The theme of ASAA’s 4th Biennial Conference 2022 is African and the Human: Old questions, new imaginaries.
What does it mean to be human today in Africa, African in the world today, and what can Africa contribute to thinking the human? The idea of the human is increasingly threatened by destabilising transformations as the world gradually moves to what is defined by some as the abyss of modernity and the aftershocks of the postmodern. Will prevalent ideas of being human and/or being African survive? Should the idea of the human and African be saved, and as we move into the Anthropocene/posthuman, what or who will or should count as human and/or African in the end? As the old certainties of the enlightenment are questioned and rejected and the promises of neoliberal democracy shattered – labelled as both fraudulent and farcical – what alternatives remain to imagine the human from Africa?