Adeena Mey

Foreword Afterall Journal Issue 55–56

On the Importance of Defining and Conserving Urban and Architectural Heritage in Dakar

Carole Diop and Nzinga Mboup are two Senegalese architects living in Dakar. Since 2018, they have been undertaking together Dakarmorphose, a series of investigations centred on the genesis of the city of Dakar and its constant metamorphosis.

Logic of the Written Word and Oral Logic: Conflict at the Heart of the Archive

In this first translation in English of his work, Senegalese philosopher Mamoussé Diagne presents his fundamental thesis that traditional African civilisations are civilisations of orality.

The Exhibition as Medium: Some Observations on the Cybernetisation of the Institution and the Exhibition

By going back to the critical moment of the cybernetisation of the museum and of the exhibition, this essay aims to put forward a thesis considering the exhibition as medium.

Issue 53

‘Medium/Metaphor/Milieu’ looks at the exhibitionary in and beyond exhibitions.

La Sape and Other Local Imaginaries in Kinshasa

(en français) Conversation between Prisca Tankwey, Cedrick Nzolo, Sinzo Aanza, Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse, Judith Clark, Charlotte Delacour, Adeena Mey, and Mick

On African Opera. A Conversation with Anawana Haloba

In this conversation with Afterall editors, artist Anawana Haloba discusses her research into African operatic traditions and philosophy, as manifested in her experimental opera How to (re)pair my Grandmother’s Basket (2021). Conceiving of ‘re-pair’ as a way of setting things together in their relationality, Haloba seeks to recuperate traditions that were ‘epistemologically disenfranchised’ following the rupture of colonialism.

Foreword Afterall Journal issue 52

By titling Issue 52 ‘New Politics’, it may look as if it were innovation and novelty in the political field that are invoked. We seem to experience yet another version of the discontents of civilisation, paralleled by the search for new political responses. The emergence in recent times of new forms of political claims and demands and the structural inequalities, both at local and global level – exacerbated by the biopolitical governmentality of the past two years and by digitisation – has reshaped the maps of the sayable and unsayable and forms of political expression and organisation.