Conference information

Venue:  North-West University, Mahikeng Campus (South Africa)

Date:  11-14 September 2023

Conference Fee: R1 500,00

Background to the conference

The colonial history of Southern Africa established an extractive political economy in which capital was able to loot from pre- or extra-colonial economies, ecosystems, and cultural achievements in pursuit of metropolitan wealth.  To the extent that colonial capitalism depended, and continues to depend, on this brutal extractivism, the resulting economies have been among the most unequal and unsustainable globally.

Mbembe (2005) has argued that such extractive structures rest on three kinds of violence.  First, the violence of conquest.  The seizing of land is a good example of the outcome of this sort of violence.  Second, the symbolic violence of legitimation deployed by colonial authorities to recast their conquest as legitimate.  The domination of local epistemologies is implied in this, as colonial hegemons worked to show that colonialism would bring with it rational goods able to replace the destructive superstitions of local populations.  Finally, the violence of reiteration. This describes that set of symbolic enactments that renamed the colonized world in terms of the colonial order such that the conquered would, at every turn, be reminded, through place names, landmarks, and statues, that they are conquered.

Engaging sustainability from an epistemic, political, and geographic context fundamentally shaped by these three types of violence requires recognizing that the world emerged from these violences as extractive, rather than sustainable and that transitioning from the extractive to the sustainable requires directly engaging these three areas of violence.  The question of sustainability in Southern Africa cannot be divorced from the conversation about how both the environmental crisis and available responses are features of the colonially ordered extractive world that rests upon the three violences outlined above, and further, that sustainability itself may be yet another form of legitimizing violence by which the global north is able to dictate policy in its own image.  Stealing land; redefining landscape in terms of settler belonging; and undermining local knowledge systems are, thus three processes and areas that we have identified as lenses through which many of our contemporary crises are most acutely expressed.

Call for papers

We are thus inviting abstracts for papers and panels engaging three key areas of our colonial legacy pertaining to sustainability.  The first is land and the question of land restitution and land use to redress inequities deriving from colonial conquest.  The second is landscape and the question of symbolic restitution to respond to the construction of lived realities as unfolding against the backdrop of what Mognolo has termed the second nomos of the earth, where all places are somehow versions of a European original.  The third is local knowledge and the question of epistemic restitution such that we can articulate a local foundation in terms of which to imagine and pursue an emergent sustainability from within the ruins of colonial extractivism.

Paper and Panel abstracts can be submitted to sdgplusconference@gmail.com before 30 June 2023.  Abstracts should be no more than 200 words, and panel applications should please include a panel abstract and a list of presenters who will make up the panel.  Presentations should be planned to not exceed 20 minutes to afford ample time for discussion from the floor.  The abstracts will be considered by a multi-institutional conference team and authors will receive feedback by 14 July.