The course highlights ongoing relations between Africa and Europe and explores postcolonial and decolonial discourses and practices. Our aim is to equip students with a renewed political and theoretical vocabulary about hospitality, migration, race thinking/racisms, forgiveness, and care.

e long relations between Africa and Europe require that we rethink the concepts of the human, the citizen-subject and community from below, at the political and cultural sites where radical transformations are taking place. Europe and Africa meet in a variety of practices and experiences that, once thought together, necessitate the decolonisation of our political and theoretical vocabularies about hospitality, migration, racisms, forgiveness and care. 

This course builds on the success of the programme that was last year and focuses on how racisms are challenged and transgressed by decolonising and creolising discourses that actively oppose xenophobia, nationalisms and ethnocentrisms. It reflects on ongoing relations between Africa and Europe by focusing on Afropean cultures that have emerged within communities of Afro-European descent across the northern and southern territories of the European continent and are interrelated with different places and temporalities in Europe and Africa.

Our programme responds to the “time of the now”; it aims to generate a framework that attends to the urgent need for discourses, aesthetics, and methodologies that destroy racisms and decolonise the ways by which we understand the human, the citizen-subject and community in the present. Decolonising our methodologies means to reckon with dominant philosophical, political, and aesthetic frameworks, and to attend to what it means to be human and live together beyond racisms in the present.

The on-site part of the course will take place from 7 to 11 April 2025 and will be held in Athens University History Museum, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

The offline component will consist of sessions that will further elaborate on the thematic component of the webinars and will be delivered by the academic staff, as well as by invited artists and cultural practitioners. The aim is for the students to create a hybrid archive of research material and practices that will include the creation of a digital mapping of key concepts and texts, the organization of cultural practices such as documentary art/photography exhibits with work done by the students, and the presentation of short research projects. 

The online part of the course is composed of the following eight webinars that will focus on the themes of the course from 3 February 2025, to 24 March 2025. 

• Week 1: Tuesday, 4 February, 11:00-13:00 CET  - Introduction to PostRacial Transmodernities (Mina Karavanta, NKUA)
• Week 2: Tuesday, 11 February 11:00-13:00 CET - Modernist Visuality and the Case of Blackness (Stamatina Dimakopoulou, NKUA)
• Week 3: Tuesday, 18 February 13:00-15:00 CET - "Academic Cucks". Radical Forgiveness, (In)hospitability, and Wanting (Not) to Understand Extremist Violence (Stephen Forcer, UofG)
• Week 4: Tuesday, 25 February 11:00-13:00 CET - On radical forgiveness <title TBC> (Raluca Bibiri, UB) 
• Week 5: Tuesday, 4 March 11:00-13:00 CET - Migrating/ Exiled Surrealists in Sweden: the case of Endre Nemes (Andrea Kollnitz, SU)
• Week 6: Tuesday, 11 March 12.00-14.00 CET - The Poetics of Space, Spatiality and Identity Dynamics: Between Being, Becoming and Belonging (Saliou Dione, Cheikh Anta Diop University) 
• Week 7: Monday, 17 March time TBC - Anthropology of Oneself and Decolonial Poetics in Post-Independence Maghrebian Francophone Literature - Abdelkébir Khatibi, Nabile Farès, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Habib Tengour (Stéphane Baquey, AMU)
• Week 8: Monday, 24 March time TBC - Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric: on Microaggression/ Symbolic Violence, Sports, and Loneliness (Astrid Franke, UT)