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News and media releases: 2009
News and media releases: 2009
| Wits hosts brainy brainstorm |
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| 31 July 2009 |
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Achille Mbembe was a speaker at the first workshop
The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) brought together intellectuals from South Africa, Mexico, United States, Guatemala, Canada, Germany, England, Iran, Palestine, Zimbabwe and the Netherlands, from 5 to 15 July. Lectures, seminars, public events, exhibitions and performances were part of the programme, which had the theme "Rethinking the political under late capitalism". Debates on crucial issues of our times are scheduled to take place annually in July under the JWTC. The JWTC is a global experimental conversation based at the Faculty of Humanities, at the University of the Witwatersrand. The workshop, hosted by the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA), comprised international intellectuals, said Kelly Gillespie, a JWTC convener. The JDA also took the delegates on a tour of the city, visiting Braamfontein, Newtown, the fashion district, the financial centre, Gandhi Square, the east of Joburg, the muti market, Baragwanath Taxi and Bus facility in Soweto and Kliptown. Among those who attended was Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in economic sciences and a former chief economist of the World Bank; Michael Hardt, the author of books such as Translation of Spinoza (with Antonio Negri), The Labour of Dionysus (with Negri) and Empire (with Negri); and David Goldberg, the director of the University of California's Humanities Research Institute. His work covers issues such as political theory, race and racism. Global intellects "The idea was to create an intellectual platform for global scholars and intellectuals to think about the theoretical conversations from the perspective of the global self," said Gillespie. The conveners explained the thinking behind the workshop: "The main objective of the workshop is to focus on the contemporary and the emergent – those domains of human life and those forms of 'the social' that profoundly interrogate the way we think and act, who we are, who we want to be and the kind of world we want to inhabit." The goal this year was to "critically examine neo-liberal capital's new logics and modus operandi. The forms of current existence, sociality and politics they entail, the kinds of accountability, governance and cultural imagination they permit. "In the process, we will also explore what remains of visions of society that held a place for consciousness, critique and agency and for forms of world making and social empowerment that were presumed to be under human control," the convenors said. The workshop would privilege the study of places in the south, where the current contradictions of capitalism were lived intensely, where social life constantly oscillates between possibilities and impossibilities, between enfranchisement and exclusion, where there were vivid experiments in new forms of social and political critique. South's role "We don't want the north to 'own' theory, but rather we want the south to take a more active role in its production and circulation," the said. "South Africa also has an interesting historical relationship with the project of theory. During the apartheid years especially, South Africa developed an original tradition of critical thought in which theory was always less an academic field than an active form of political resistance." The audience was a new generation of international scholars who wished to locate themselves beyond the old model of area studies and who were willing to challenge naturalised conventions of interpretation. Some of the speakers at the first workshop were Achille Mbembe, Ackbar Abbas, Zackie Achmat, Ariella Azoulay, Goldberg, Adi Ophir, Hardt, Shalini Randeri and William Kentridge. The JWTC is based at the University of the Witwatersrand in the Faculty of Humanities and is partnered with the Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Yale University and the Human Research Institute at the University of California. It is also aligned with the Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago; the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University; and Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research in Mumbai. |
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The Johannesburg Development Agency, set up as a limited liability company, is an agency of the City of Johannesburg that stimulates and supports area-based economic development initiatives throughout the metropolitan area.