Claiming citizenship outside party politics: thinking politically with Angolan activists
Author: Chloé Buire (Les Afriques dans le Monde / CNRS)
Keywords: Urban Citizenship, Coproduction of Urban Knowledge, Activism, Luanda, Angola
Session 8: Knowing the City: Transformative Theoretical Practices of African Urban Scholarship
Thursday October 24, 13:45-15:15 & 15:30-17:00, A4, John Moffat Building
Claiming Citizenship Outside Party Politics: Thinking Politically with Angolan Activists
Abstract
The presentation is based on a long-term engagement with political activists in Luanda, and especially on three years of immersive ethnographic fieldwork (2019-2022) during which I – as a foreign scholar – facilitated various audiovisual workshops and engaged in alternative forms of academic writing in order to decentre my own gaze and allow the expression of voices that are structurally suppressed in Angola. Reflecting on these experiences, and on their reception both in local activist circles and in academia, I seek to highlight the potentials but also the pitfalls of these collective modes of expression and of reflection. Writing and thinking together with the activists allowed me to better understand the fluidity of their political ideologies, their strategic use of academic knowledge. Their very engagement in our projects prove their astounding capacity to navigate complex institutional environments and demanding affective relationships. I became involved in their opportunistic tactics and got to experience the physical cost of challenging fear and censorship. Eventually, our productions (texts, photos and videos) enacted as much as they captured the emotional labour of maintaining hope despite the grimness of Angolan political landscape.