Expulsions: Knowledge, temporality, and materiality in Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Expulsions remake knowledge and experience of time, space and the body. However, they have largely been studied and theorized through histories of Europe or within contemporary global racial capitalism, sheared off its longer global histories. This special issue anchors the study of expulsions in historical experiences and conceptualizations from a variety of African contexts over time. Expulsions are tightly entwined with the formation of knowledge and power-including area studies and academic disciplines, national citizenship and the making of nation-states. This introduction charts the ways expulsions as time-bending and chronology-blurring processes are integral to the naturalization of communities, groups and the body as subjects of scholarly and political work. At the same time, it argues that expulsions are relational, violent processes that defy temporal bounding, move across spatial scales and dislodge epistemological logic. Material landscapes are key sites through which expulsive processes are mediated, embedded and remembered, even as they are impinged upon by the violence of expulsions. This special issue argues that the study of expulsions opens conceptual questions about how knowledge, time and material forms are constituted.