The Institute of African Studies’ Sawyer Seminar, 2001-03 CONTENDING WITH CONFLICT: A COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL APPROACH TO THREE AFRICAN CASES In December 2000, Emory University received a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to sponsor a four-semester Sawyer Seminar dealing with historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. Specifically, our proposal to the Mellon Foundation focused on the question of conflict and violence in a comparative framework, pairing three African examples with differing but parallel cases: political transitions and violence in post-apartheid South Africa compared with post-Soviet Russia; genocide and related wars in Rwanda compared with the Nazi Holocaust; and contemporary communal and religious strife in Nigeria compared with religious conflict in India. The three semester-long seminar sessions were to be followed by a final conference on African violence that would be informed by comparative perspectives with other world areas. The goals of the seminar sessions were to explore how people contend with conflict. We set out to understand the everyday experience of people who live in the shadow of strife, how they individually and collectively make sense and meaning of conflict: conflict that ramifies sometimes through various levels of social organization, from households to regions to nations and beyond. Within each case study, we planned a broad multidisciplinary approach including appropriate historical depth that would go beyond causal discussion to analyze the formation of collective memory and its role in effecting historical change. Building on our faculty and graduate student strengths in African studies, we used the project to reach out to colleagues associated with Russian and East European Studies, the Institute for Jewish Studies, and Asian Studies. The Sawyer Seminar was initially directed by Don Donham, then Director of the Institute of African Studies and was completed by Edna Bay, who succeeded him as Director in 2003. Seminar I: The Past in the Present in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Soviet Russia (Fall 2001) Organized by Professors Matthew Payne (Russian specialist) and Randall Packard (Africanist) of the Department of History Political changes with the fall of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of apartheid are well-known. Both states underwent fundamental political transformations in the early 1990s, moving from regimes with little political legitimacy to those put in place through popular elections. Yet in both, everyday violence remained and, indeed, intensified for most citizens. Political corruption and organized crime flourished alongside extraordinarily high levels of street violence. We organized our first seminar sessions to explore the political trajectories of both states; to look at property and land reform, including the career of the black middle class in South Africa; to study the formation of collective memory about the past, particularly in the case of South Africa through the role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; to examine the reinvention of ethnicity in the former Soviet Union and the changing perception of ethnic identification in South Africa; and to consider the question of youth and violence in both cultures. The ambitious series of speakers who emerged from the planning sessions for the South Africa/ Russia comparison included art historian Sandra Klopper from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, performance studies graduate student Stephanie Marlin-Curiel from New York University, political scientist Michael Urban from the University of California at Santa Cruz, anthropologist Pamela Reynolds from the University of Michigan, cultural studies scholar Nancy Condee from the University of Pittsburgh, sociologist Hilary Pilkington from the University of Birmingham in the UK, and our own graduate student in anthropology, Elaine Salo, who by September 2001 had become a lecturer at the Gender Studies Unit of the University of Cape Town. The series was begun with a general discussion on identities and revolution that included presentations by Benedict Anderson of Cornell University and Ronald Suny of the University of Chicago. The format for the series paired a speaker expert in South Africa with one from Russia. Participants were asked to read in advance the readings that were selected in order to provide background for speakers’ research and to raise questions that could be discussed with the speakers. Discussion was lively, yet there was a lingering sense that as a group the seminar did not delve deeply enough into several of the issues raised. Suggestions were made for changes in the format for the second seminar that could make the learning deeper and more meaningful. Seminar II: Warfare and Genocide in the Great Lakes Region and Nazi Germany (Spring 2002) Organized by Professors Shalom Goldman (Jewish studies specialist) of the Department of Middle East Studies and Don Donham of the Anthropology Department The Rwandan genocide began in April 1994. In a matter of weeks, at least half a million people perished, perhaps as many as three-quarters of the entire Tutsi population: as well as thousands of Hutu who opposed the killings. The genocide was the deliberate choice of a modern elite that fostered ethnic sensibilities to keep itself in power and set off the killings to counter a growing democratic political opposition within Rwanda. The rationale for comparison between Rwanda and Germany was not simply that the voluminous work on the Nazi Holocaust would allow us to “ask new questions&rdquo: but rather, that the example of the Holocaust provides such a ready lens that, in some ways, it threatens to distort Rwandan realities. Issues at the center of planning for Seminar II included the formation of collective memory, the ethnicization or building of ethnic sensibility and hostility in both examples, and the contrast between the two examples against the background of the creation of the late 20th century notion of international human rights. Building on the experience of the first seminar series, the planners chose to have fewer outside speakers and more discussion of background readings. The two co-directors of the seminar sessions also taught a course, cross-listed between African studies and Middle Eastern studies, that brought upper division undergraduates into the sessions. For expertise on the Holocaust, the seminar relied mainly upon Emory faculty, including Deborah Lipstadt and Shalom Goldman. Speakers on the Rwandan genocide included political scientist Catharine Newbury from Smith College, political scientist/anthropologist Tim Longman, then from the University of California at Berkeley, and Rwandan lawyer Charles Ntampaka from the University of Namur in Belgium. While the quality of discussion improved in the second semester, we were still having difficulty reaching our desired level of depth of comparison across the topics. Complex comparative discussions tended to elude us because of the differing background knowledge of the two sets of specialists. Observations by Africanists, for example, would be “corrected&rdquo: by the Holocaust specialists and vice versa, so that we found the deep knowledge of a given setting brought by some participants working against our ability to come to broad general conclusions. The seminar continued to tack back and forth between the search for commonalities and the tendency to stress particularity in the final analysis. Seminar III: Religious, political and ethnic tensions in Nigeria and in India (Fall 2002) Organized by Professors Joyce Flueckiger (Indian religions specialist) of the Department of Religion and Sidney Kasfir (African art historian) of the Art History Department. Struggling to bring democracy and order with the end of military rule in 1999, Nigeria faced serious problems of reconstruction: economic decay, education decline, environmental degradation and mounting crime. Perhaps surpassing all these problems, however, was ethnic and religious violence. Islamic Shar’ia law was declared in a number of northern states, hundreds were killed in reprisals against northern Muslim immigrants in the Christian states of the southeast, and many Nigerians became caught up in various kinds of new Christian fundamentalisms. As religious tensions played themselves out, the very possibility of the continued existence of Nigeria was put into question. Nigeria’s tensions parallel many trends in India: the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, the problem of demographic imbalance between religious groups and the unpredictability and dangers of occurrences of communal violence. The co-directors of Seminar III attempted to deal with the difficulty of lack of participant knowledge across the area studies divide by having orienting lectures at the beginning of the semester: from Professors Murray Last of University College London on Nigeria and Paul Courtright of Emory on India. The paper-givers included Muhammad Sani Umar from the Department of History at Northern Arizona University, Rita Kiki Edozie from the Center for International Relations at Columbia University, and Connerly Casey from the Department of Anthropology, UCLA. Valentine Daniel from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia and Sudhir Kakar from New Delhi, India, presented South Asian materials. One particularly noteworthy aspect of this semester was that nearly all of the scholars who came to campus from elsewhere to participate were originally from the regions discussed. Culminating Conference: Africa and Violence: Identities, Histories and Representations (September 2002) Plans for the culminating conference called for a program with a focus on Africa and papers informed by the insights drawn from our learning at the three earlier seminar series. Our goal was to bring a humanities-based, interpretive perspective to the topic of “Africa and Violence: Identities, Histories and Representations.&rdquo: Among the questions that we asked potential participants to address in their papers were:
Calls for papers were circulated beginning in the spring of 2002. Following reviews of abstracts, a number of scholars were invited to submit papers, which became the focus of discussion at the working conference. The fourteen paper authors, a number of Emory faculty and graduate students, and interested colleagues from the Atlanta area convened to discuss issues raised by the papers at our working conference, from September 11-13, 2003. The conference schedule and participant list is below. The authors of the papers did not present their work at the conference. Rather, at each session two of our four invited commentators began discussion by talking about the salient issues raised in the papers under consideration. The commentators included Russian historian (and co-organizer of Seminar I) Matthew Payne of Emory University; Fred Cooper of New York University; Heike Schmidt of San Diego State University, who had served as our grant-sponsored Mellon post-doctoral fellow in 2001-02; and Catharine Newbury of Smith College, who had participated in the Holocaust/Rwanda series. Following the end of the conference, the seminar project directors, Don Donham and Edna Bay, reviewed the draft papers in light of the conference discussions and the broad themes that had emerged. Concerned that relatively rapid publication would be important for so topical a subject, we selected nine papers that were exemplary for their perspective and their relative polish. The collection is currently under review by a university press, and we hope for publication in 2005. A brief description of the nature of the book follows:
Conclusion The Sawyer Seminar project succeeded in innumerable ways in promoting comparative cross-regional discussion and analysis. The seminar sessions over the course of three semesters, while not yielding easy answers, impressed on all of the 25-30 regular participants the importance of close attention to the interplay of general comparative patterns with specificities associated with the individual cultures, geography and politics in different world regions. Perhaps the most enriching of our discussions took place during the culminating conference, when a largely Africanist group of participants, their thinking informed by the earlier seminar sessions, were forced to take comparative perspectives into account in moving toward consensus on patterns of violence in Africa. Intellectually stimulating and rewarding, this unique experiment in cross-regional collaboration and exploration is something that we hope to use as a model for future seminars within the Institute for Comparative and International Studies, the parent organization for area studies programs at Emory. At another level, the Sawyer Seminar promoted the building of long-lasting and very satisfying working relationships among scholars from different areas whose previous intellectual interactions had tended to be discipline-based or based in contacts with colleagues from the same area studies program. Our students benefited greatly from the opportunity to work in a collegial setting with faculty, to develop a sense of how different area studies scholars approach similar questions, and to enlarge their own networks of contacts with fellow graduates in different disciplines and area studies programs. Not inconsequential in the positive impacts on graduate students was the financial support incorporated into the project. Finally, we are pleased that a publication is emerging from our efforts as a tangible and visible record highlighting the work of all involved. Programs Seminar 1
Seminar II (Only lists Sessions With non-Emory Speakers)
Seminar III
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