Global Humanities Now
Can the Humanities truly claim to address the human condition if they are constructed largely around the lives and concerns of only a fraction of the world’s population? The series Global Humanities Now responds to the need to democratize the scope and expand the classical Humanities while retaining regional distinctions.
As presently constituted, the Humanities are grounded in the philosophies, archives, cultures, knowledges, experiences, and aesthetics of mainly Western civilization—and in their assimilation of other cultures into a Western worldview. To rehumanize and globalize the Humanities is therefore to expand the field, bringing into focus the under-accounted peoples and knowledge systems of the world. It is to center and welcome, in their fullness, the archives, philosophies, cultures, and experiences of non-Western peoples into Humanities research, pedagogy, and practice. Speakers in this series will present diverse pathways toward rehumanizing the Humanities and making them a truly global endeavor.
Towards this end, the Mandel Center for the Humanities is proud to partner with Professor Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso to bring the Brandeis community a series about humanities outside the western worldview.
In a talk entitled Ajami Studies: The New Frontier in the Study of Islam in Africa and Beyond, Dr. Fallou Ngom discusses how Sub-Saharan Africa is often stereotyped as being largely illiterate because of the legacy of the Eurocentric tradition that equates literacy with the ability to read and write only in European languages and the Roman alphabet. However, millions of Africans have been reading and writing various types of religious and non-religious texts in local languages, using enriched forms of the Arabic script known as Ajami.
Ngom shows what scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences can gain by studying African Ajami manuscripts and how new insights from these primary sources will lead to revisions in our understanding of various aspects of pre- colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Africa.
In Witnessing in Practice: Memory, Care, and African Women’s Stories, Professor Emilie Diouf of Brandeis English and AAAS, discusses feminist and humanities-centered approaches to repair work through remembrance and community archiving for social justice. It analyzes co-creation and co-curation as a methodological approach that can involve students in practices of witnessing that resist indifference, and ensure instead that they open the possibility of creating knowledge in solidarity with care and ethical engagement with African women refugees and immigrants. By focusing on the lived experiences of ordinary mothers, this presentation seeks to highlight the nuanced ways in which memory operates as a means of resistance in the daily lives of African women migrants.