Abstract
Intellectual and cultural work in times of austerity
Highlights
How have African cultural and intellectual institutions worked under conditions of austerity? Through what acts of remediation and choreographies of survival have university faculty, staff and students, playwrights, artists, publishers, journalists and curators made up the gap between ambition and deficit, between the state of the art and material scarcity? In this part issue we expose the often unacknowledged labour and expertise of African intellectuals, administrators and artists whose commitments and sense of vocation have made institutions work in spite of crippling social and economic challenges
Artists, publishers, lecturers and archivists have had to make up the difference between the political and moral weight placed on the institutions they superintend and the facts of shortfalls, scarcity and lack
We recognize the risk of collapsing diverse expressions of marginalization and poverty into the concept of austerity, we argue that the historical meanings of austerity outlined above speak to the experiences of people living on the continent under colonialism
Summary
How have African cultural and intellectual institutions worked under conditions of austerity? Through what acts of remediation and choreographies of survival have university faculty, staff and students, playwrights, artists, publishers, journalists and curators made up the gap between ambition and deficit, between the state of the art and material scarcity? In this part issue we expose the often unacknowledged labour and expertise of African intellectuals, administrators and artists whose commitments and sense of vocation have made institutions work in spite of crippling social and economic challenges. Provisions for the institutions that curate and superintend intellectual life are often the first to disappear, or be radically reconfigured, when conditions of austerity prevail In their conceptualization of ordinary bureaucracy, scholars working on the practical norms of African states refer repeatedly to the gap between norms ‘on paper’ and those that exist ‘on the ground’ – highlighting a distinction between bureaucracy in theory and practice (Bierschenk 2014; Olivier de Sardan 2015 on grounded theory; Martin 2015). Artists, publishers, lecturers and archivists have had to make up the difference between the political and moral weight placed on the institutions they superintend and the facts of shortfalls, scarcity and lack In this introductory essay we chart how conditions of austerity have shaped knowledge production over time. These impulses can motivate works of extraordinary self-sacrifice or selfish opportunism
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