Panel 141: Oratory in Assembly Citizenship, Orality and Public Spaces in Africa

The workshop focuses on speech practices one can observe in assemblies like “street parliaments”, public talk shows (ebimeeza in Uganda), religious ceremonies, local councils, reconciliation workshops, participatory development projects, “grins” and other social gatherings like funerals or weddings. The idea is to produce ethnographies of these spaces of deliberation to shed light on citizenship practices and power relations. Ultimately, a comparative reflection on the historical and imaginary foundations of the public sphere in Africa is expected.

Panelists will analyze the procedures and forms of talk and interrogate their shaping and how they relate with dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and domination. They will pay a specific attention on the profile of the speakers, as well as on the representations and uses they have of this practice.

One of our main interests will be the question of the historicity of these assemblies and the fact that they are the result of processes of circulation of vocabulary, habits, procedures, representations of the value of oratory, as well as imaginaries of the self, of citizenship and of power. Our second important focus will be on how these assemblies are situated within the political systems. What do these assemblies reveal on the distribution of space in a city or in a village? On the distinction between what is public or private? What do they tell us about the distribution of political competence? How are they influenced by national political competition and by the State?