As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is undergoing a major historical shift: Africa, and the Global South more generally, is increasingly becoming a principal theatre in which the future of the planet plays itself out. But not only this: Africa is at the same time emerging as one of the great laboratories for novel forms of social, economic, political, intellectual, cultural, and artistic life. Often arising in unexpected places, these new forms of life materialize in practices that draw deeply from collective memory while simultaneously assuming distinctly contemporary, even futuristic, guises.

In November 2017, the second session of the Ateliers de la pensée Workshops of Thought was held in Dakar, Senegal. Fifty African and diasporic intellectuals and artists participated and their debates unfolded along numerous thematic lines, approached from the standpoints of many different disciplines. This volume is the result of that encounter. Among the many topics discussed were the concurrence and entanglement of multiple temporalities, the politics of life in the Anthropocene, the project of decolonization, and the preservation and transmission of different ways of knowing. At a time when the world is haunted by the specter of its own end, the contributors to this volume ask whether one can, by taking Africa as a point of departure, seize hold of other options for the future not only for Africa, but for the world.

The Politics of Time and its companion volume,To Write the Africa World, will be indispensable works for anyone interested in Africa its past, present, and future and in the new forms of critical thought emerging from Africa and the Global South.

Achille Mbembe is a Research Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, JohannesburgFelwine Sarr is Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University

Preface Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr I From Thinking Identity to Thinking African Becomings Souleymane Bachir Diagne Notes for a Maroon Feminism. From the Body Double to the Body as such Hourya Bentouhami Weaving, A Craft for Thought. Writing and Thinking in Africa, or the Knot of the Worlds Great Narrative Jean-Luc Raharimanana II Africa and the New Western Figures of Personal Status Law Abdoul Aziz Diouf Rethinking Islam, Or, the Oxymoron of Secular Theocracy Rachid Id Yassine The Impossible Meeting. A Free Interpretation of J. M. Coetzees Disgrace Hemley Boum III Circulations Achille Mbembe On the Return. The Political Practices of the African Diaspora Nadia Yala Kisukidi Reopening Futures Felwine Sarr IV Un/learning. Rethinking Teaching in Africa Françoise Vergès The Bewitchment of History: Mohammed Dibs Who Remembers the Sea Soraya Tlatli Currency, Sovereignty, Development. Revisiting the Question of the CFA Franc Ndongo Samba Sylla V Memories of the World, Memory-World Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux Cum patior Africa: The Political Production of Regimes of the Nigh Nadine Machikou The Sahara: A Space of Connection within an Emergent Africa, From the Anthropocene to the Spring of Geo-Cultural Life Benaouda Lebdai Migrations, Narrations, the Refugee Condition Dominic Thomas VI Humanity and Animality: (Re)thinking Anthropocentrism Bado Ndoye The Tree Frogs Distress Lionel Manga To Speak and Betray Nothing? Rodney Saint-Éloi The Paths of the Voice Ibrahima Wane Notes Index