The AYA NETWORK – AFRICAN STUDIES is a group focused on developing joint actions and research and extension projects related to African realities in the past and present. The Network is characterized by its approach to African Studies from perspectives embedded in Post-Colonial and Decolonial studies, seeking at this starting point not only to recognize and problematize the persistence of Eurocentric optics linked to coloniality, but also to understand the need for approaches and epistemologies committed to African logics and perspectives.
In this sense, it is worth considering that the AYA NETWORK – AFRICAN STUDIES is a proposal initiated in the academic arena in dialogue with institutions and sectors linked to social movements and spheres of political action, recognizing that the academic and political fields are inseparable and expressing the commitment of scholars on the African continent to building knowledge. The Network understands African Studies in its disciplinary and dialogical plurality, encompassing researchers from various fields of study on Africa in parallel with what the Burkinabe historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, in the introduction to the first volume of the collection General History of Africa, defined as fundamental to research on the African continent: interdisciplinarity in the face of the variety of documents and evidence about Africa and its particularity in terms of the urgency of methods and approaches.
OBJECTIVES
The objective of the AYA – AFRICAN STUDIES NETWORK is to promote joint actions between researchers on African themes through the development of research and extension projects based on approaches and themes common to the network;
The aim is also to hold meetings, encounters and congresses in order to socialize and exchange reflections and analyses on African Studies, as well as to stimulate them in the political and academic spheres at regional, national and international levels;
Finally, the Network aims to encourage cooperation between researchers and national and international organizations in the broad development of research and studies on African realities, as well as the possibility of agreements, exchanges and visiting actions by teachers and students linked to the projects and institutions associated with the Network.
BACKGROUND
The field of African Studies, specifically with regard to historical analysis of Africa, has been expanding in recent years in national and international academic contexts. In the last three decades in particular, more and more Brazilian research and publications on the African continent have marked the development of the field. This context is permeated, in addition to the academic interest parallel to the gradual global development of the area, by the fundamental political action of social movements, specifically the Brazilian Black Movement, whose historical demands around the academic and pedagogical development of content around the history of Africans and their descendants in the diaspora emerged with the enactment of Law No. 10639 of 2003, making the teaching of African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture compulsory in teaching spaces in Brazil.
Understanding the Brazilian scenario marked by the struggles of the black movement for historical and epistemological visibility with regard to African and black populations in the diaspora, we seek as a guiding perspective in the development of the Network to see the political relevance of content and approaches relating to African realities in the past and present, in a theoretical approach committed to the fight against what the Brazilian philosopher Sueli Carneiro defined as epistemicide, to understand not only the subjugation of subalternized knowledge, but also the maintenance of repressive mechanisms of knowledge to persist in the lack of populations subalternized by coloniality and racism. At the same time, we understand the need to analytically point out the distinction that African realities have in relation to Afro-diasporic experiences in Brazil, since the former have historical and political processes that encompass the phenomenon of diaspora, but also many other elements inserted in the historical trajectory of Africa under exogenous and endogenous factors to African populations, as the Congolese historian Elikia M’Bokolo pointed out in the first volume of the work Black Africa: History and Civilizations.
Thus, the consolidation of the Network is justified by the urgent need to develop African Studies, a field that is on the rise both nationally and internationally from a variety of analytical perspectives. However, our proposal is based on the equally growing demand for African Studies committed to African perspectives and factors endogenous to the continent, in order to observe in the documents, sources and methods used, above all, the vision of African historical subjects themselves regarding their ways of being and living beyond the weight of representations, epistemologies and dichotomies inherited from Western colonial matrices.
CONFIRMED RESEARCHERS AND INSTITUTIONS
Carol Lima de Carvalho (Doutoranda – PPGH/Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina)
Profª Drª Cláudia Mortari (Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina)
Prof. Ms. Fábio Amorim Vieira (Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina)
Profª Dra. Fernanda Oliveira da Silva (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul)
Prof. Dr. Filipe Noé da Silva (Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina)
Prof. Dr. Joaquim Paka Massanga – (Universidade Onze de Novembro)
Prof. Dr. José Rivair Macedo (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul)
Prof.ª Dra. Karine de Souza Silva (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
Prof. Dr. Marcello Assunção (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul)
Ms.ª Tathiana Cristina da Silva Anizio Cassiano (Doutoranda – PPGH/Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina)
Ms. William Felipe Martins Costa (Doutorando – PPGH/Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina)
AYA LABORATÓRIO 