ECAS 2013

Joseph Massad (2002) coined the term "gay international" to mock Western activists whose inappropriate and culturally insensitive interventions to promote sexual minority rights in Egypt - and by extension the Global South more generally - exposed the ostensible beneficiaries of their activism to increased danger. Western "queer imperialism" has also been criticized in the academic sphere. Indeed, the majority of studies of non-normative sexualities in Africa since they began to proliferate in the 1990s are the result of research by European, North American and white South African researchers, my own obviously included. African lgbti and their enemies mostly provided the raw data in these studies. In recent years, however, Africans have been taking a more assertive role in the production of knowledge on the topic, often in collaboration with Western researchers and funding agencies. In this paper, I reflect on one such collaborative experience that brought together a diverse group of mostly young researchers and activists over the course of six years to produce Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory and Citizenship, to be published in Fall 2013. What lessons can we learn from a process that emphasized close attention to post-colonial critiques of Africanist scholarship and building transnational networks?

When Indian scholars rhetorically asked whether the Subaltern could speak they set the ball rolling on the game of questioning the authority of scientific knowledge, but most of all on the warrant to speak on behalf of silent others. Since then much energy has gone into the critical interrogation of the political economy of western knowledge over the "Rest", including doubts over its claims to truthfulness as Valentin Mudimbe, among others, have pointed out. The problem however is that the critical stance which has come to define the "Subaltern's" discomfort with knowledge about his or her societies produced from far away has been formulated using vocabularies derived from the language of the Social Sciences almost under the assumption that the concepts upon which they are based are innocent. Well, maybe they are not. This paper addresses this apparent paradox by inquiring into the conditions under which social scientific concepts can be deployed to break the barriers of knowledge production. In other words, the paper asks whether conceptual discussion can provide the ground upon which collaborative work can be pursued and, if so, on whose terms and provided which adjustments to be made to which traditions of working with concepts. In fact, the paper addresses the challenge of collaborative work across cultures and continents with reference to the possibility of setting limits to claims to intelligibility.

This paper debates experiences from a Swiss-South African research partnership on challenges to democracy. Instead of exclusively focusing on South Africa, which is usually the norm in partnerships between "Africanists" and African scholars, we have investigated various arenas of democratic politics and the challenges to democracy they provoke. Despite differences, a striking similarity is that both countries consider themselves model democracies that tend to overlook deficiencies and threats to democracy. The two democratic systems - representative versus direct democracy - mark distinctive ways of putting democratic ideals into practice. Strategies employed within the two political systems by different actors to engage with and influence political processes, the quality of government-society relations and the ways in which different interest groups respond to political opportunity structures offer a comparative perspective.

We present empirical studies on identity and the struggle for autonomy within the Swiss Confederation, populist politics and the understanding of and expectations from democracy in a context where history, heritage, tradition and culture shape contestations in current politics.

The insights we have derived from an African gaze on Switzerland and a Swiss gaze on Africa, from this 'regard croisé', have deepened our understanding of how democracy works. Moreover, this novel approach not only offered spaces for African academics to move away from an exclusive focus on Africa but also allowed for critical reflections on the academic tradition, language and intellectual agenda of "Africanists" from outside the continent and African scholars.