The African Humanities Project Workshop II : Form, Practice, Theory

A Collaboration between Columbia University, Center for African Studies CAS/ UM6P, and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

December 8 – 10, 2025

UM6P Campus – Benguerir

In her germinal 2003 essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, Afro-Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter argued that the defining conflict of the twenty-first century is between the preservation of Man—the overrepresented figure of European humanism—and the survival of the human species and the planet. She called for a “new science of the word” capable of inventing another conception of the human.

The African Humanities Project situates itself in this horizon. Our first workshop (Ben Guerir, December 2024) began this collective work by interrogating history, geography, and knowledge in order to offer a critique of European exceptionalism and the marginalization of Africa in dominant representations of the human. In practice, our discussions reached further, touching on diasporic connections, language, aesthetics, objects, justice, and pedagogy. The workshop exceeded its original brief, suggesting that our project is best understood as an iterative process of discovery.