Drawing on work in progress, among the questions that participants will address are: What insight does reading African literature, film, popular culture, etc., in terms of ethics bring? Do we learn anything, for example, about the ethics of reading from African literature? How do African authors, performers, etc. challenge metropolitan conceptions of ethics by setting to work ethical precepts understood to be specifically African? What does it mean that an ethics is phrased in a particular language - in other words, is ethics idiomatic, and can it be translated, or even universalized? How is ethics inflected by gender and sexuality? How does ethics enter into practices of research and writing about African literature, film, popular culture, etc. - for example, what protocols are to be adopted when drawing on interviews, or using colonial-era archives?
Connect Africa is a group of African literature scholars, with friends in other disciplines, based at universities and colleges in the northeastern United States. For further details, contact Prof. Mark Sanders at ms130@nyu.edu.
Connect Africa, Spring 2019: Ethics
