The Undisciplined Campus Forms of Université Cheikh Anta Diop

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores representations and lived experience of the Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD), the largest public university in Senegal. While UCAD houses “disciplined” knowledges grounded in ideas of national development, this landmark institution also yields multidirectional forms of knowledge and solidarity located in student-led work and cultural production. Our analysis discusses the symbolic significance on campus of Cheikh Anta Diop, after whom the university was renamed in 1986. His body of work incarnates a fundamentally decolonial and pan-African vision, in the sense of an Africa liberated from colonial tutelage and carried forth by a young generation. In Dakar, this perspective is materialised through visual, musical and intellectual homages on campus. Yet his published writing remains marginal within the academic curriculum. The second part of the article discusses narrative representations of the university that further complicate the campus space and its Diopian promise of Afrofuturity. Infrastructural abjection, conservative societal values and gendered inequalities find expression through Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel De purs hommes and through films produced by the student-led Ciné-UCAD collective. Our emphasis is on expressive creativity and entangled temporalities that rub up against institutional strategies, surging into their pressure points, and questioning anew higher education’s social role.