to her doctoral scientific advisors Dr Catarina Martins (CES-FLUC) and Dr Ricardo Roque (ICS-IUL), for their incisive comments to early reflections that preceded this paper, and for the encouragement to proceed with this PhD research.

On behalf of ibidem-Verlag, I heartily wish to thank Jakob Horstmann and Florian Bölter as well as their entire staff for their tireless efforts, time-consciousness and professionalism. It was wonderful working with all of them!

To Emilia Nkoyo Otang: Thank you for keeping the night virgil with me all through as I worked hecticly to bring this project to fruition.

Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta

Lessebo, August 31, 2017

Contributors

Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta holds a D. Phil. in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University (CEU) Budapest, Hungary. Apart from teaching stints at the Universities of Yaounde1, Cameroon, CEU, and University College Dublin, (Ireland), he has recently completed postdoctoral research at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. He is also a consultant for several NGOs in both his native Cameroon and abroad-thereby cross-pollinating between the fields of anthropology and development. He is the country expert on asylum for Cameroon for the United Kingdom-based Rights in Exile Programme. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in, and published on Cameroon, Chad, South Africa and Sierra Leone. His research interests include gender, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, environmental policy, ethnography, medical sociology/anthropology, social science and medicine, colonialism and postcolonialism.

Nicklas Hållén is a postdoctoral researcher at Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden and is currently working on a research project called African Street Literatures and the Future of Literary Form at the Department of English at Uppsala University, Sweden. He was awarded his PhD in 2011 (Umeå University). His research interests include African literature and travel literature about Africa.

Kristian Van Haesendonck is a research fellow at the University of Antwerp and works on Latin American, Caribbean and Lusophone African literatures. He is the author of ¿Encanto o espanto? Identidad y nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual (Frankfurt-Madrid: Vervuert-Iberoamericana), editor of Going Caribbean! New Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Art (Lisbon: Humus), and co-editor of Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi). His book Postcolonial Archipelagos: essays on Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African Literatures is forthcoming at Peter Lang.

Ernest A. Pineteh is senior lecturer and researcher in the Unit for Academic Literacy in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He obtained his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, for an interdisciplinary research project on the life testimonies of a group of asylum seekers and refugees. He has written and published several articles on the experiences of African migrants in South Africa. His current research interests include but are not limited to xenophobia, migrant narratives, African transnational students and academic literacies.

Melanie Klein held a fellowship as a postdoctoral researcher in the DFG Research Group “Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art. Comparative Perspectives on Historical Contexts and Current Constellations” at Freie Universitaet Berlin from 2011 to 2017. She studied Art History and Economics in Heidelberg, London and Berlin and completed her thesis on “Masculinity contested. Strategies of resistance in the art from South Africa and the oeuvre of Wim Botha” at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig in 2008. She was Visiting Associate at the Centre for African Studies in Cape Town with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service and held a two-year research position at the Graduate College “Identity and Difference. Gender Constructions and Interculturality” at the University of Trier. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art from Southern and Eastern Africa, art education and perspectives on Gender issues.

Margareta Wallin Wictorin has a PhD in Art history and visual studies from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is Reader in Art history and visual studies at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, and has a position as senior lecturer in Cultural Studies at Karlstad University. She is affiliated to Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial studies. Since 2008 she has been on several research trips to Senegal and Kenya to study contemporary art and visual culture, especially at Dak’Art, The Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary African Art In Dakar.

Cristina Sá Valentim is a cultural and social anthropologist with a BA and MA from the University of Coimbra, Portugal. The main areas of her research are related with anthropology and postcolonial studies concerning social differentiation, identitary processes, migration, power, agency, resistance, subjectivity, colonial relations, image and music. She is a PhD candidate inSociology inthe doctoral programme ‘Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenship’ at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), School of Economics of Coimbra University(FEUC). Currently she is studying the colonial category of ‘indigenous folk music’ within the Cokwe people, during the Portuguese colonialism at Lunda, northeast of Angola. To this project she did fieldwork in Portugal and Angola through oral history survey and on colonial archives. She is an associated researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), and recently collaborated with the Institute of Ethnomusicology – Center for Studies in Music and Dance (INET-md). She is the back office manager of the website “Diamang Digital” (www.diamangdigital.net).

Pia Lundqvist is a researcher in history at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her doctoral thesis (2008) contains a study on peddling in Sweden in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her main research interests lie in the areas of the history of consumption with a particular focus on textiles and material culture, migration, and cultural encounters. Her current research project, Equals or subordinates? Male and female Swedish missionaries in the Congo Free State, 1886–1908, draws attention to the complexity of different missionary identities and power hierarchies of gender, race, and class within the mission. The project is financed by the Swedish Research Council and started in 2014.

Catherine E. Hoyser is Professor of English and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, Connecticut, USA. Her doctorate is in Victorian Studies with a minor in Women’s Studies. She teaches post-colonial literature, British cultural studies, detective fiction, gender studies, and feminist theories. Publications include an anthology of women writers and an overview of the novelist Tom Robbins as well as scholarly articles. She is also a published poet. Her research in Hawaii focuses on the impact of U. S. 19th century settler colonialists and royal Hawaiian connections to Victorian England.

Terence Y. Yong holds the degree of MPhil in Higher Education from the University of Oslo, Norway. He is a doctoral researcher with Higher Education Group, School of Management, University of Tampere, Finland. The focus of his doctoral research is in the regulatory framework of governments in higher education. He also researches the influence of global policy ideas on African national university systems. He focuses on neoliberal tendencies relating to the organization and management of universities in Africa. Consequently, he stretches his research interest to assessing the impacts of universities on African economic development.

Towards Global Connections and Multiple Entanglement

Ngambouk Vitalis PemuntaCentre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden

One of the central preoccupations of postcolonial studies is ‘‘to recover the voice and agency of the subaltern to find alternative articulations to monolithic imperial representations. Universalizing perspectives obscure their origins and threaten to silence alternatives, regardless of their validity or influence” (Fur et al., 2014: 1253). The methodological and theoretical process of recovering alternative voices in space and time while factoring in our conflicting analysis and claims regarding culture, history and identity is no easy feat. The difficulties are because either one individual academic discipline or grand theory can fruitfully explain concurrent encounters. This difficulty is rather an invitation to open our eyes to the permeability of academic disciplines, concepts and methods as captured by the idea of ‘‘travelling concepts”. Concerning perspectives in research, Doris Bachmann-Medick invites us not only to take a critical look “at the differences between cultural semantics, knowledge traditions, and knowledge gaps. [Nevertheless to also] concentrate on smaller units of social interaction, on misunderstandings, or even battles over interpretation” (Bachmann-Medick 2014: 130–131). It is also an invitation to journey into the seemingly unfamiliar, a space in which to reflect upon the travels of concepts, beyond disciplinary boundaries, using widely different theoretical and methodological approaches. Stated otherwise, methodological nationalism has been shown to be inadequate in accommodating these challenges. What then is this intellectual elephant called concurrences; is it just another synonym for the concept of globalization in its various guises?

Concurrences is a complex, all-inclusive, multidisciplinary concept that describes ongoing, simultaneous cultural processes and encounters—one that gives voice to, and in which dominated populations challenge representations that play upon and legitimize racial and cultural differences (Nicholas, 1994). Challenging structures of power and actions that silence alternative, subaltern voices by recovering these voices constitute concurrent views. It is about capturing multiple voices in our analysis and demonstrating the multiple capillaries of power and myriad forms of collective and individual acts of resistance.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the multiplicity of paradigmatic meanings that the all-encompassing concept of concurrences connotes. We focus on concurrent, but hierarchical relationships between the colonized and the colonizer, and between subaltern and dominant groups. We examine how these relationships are challenged through different forms of resistance by the subaltern in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. In a sense, this collection demonstrates the complexities and contradictions inherent in these relationships regarding ideas and practices, but also regarding discourses between the colonized and the colonizer as well as the powerful and the powerless. One hallmark of colonial relations that is worthy of note is that the subjects of colonial rule are never directly and totally against the colonizer. Bill Ashcroft speaks to these ambivalent relations thus ‘‘ambivalence suggests that complicity and resistance exist in a fluctuating relation within the colonial subject’’ (Ashcroft, 1998: 12–13). These encounters involve cultural otherness, the coming together of conflicting and competing facts, narratives and counter-narratives about capitalist benevolence that mask exploitation. The same events are narrated in different ways thereby challenging the accounts of various social actors as mere fabrications. Can social agents objectively recount their encounters with each other? Why do various actors narrate the same events in different ways? Can the subaltern speak?

While the volume attempts to elicit connections between different, and sometimes disparate, instances of concurrences, it also maintains their contextual specificities. Scholars have put to question contemporary theories that portray colonialism as monolithic in character, purpose, and efficacy throughout the world (Fur et al., 2014, Nicholas, 1994). In Nicholas Thomas’ view, colonialism is not so much a discourse but rather a project—a project in which the interactions among colonizing and colonized people are far more variable and reveal greater ambivalence than is imagined (Nicholas, 1994). Thomas further concedes that ‘‘Even colonialism as a concept is not a unitary project but a rather fractured one, riddled with contradictions and exhausted as much by its internal debates as by the resistance of the colonized” (Nicholas, 1994: 51, Fur et al. 2014, 2017). The apparent humanitarian gestures of descendants of missionaries in Hawaii and of the Swedish Missionary Society (SMS) in the Congo Free State are all self-interested acts. In the same light, colonial injustice as perpetrated on the native Hawaiians cannot be whitewashed as regrettable, but understandable in its specific historical moment.

At the same time, the contradiction of compulsory freedom is palpable and omnipresent. Essays under the rubric of homophobia and the transnationalization of homosexuality raise the question of how readily Western countries should intervene or dictate the social practices of other societies. The international outcry against the persecution of same-sex partners in African countries and the competing discourses of human rights and cultural autonomy raise the issue of whether Western nations must impose the ‘‘UnAfrican practice” of same-sex relationships in the name of universal human rights. The linking of aid (a form of inter-governmental benevolence) by Western nations as a benchmark of civilization or modernity seems uncalled for and smacks of material and discursive imperialism. It leads us to question what human rights as a hegemonic discourse is really about. Human rights can, of course, not be assumed as normative, static and universal—a standard to which non-Western countries must assimilate and adhere to, to continue receiving Western development aid. As expected, African nations are resisting this Western imposition by continuing to adopt anti-homosexuality laws. Same-sex relationships in African societies go beyond sexuality, it is also intertwined with magico-religious practices, the quest for social mobility and serves as a mechanism for deflecting criticisms of bad governance and unbridled corruption among the ruling elites.

Core to this book is the recognition of the multiple understandings of concurrences and cultural encounters, and how power relationships are negotiated as well as shaping these battles across space and time. It is also, about how to simultaneously analyze these relationships and power fields by capturing the multiplicity of voices and positionalities embedded in them. While these concerns have traditionally been at the forefront of postcolonial theory, we seek to reopen and deepen these debates and find the underlying cause of its inherent ambivalences and contradictions. Through the result of new empirical, interdisciplinary studies, we engage with the voices of individuals and groups in different cultural encounters as well as how these encounters (re)shape their identities (McCorrmak, 2014, Goebel & Schabio 2013, Spivak, 1988). As a response to the incessant debates that characterize postcolonial studies, this collection emphasizes the lived experiences of social agents taking part in cultural encounters. The papers draw from a wide range of methodological traditions—auto-ethnography, participant observation, autobiography, individual in-depth interviews, storytelling, archival sources, and literary analysis. They also draw on various cultural archives—formal and informal, traditional and digital, fiction and documentary text, and different methodological traditions, present different disciplinary viewpoints and engage with a variety of geographical locations in order to explore the multiplicity and diversity of experiences, which can be brought together under the concept of ‘‘current encounters”.

To situate concurrent encounters within the fluid geographic, historic, temporal and cultural context they operate within is significant for two main reasons. First and foremost, social and cultural context and power fields/relationships matter in the experiences of subjects in concurrent encounters. Secondly, different contexts open up different possibilities for both resistance and subaltern agency. Accordingly, only a multiplicity of disciplinary lenses and not one overarching theorization can encompass the complex and varied cultural encounters that appear in this collection. Concurrences is a shorthand description for a wide range of theoretical concepts that reoccur in debates about cultural encounters, cultural productions and social experiences. Most of these concepts, including among others—identity, xenophobia, sociology of absences, contact zones, colonialism, imperialism, cultural genocide, white supremacy, deviant sexualities, sexual minorities, discursive dichotomies, invisibilities, queer, autobiography, autofiction, ‘‘divergent modernities’’, temporalities, coevalness, concurrent subjectivities, diaspora, slavery, and alienation—have originated in sociology, anthropology, history, English studies, arts history, virtual art, refugee studies, literary, and historical studies. In the course of debates on the human condition, they have traversed into other academic disciplines. While these concepts are significant in capturing concurrent encounters, they require revision and contextualization to reflect lived experiences and the reasoning of social agents involved in cross-cultural encounters. This explains why they are sometimes used differently in different disciplines.

This collection is part of a larger long-term project at Linnaeus University. It seeks to expand current scientific debates on the specificity of concurrent encounters (see Fur et al. 2014, 2017), by revisiting previous discussions on xenophobia, homophobia, the layering of temporalities—nation time, diasporic time, and time of slavery that are coeval and facilitates the encounter between concurrent subjectivities, the renegotiation of relations between past and present as well as the ambivalence and contradictions that is inherent in the various encounters that these scholars individually engage with in their papers.

At the Linnaeus University interdisciplinary Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, an interdisciplinary group of researchers is preoccupied with refining the methodological and theoretical framework for engaging with the simultaneity of claims and counterclaims about culture, history and identity.1

For more than a decade, these humanities and social science scholars have collaborated around investigations of colonialism, archives and cultural encounters. In 2011 the Swedish Research Council awarded the group funding for four years to investigate a range of cultural archives, and develop methodologies to map multiple, simultaneous, and concurring claims of reality, experience, and meaning in time and place. The conference at which most of the papers in this anthology were presented in their draft forms was one of the greatest milestones in the history of the Centre.

Concurrences as a Multifaceted Concept: Temporality and the co-production of the past

The concept of concurrences evokes many things: It is a multifaceted concept. It is an all-encompassing concept that is at the centre of cross-border thinking and intersectionality. It can be deployed alongside a wide range of concepts to approach a multiplicity of experiences and understandings such as intersectionality, transnationality, contact zones, temporality, power inequalities, resource colonialism, multiple identities, modern and local knowledge, entangled histories and connected sociologies, border thinking, contrapuntal perspectives, and transnational ethnography among others. As a methodology, Concurrences recognizes both confluence and competition, alliance and conflict, and insists that any understanding of the world must take into account both entanglements and tension between equally weighty jurisdictions. Concurrences suggest that different perspectives and locations are always and inescapably entangled and human beings constantly negotiate the different and sometimes incompatible demands arising out of these concurrent conditions.

The issues in this anthology are framed around three interconnected themes—temporality, homophobia and the transnationalization of homosexuality, entanglement and colonial encounters. Coevalness runs through most of the essays. Although the critical term ‘coeval’ speaks to and engages with Achille Mbembe’s (2001) widely cited ‘temporality of entanglement’ in On the Postcolony, Nicklas Hållén instead chooses to compare the two. Through this comparison, he articulates the notion of multiple temporality—nation time, diasporic time, and time of slavery. Hållén’s notion of multiple temporality is analogous with what philosophers variously refer to as entangled times, temporal heterogeneity, timeknots, hetero-temporality, etc. Even the present or the now is marked by plurality. It is about the idea of worlding the world, which allowed the slaves in Sidiya Hartman’s book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Routethat Hållén analyzes the possibility of recognizing the plurality of co-existing temporalities—nation, diasporic and slavery times, in her book Hartman’s search is for ‘a method of renegotiating the relations between past and present, history and identity’ (Hartman, 2007: 4). This temporal co-existence is competing and simultaneously conflictual. The various themes connect past and present, disparate places as well as competing and co-operating social agents who influence each other and are involved in the co-production of ideas and identities.

Whatever transpires in one part of the globe reverberates in other parts of the world. Europe is facing the adverse effects of bad governance, mismanagement, unemployment, climate change and Islamic fundamentalism from the Middle East and Africa as refugees flood into the continent leading to homophobic reactions. In the fall of 2015, Europe’s fortress walls got shattered, putting to question attempts such as barbed wire along the Hungarian border and detention camps offshore of Australia. Scores of refugees escaping violence and threats from climate change flooded the shores of the continent seeking safety. It is no longer possible—if it ever was—to ignore “the global” in whatever shape it enters the consciousness. Scholarly disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are failing short in grappling with these simultaneously local and global challenges. The process of migration brings together multiple temporalities and is often fraught with xenophobia from the host society, victimization and concurrently, resilience from refugees. In fact, even places such as “home” tend to have multiple meanings. Methodological nationalism has been shown to be inadequate in accommodating the challenges of multiple temporalities that the process of migration involves.

Similarly, autofiction gives a semblance of truth to the multiple but concurrent voices of different characters that allow an author to express multiple personalities, temporalities and the cultural complexity involved in diasporic lives. Through autofiction, the autobiography of an individual is written across different characters representing the narrator and the author concurrently. Characterized simultaneously by ambiguities and contradictions, autofiction shows the multiplicity of the author’s self, and multiple voices that create the effect of verisimilitude and authenticity (see Kristian Van Haesendonck this volume)

Travel writing scholar Nicklas Hållén appropriates the concepts of home, temporality and identity to explore the inaccessibility, coevalness and concurrent intersection of multiple temporalities. Also, he explores how they tend to differentially shape places and human life. Hållén explores the concurrent opposition and rupture between past and present as captured in the complexity involved in the relations between Africa and the black Western subject through Saidiya Hartman’s travelogue Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route to signal distance and difference rather than closeness and sameness. The group of travellers with whom Hartman interacts, he argues, have juggled identities. They are simultaneously American pilgrims, the ancestors of contemporary Ghanaians and African Americans who escaped slavery. They exist, like Hartman, in time of slavery insofar as it shapes their world and identity as a people of refugees, but they are at the same time, free from the constraints of this horizon-less temporality. The layering of temporalities is paradoxical, and results into multiple, concurrent temporalities—nation time, diaspora time and the time of slavery. This entanglement of temporalities makes the travellers coeval with Hartman and the reader and facilitates the encounter between concurrent subjectivities. In the spirit of Paul Gilroy (1993), Hållén points to the need to consider space and time as relational in their underarticulation with racialized being. As concepts, past and present and its impacts on the lived experience of the diaspora creates connections between the living and dead, traditional and modern.

The past and ongoing he argues, merge and become coeval and concurrent since they achieve a kind of encounter between the two subjectivities. This encounter is, however, characterized by fictitiousness, because in this textual moment more than one past and one present intersect. Hartman is faced with resolving the ambiguities and contradictions of the coexistence of a sense of belonging and a personal sense of loss and uprootedness. He demonstrates how the language of love and kinship and that of domination and ownership of property are simultaneously intertwined in the discursive history of the slave trade. Central in this language are relationships embedded in the temporal and spatial concepts of coevalness and closeness. They are central because the relationship is threatened by the slave’s and child’s departure and estrangement from their people. In negotiating relations between past and present, history and identity, Hartman finds herself in some sought of a dilemma as she attempts to stage an encounter between the self and an entangled past and present that, nonetheless remains distant and unreachable. Hållén concedes that Hartman is seeking to approach the history that has been severed from the present not by the ordinary passage of time, but by the rupture of the middle passage and forced amnesia under slavery. In his analysis of Hartman’s work, Hållén connects places and multiple temporalities by chronicling the forced journeys from the homeland to the Americas and the journey back in time as a voyage back in the date of slavery. The journey back in the date of slavery is contrasted with diasporic time, temporality and history that is discontinuous and fractured. Diasporic time is simultaneously compared with nation time, which tends to exclude and is only accessible to those having a privileged and largely uncontested position within the narrative of the Western country. Unlike diaspora time that emphasizes “… Breaks and continuities,” in a march toward Western style progress, nation time “links past, present and future”. Hållén highlights the enmeshed histories and hyphenated African-American identity that creates a rupture between past and current.

Combining the concepts of the politics of violence and resilience, academic literacy and migration scholar Ernest A. Pineteh demonstrates how the social and political violence experienced by Somali refugees in Cape Town, who are fleeing Al-Qa’ida orchestrated violence in their home country shape the experiences of the xenophobic violence they face in post-apartheid South Africa. Pineteh unearths the multiple meanings of home and flight as well as multiple temporalities. Somalis’ reconstruction of home as resembling post-apartheid South Africa renders the concept of home as concurrently “amorphous and fluid” (Arthur 2001: 133) as well as a contested space. Their struggle over spaces and for social inclusion in a xenophobic South Africa echoes the spatial contestation in Somali. The violence in the former served as preparatory time and time of emboldening (co-existence of temporalities) for the xenophobia in the latter country. He goes on to demonstrate how resilience concurrently implies the risk of endangerment or significant adversity even in the face of great assault and active adaptation to the process of social development. Faced with incessant violence at home, Somali refugees developed survival strategies and the abilities to deal with hostilities in the course of their journeys into exile. The narratives of their fragmented travel/flight into exile connect different places (“spatiality of the journey”) and temporalities because each transit point in the course of their journey created a particular migratory experience worth remembering or forgetting.

Ernest uses storytelling to reconstruct the experiences of Somali migrants. He connects disparate places through the spatial and temporal metaphors that express the physical and psychological effects of exile, immigration and displacement. Their journeys into exile are concurrently characterized by memory and imagination as they negotiated between old and new, past and present, self and other, safety and danger. Memories of violence in Somalia are concurrent with memories of displacement. Concurrently, their ability to take a business risk and operate businesses in volatile environments has exposed them to xenophobia from the local South African population who faced with failing and poor delivery of social services, suspect successful migrant business operators of casting a spell on them. Somali refugees constitute a community of forced migrants whose national identities and sense of belonging have been simultaneously shattered by the “destructive insurgency of Al-Qa’ida activities and the counter-terrorism actions of the United States’’. As accounts of displacement, Somali narratives of home and flight to exile serve as tropes of memory that shape our understanding of their resilience to post-apartheid violence and their strategies to navigate hostile spaces using survival tactics in spaces where they are not wanted. Pineteh demonstrates how by transforming their past traumatic memories into social capital and narratives, they gain a sense of place and time and chart the future. While they make sense of their selves, their collective identity and the events that have shaped their lives, they are concurrently caught up in the logic of ambivalence between remembering and forgetting. They can choose to either talk about the past, suppress it or let the past reside in the past. It is about the realization, textualization, suppression, burial or avoidance of the past. Somali memories serve as stories that attach political agency to their sense of belonging and which help us make sense of their social existence in a new South Africa fraught with anti-foreigner sentiments. The migrant journeys often concurrently involve diversion, repetition and simultaneity. In this description of flight, there is an interesting interconnection of different events, which helps to shape our understanding of this migrant’s experiences, exposing us to “complex webs of historical past in the present” (Hautaniemi 2006: 82).

The Latin American and Caribbean scholar Kristian Van Haesendonck addresses the similarity between autobiographical writing concerning “diaspora’’ or “migration’’ literature and autofiction—the concurrence of facts and fiction in an author’s life. Van Haesendonck argues that as a mode of writing, autofiction is used to create meaning in the post-colony and to give a semblance of truth to the multiple but concurrent voices of different characters that allow an author to express, rather than multiple personalities, the cultural complexity that is involved in diasporic lives. Through autofiction, the autobiography of an individual is written across different characters. The classic first person narrator (“I’’) is not the only possible voice. There are concurrent characters corresponding to the narrator and author. Real life events are spread out across the lives of very different characters. He compares two novels: Guilherme Mendes da Silva’s De humeuren van meneer Utac and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and beside their seamless mix of autobiographical elements with fictional ones, he addresses the themes of displacement, connections between home and abroad through diaspora as well as connected histories that are central to these. Although Diaz grew up as a nerd in the Dominican ghetto, he simultaneously finds himself uprooted because of his love for academic pursuits in particular and Western pop culture in general. Mendes da Silva’s transnational autofiction takes root in the United States. He addresses the conflictive relationship between the Dominican Republic’s national history and its diaspora.

Van Haesendonck concedes that both authors explore the self (the auto in autofiction) which functions as a lens for examining broader issues of national, regional, and diasporic identities, the construction of an alternative modernity as well as the postcolonial status of the more general regions. In his autofictional account, Junot Díaz reflects on his nomadic life in both the Caribbean and Cape Verde as well as on his feeling of a sense of double belonging and uprootedness. Using his fictionalized name of mister Utac, the latter articulates his sense of loss and uprootedness, which is the result of his migration from Cape Verde to the Netherlands and his decision to return to the latter country. In Junot Díaz’s autofictional account, he self-embedded himself into two different characters—Yunior and Oscar without “fitting” into none of them with ease.

Although the autobiography of a person is narrated by himself/herself and is believed to be an objective and a non-fictional account of that individual’s life, autofiction, Van Haesendonck argues, is however fraught with ambiguities because of the simultaneity between factual and fictional elements. Though lacking conceptual popularity when compared to an autobiographical account, it is characterized by diversity in the genre. Although autobiographical writing concurrently integrates elements of an individual’s history, it fails to privilege the author’s biography. Similarly, while autofiction tends to authenticate an autobiography, it carries only a semblance of truth (verisimilitude). Fictional elements can, however, undermine an autobiographical narrative. Despite divergences in cultural contexts, both da Silva and Díaz are preoccupied with profound long-term cultural encounters and connected histories between the Caribbean and Cape Verde and their respective Diasporas. In tracing the cultural and historical links between the Caribbean and Africa, da Silva shows how syncretic forms of cultural expression have taken root in African religions and suffered significant transformations because of contact with the local Caribbean religious and cultural practices. The syncretic cultural productions that constitute the divergent modernities of both the Caribbean and Africa are usually relegated to the realm of primitive practices—that is, as in opposition to what modernity should look like. In reality, these practices have modernized in a way that cannot easily be explained through Western concepts.

Homophobia and the transnationalization of homosexuality

The globalization of human rights activism, which partly speaks to the need to respect the rights of homosexuals has instead tended to endanger same-sex individuals and made them increasingly invisible in most of Africa. They face homophobic reactions and death threats and are obliged to live in a closet. While lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals are objects of homophobia; gay right activists are accused of violating Africa’s cultural codes. Artists who attempt to give the LGBT community visibility and voice play a dual role. They simultaneously call attention to the plight of these sexual minorities while also exposing them to the violence and homophobia of society. Furthermore, they are simultaneously Africans and the queer and are associated with the typically homophobic and discriminatory African context in which LGBT people live in fear. Various international exhibitions, galleries and museums serve as arenas for negotiating queerness by making queer visibility relevant by creating awareness about their daily sufferings and humiliations. On the one hand, the LGBT community is concurrently acknowledged and designated while on the other they face resistance, disrespect and hatred (“oppositional forces”) from various sectors of society including the media in Africa. Even in African countries like South Africa where the LGBT community is acknowledged and granted rights, they remain on the margins of society, since these rights are never implemented. The non-implementation of their rights takes place even when queer exists as individuals and as a group, and look like everyone else.

The social anthropologist Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta combines local level ethnography and auto-ethnography and engages with the concurrent and contentious debates between African and Western societies over the supposed “UnAfrican” practice of same-sex intimacy, which African countries are coerced into legitimizing by Western nations. Respect for human rights including the rights of same-sex partners is increasingly linked to the disbursement of development aid. Pemunta demonstrates that while same-sex relationships among the elites are intertwined with class and the maintenance of power through supernatural means, they are fiercely opposed by society thereby leading to homophobia. Concurrently, the competing ideals of universal human rights and sexual orientation, which is a protected category of nondiscrimination, are in competition with African tradition/authenticity and presumed ideological colonization from the West. African politicians are expected to display evidence of respect for human rights by being tolerant of homosexuality while as moral entrepreneurs; they should serve as custodians of traditional values that extol biological reproduction to their constituents.

Using the case of Cameroon, and building on the core notions of “heterosexual citizenship’’ and “heteronormativity’’, Pemunta demonstrates how the deployment of political homophobia against political activists and the LGBT community and how the competing visions between nation and sexuality are primordial in national identity construction. While Western imposed norms of democratization and good governance have brought to the fore the issue of the status of sexual minorities, it has simultaneously exposed the LGBT community to the homophobic violence of society in Africa. Homophobia is, however, doubly appropriated by disenchanted masses left out of the benefits of the economic growth associated with democracy to question the morality of their rulers and the ruling elites to account for their failure to deliver on the dividends of democracy to their people. Caught up in a situation of role conflict, there is the second appropriation of the concept of privacy and individual autonomy by the political class and ambivalence as a political strategy among the ruling elites who simultaneously have to comply with donor conditionalities as well as to reflect their cultural credentials as moral entrepreneurs in their communities. There is also the simultaneous appropriation of the concept of democracy and respect for human rights including the rights of LGBT people through official discourses while at the same time; the LGBT community is stigmatized, humiliated and subjected to persecution. Homophobia is paradoxically a strategy that state agents also appropriate to cover up their inability to deliver social services to the masses as well as to blackmail opponents.

Visual art scholar Melanie Klein employs the idea of the “travelling concept’’ to examine strategies of queering in artistic works from Africa within the context of exhibitions, and their relationship to intersecting political, social and cultural debates around the issue of homosexuality. Relying on the works of various artists, Klein demonstrates how through various exhibitions queerness is negotiated across regional boundaries. The Rotterdam (Netherlands) based artist Ato Malinda, and Igshaan Adams who resides in Cape Town, South Africa, provide a multiplicity of alternative conceptualizations and narrations of homosexuality. Designation, acknowledgement and solidarity as well as resistance, disrespect and hate concurrently surround homosexuality. These issues intersect with categories such as race, ethnicity, class, religion and spatial locations. In the face of the constant conflicts and homophobia that characterize homosexuality, same-sex partners negotiate their identities both as individuals and as a group within a global network of antagonistic forces. These forces include African anti-gay movements, American evangelicals on the one hand and on the other hand, internationally engaged non-governmental organizations promoting gay rights. The extended battlefields of Western or American oppositional contestations on homosexuality and transgender politics are, however, found in African countries. The concurrent representations of “the West as the epitome of modernity and civilized values” as well as the rest as needing to be “civilized” which is evident of hierarchical power relationships inform the politically and discursively conflicting constellation surrounding homosexuality.

Klein argues that in presenting representations of queerness in arts from Africa, artists find themselves in a dilemma in their dual position of marginality: artists are concurrently African and queer. As such, artists are perceived as oppressed LGBTQ protagonists producing ‘queer’ and thus politically significant art. It emerges from Klein’s analysis of discourses, different sources, several relevant exhibitions, and their presentational practice that homosexuality is discursively trapped in the backwardness-progressiveness-dichotomy between African and Western countries. This dichotomy is the result of dominant, interwoven discourses: Africa is reinvented as a heterosexual continent in ‘African’ debates and stigmatized as homophobic in ‘European’ debates. The use of the discussion of “sexual minorities in Africa’’ by Western donors and funding agencies, she argues, present “sexual minorities’’ as people who are in violation of the cultural codes of their communities. Homosexuality is at the intersection of the battleground between human rights politics and neoliberal dynamics. Simultaneously, the visibility of same-sex intimacy mediated by human rights groups has led to increased vulnerability of the LGBTQ community and their violability that is alleged to violate cultural codes is turned into an acknowledgement of global efforts to fight against discrimination. As a “travelling concept’’ queerness concurrently refers to both the knowledge to actively engage in theory and discourse formations and the connection to LGBTQ communities as they are circulated, and they travel worldwide through international exhibitions, galleries and museums. Queer visibility simultaneously is politically relevant; it raises awareness and catalyzes the push for social change. The variety and concurrence of the narrations create awareness for the various discriminations but also relations, affirmations and demarcations that LGBTQ people are engaged with.

Drawing on the concepts of queer visibility and visual resistance, art historian Margareta Wallin Wictorin describes and interprets a collection of artworks contesting homophobia. Like Melanie Klein, the collection of artwork she engages with was exhibited at the DAK’Art 2014 in Dakar, Senegal. To give the artworks context, Margareta combines relevant information about them from the exhibition catalogue but also draws on a Peirce-inspired semiotic method that relates iconic, indexical and symbolic signs (Rose, 2012: 119). Differently composed, they could be interpreted differently and have different objectives. Margareta analyzes the works of the artists Ato Malinda, Milumbe Haimbe and Andrew Esiebo. Ato for instance concurrently creates empathy through an interactive performance work meant to draw attention to the everyday torments that homosexual people live through in Africa. She shared the life stories of LGBT individuals and presented queer visibility and audibility, intimately. She was able to tell the world about their existence in Africa and homosexuality as not the “UnAfrican” practice that political leaders are trying to make people believe. Conspicuous invisibility—represents what can neither be seen nor shown, as well as the censorship of homosexuality and queer ideas. Contrary to Ato, Milumbe used both visual and verbal means to narrate a fictive story and a silent story to promote an antithesis to a stereotypical superhero. This is a way of imagining what possible future role models could look like.

Margareta maintains that LGBT persons as presented through various artistic representations are diverse. They neither are a monolithic group of individuals nor made up of an odd exception. Queer visibility is paradoxical. While it seeks greater space for cultural, economic, political forms of representation, it also mitigates the effects of homophobia. The provision of visual information about the existence of LGBT people and their way of living to resist oppression and exclusion, resist hetero-normativity and give more visibility to the plurality of gender and sexualities. Both artists use visual art to provide visibility to queering for ideas and statements and to serve as a medium for contesting homophobia. On his part, Esiebo demonstrates through art that despite the presumed role-conflict and accompanying homophobia, there is no contradiction between being religious and gay. He concedes that the sexual practices of homosexuality and not issues of love, desire, aspirations, compassion or faith have been the misplaced focus of homophobia. The coexistence of visual resistance by queer visibility and artwork on conspicuous invisibility (South Africa), Margareta concedes, highlights the gap between granting LGBT individuals constitutional rights and failing to uphold same by the South African state. Art is further used not only to create awareness but also to influence politicians to promote the human rights of the LGBT community.

Entanglement and Colonial Encounter

Contradictory and paradoxical entanglements are a prominent feature of colonial encounters. They are often characterized by the lack of any homogenous and unitary voices (“in-between positions”). At the same time, multiple concurrent narratives are embedded in the dominant civilizing trope and the discourse of colonial/missionary benevolence. Capitalist benevolence masks the enduring legacy of resource colonialism and the exploitation of the indigenous population as well as their conquest and the ensuing cultural balkanization, uprootedness, loss of local knowledge and cultural genocide (see Catherine Hoyser’s contribution). The relationship between the subaltern and the powerful, the colonizer and the colonized is characterized by a seamlessness of temporality between the past, present and future in both space and time. Colonial encounters also transform the identities of the colonized and the colonizer who come to the encounter with different, and often, competing for perspectives in the light of their worldviews. As seen in the Kongo Kingdom between the missionaries and the indigenous Congolese, these encounters are sometimes characterized by cultural reciprocity/hybridization/creolization. Attempts by missionaries from the Swedish Missionary Society to convert indigenous villagers resulted in the amalgamation/hybridization of Christian and indigenous religious beliefs (see Pia Lundqvist’s contribution). In these encounters, neither the missionaries nor the colonialists were a homogenous group. The relationship between colonialism and missionaries was both complex and ambiguous but also dynamic, and characterized by co-operation and conflict. At times, the colonial establishment provided security to the missionaries, but still, complicity and resistance marked their relationship. Similarly, friendship and co-operation initially characterized the relationship between the Chiefs in the Congo and the missionaries but later changed to a missionary offensive and an indigenous resistance. While the Portuguese state in Lunda forwarded labour as a form of “imperial benevolence” that was inevitable for improving local conditions, both the state and the Diamang mining company used the discourse to justify coercive and compulsory labour practices meted out on the natives. Although most of the labour was coercive, labourers were equally able to negotiate longer stays and multiple contracts in the mines as well as incentives for their work. This shows the dynamism of relationships over time and the coexistence of conflict and co-operation (see Cristina Sá Valentim’s contribution).

Similarly, Terry Yong addresses the contentious issue of competing knowledge systems and policy imposition/lending between the World Bank and African countries. Through both consent and coercion, African countries are imposed a global one-size-fit-all education solution by the World Bank that fails to take cognizance of their socioeconomic realities and needs. They consent to implement educational policies that prioritize poverty alleviation and that serve their political interests by investing more in primary education whereas to be competitive, and to encourage research and development, they need to jump start the higher educational sector and increase investment as well as participation. Developing African countries were accordingly, forced to enhance their support for primary education over higher education as a way of identification and being in line with the international community.

Literary scholar Catherine E. Hoyser uses a biographical approach to document the relationship between native Hawaiians and a member of the fifth generation of New England missionary descendants Amos Starr Cooke’s retrospective look at her family’s culpability in cultural genocide and land grabbing. Cooke’s descendants had negated every good thing about Hawaiian life and culture including their sophisticated system of sustainable agriculture. In Hoyser’s analysis, the descendants of the missionary mask resource exploitation with the use of the discourse of benevolence whereas their ancestors brought chaos, death, poverty and ruined the landscape through the development of capitalism, Christianity and democracy. One of their descendants Cooke is, however, guilty and concurrently willing to make amends for the deeds of her ancestors to avoid the curse of early and premature death on her relatives. Despite the presumed benevolence of the Mission Boys, protest and resistance from the local inhabitants marked the occupation of the native Hawaiian Islands.

Hoyser juxtaposes the entanglement of the concurrent narratives of contemporary life with the past trauma of missionary history localized in one mission descendant’s processing of trauma by challenging the historic narrative of missionary benevolence and compensation for the damage that her ancestors helped perpetuate. She simultaneously enacts her own attempts at reparations to native Hawaiians as an effort to break a cycle of loss and grief for Hawaiians and her own family. Missionary benevolence, Hoyser argues, was complicit with colonialist and capitalist agendas. This was despite a vow in the original charter that forbade interference in local politics or culture. Although the alphabet ensured literacy in the Hawaiian language, it was a tool of conquest. The translation of the Bible was a mechanism of governmentality—it was a mechanism for converting Hawaiians into Christianity. By leaving out many sounds in the spoken language, the missionaries distorted the language. They caused violence and Balkanized the culture. Their actions led to the loss of identity, cultural genocide, and loss of local knowledge, world sense, idiosyncrasies, and the orchestration of cultural genocide by missionaries, erasure of collective memory, cultural pride and sense of identity. They controlled the educational system—directed the Chief’s children’s school where Royal children were taught Western customs and language so that they could interact with representatives and royalty from other countries. The instruction was provided in Western European subjects—a development that contributed to the near annihilation of Hawaiian customs, arts, and beliefs in their charges.

Hoyser looks beyond the purported benevolence of the missionaries and points out that the aim was to ensure the deeply entrenched financial, political, and cultural dominance of missionary descendants in the Islands. Missionary descendants claimed to have developed and transformed the various Islands that constitute Hawaii into functioning Congregationalist, Christian, capitalist democracy with a titular monarchy. The self-serving civilizing narrative mask atrocities including the annexation of Hawaii in 1898. Until date, the long-lasting trauma of colonialism, haunt the psyche of Hawaiians. Hoyser skillfully unpacks the multiple concurrent narratives embedded in the dominant civilizing narrative. She chronicles the impact of one dominant civilizing narrative and one dissenting voice-a missionary descendant who eschews the saviour narrative of her missionary ancestors and regards the legacy as an actual curse still being enacted on her family.

Historian Pia Lundqvist examines the contradictory encounter between the Swedish Missionary Society and the indigenous population in the Congo Free State. Lundqvist concedes that despite the intertwined history of colonialism and missionaries, the latter were not a monolithic group of actors. Furthermore, they stood for different opinions and actions, and even the character and organization of the mission changed over time. A further distinction was made between “God’s Whitemen” (the missionaries) from other white people in the Congo. Additionally, despite imbalances in the first encounter between Congolese natives and the missionaries, as the missionary enterprise became institutionalized and formalized, the latter subjected Congolese converts to more detailed, formal regulations. In the analyzed texts, the differences between the missionaries and the indigenous population are explained regarding race, whereas, at an earlier stage, these discrepancies were instead explained by the religious and cultural disparity.

In analyzing the complexity and ambiguity of the relationship between colonialism and missionaries, Lundqvist demonstrates that both the missionary and indigenous culture and identity were dynamic. She examines the multidimensionality, complexity and contradictions of the relations between the SMS and the Congolese natives. One hallmark of colonial relations that emerges in these encounters is that of ambivalent relations orchestrated by the fact that the subjects under colonial rule are never simply and completely against the colonizer “ambivalence suggests that complicity and resistance exist in a fluctuating relation within the colonial subject” (Ashcroft 1998: 12–13). Lundqvist’s analyses of the colonial archives show that the missionary position was “in-between” over time. While ambiguities existed within the missionary organization as a whole, it also presumably existed within inside each missionary. The converts concurrently had a dual identity—while they originated from the Congo, they were also socialized within the culture of the missionaries. Their cultural origin from within Congolese culture made their position as ambivalent as that of the missionaries some of whom found themselves in a dilemma by their modest backgrounds and superiority complex vis-à-vis the natives and the promotion of brotherhood.

The encounter was characterized by cultural reciprocity/hy­bridization/creolization. There was the amalgamation/hy­bri­dization of Christian and indigenous religious beliefs in the Kongo Kingdom. For example, the first meeting in Kibunzi between the missionaries and the native Chiefs was characterized by friendship and co-operation. However, as the missionaries attempted to implant Christianity, this interactive encounter later transformed over time into a missionary offensive and indigenous resistance. The latter encounter at the Diadia missionary station sharply contradicts the earlier encounter with local Chiefs and people in Kibunzi. Although some Chiefs in Diadia were against the missionaries, it was, however, not the entire village. The founding of both mission stations, Lundqvist concedes demonstrates that the missionary encounter concurrently, “include[d] the exchange of gifts, negotiations and displays of kindness—and perhaps even friendship—as well as fear and violence’’. She further highlights the divergent voices of indigenous people through empirical cases and themes. While colonial archives and records tend to exclude vast amounts of information (Stoler 2002) kept by missionaries, archival materials and printed sources also silence the voices of female Swedish missionaries and indigenous women, though not in the same ways or in equal measure. Drawing on the stories of Congolese converts (“converted native teachers’’) who were supposed to have been re-shaped by Christianity to expose the nature of these encounters, the stories demonstrate that missionary encounters were not monolithic: They were concurrently characterized by “cultural imperialism, missionary offensive and indigenous resistance, as well as mutual exchange, openness and friendship’’. These encounters were simultaneously characterized by competition and co-operation. A complex relationship also existed between the missionaries, colonial state and the indigenous population. Common interests and conflicts sometimes existed between the government and missionaries, as well as people and missionaries. Missionaries were paradoxically divided between promoting brotherhood and the imperial agenda.

Doctoral researcher in social anthropology Cristina Sá Valentim analyzes songs among which is the Mwambwambwa of the Cokwe to explore the hierarchical nature and simultaneous complexities of the colonial encounter between labourers in Lunda, Angola and a Portuguese mining company, Diamang that was involved in voluntary and forced labour conscriptions. Portuguese colonialists through the aegis of the Dundu Museum recorded the songs. The Portuguese colonial labour regime perceived forced labour as a form of “imperial benevolence’’ and as inevitable for improving local living conditions. The songs explore the ambiguous and complex dimension as well as the new anxieties raised by the new ambitions and social expectations associated with labour in the mines—particularly the fear of returning from forced labour without goods and money. Such a scenario would trigger several processes of violence among contract workers at the mines. Sá Valentim describes the double bind situation that simultaneously entailed physical, emotional and symbolic violence. Being unable to do the hard work was a sign of shame and an individual could lose his wife to the man who completed the job. Escaping from the harsh labour conditions carried the danger of being caught by the Whiteman and taken back to the mines where the vicious cycle of violence would continue.

The natives used musical expressions (a form of covert resistance strategy) to make their voices heard and to expose ambiguous engagements within the context of the new, modern colonial realities. Sá Valentim goes beyond the surface level realities of forced labour recruitment and examines the construction of colonial identities as embedded within different and concurrent constraints, purposes and agendas. The songs that Sá Valentim analyses highlight the core issues of the affirmation of cultural identity, compliance with the colonial rule, dynamics of gender, power as well as resistance. The native population resisted assimilation through their songs, and in the process preserved their cultural values in the face of modernity. Underlying these colonial complexities is a web of relations among persons entangled in high-level hierarchical and asymmetrical power relationships but who were always scratching a bare existence. Sá Valentim conceptualizes colonialism as a set of performative and social practices made up of contradictory or ambiguous meanings where different agencies, times, and places overlap and intersect. The identities of colonized and colonizer is simultaneously constructed through suffering, anxieties, inquietudes, worries, hopes, expectations, dilemmas, desires, unpredictable situations, engagements and different negotiations. Native agency and the ambiguous as well as hidden transcripts of resistance (Scott, 1990) coexists with the oppression that the colonial process constituted. To unpack and foreground understanding of subtle forms of imposition and the contestation of power, issues of power need to be analyzed beyond the balance between domination and resistance.

Both the colonial state and private enterprises including Diamang appropriated the discourse of the “civilizing mission to justify the coercive and compulsory labour practices meted out on the indigenes’’. They further used both coercion in labour recruitment and incentives for labourers such as allowing them to stay on longer. Confronted with different knowledge systems articulating both Western and traditional/native rationalities, the colonized and the colonizer developed juggled identities, but at the same time got their identities transformed by the encounter. The colonial encounter produced transformation in the Angolan local knowledge system leading to “a poli-rationality logic that was developed as a mechanism for surviving in the new world’’.