Concurrences in Postcolonial Research

The concept of concurrences is a blanket term for challenging dominating statements of the past and present. Concurrent stories have varying claims to reality and fiction, as well as different, diverging, and at times competing claims to society, culture, identity, and historical past. Dominant Western narrations about colonial power relationships are challenged by alternative sources such as heritage objects and oral traditions, enabling the voice of minorities or subaltern groups to be heard. Concurrences is about capturing multiple voices and multiple temporalities. As such, it is both a relational and dynamic methodology and a theoretical perspective that undergirds the multiple workings of power, uncovering asymmetrical power relations. Interdisciplinary in nature, this anthology is the outcome of scholarship from the humanities and social sciences with an interest in the multiple temporality of postcolonial issues and engagements in various places across the world.

Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta holds a D.Phil. in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University (CEU) Budapest, Hungary. Apart from teaching at the Universities of Yaounde1, Cameroon, Central European University, and University College Dublin, he has recently completed postdoctoral research at the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. He is also a consultant for several NGOs in both his native Cameroon and abroad?thereby cross-pollinating between the fields of anthropology and development. He is the country of origin expert on asylum representing Cameroon for the United Kingdom-based Rights in Exile Programme. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork and (Co-)published on a wide range of issues focusing on Cameroon, Chad, South Africa, and Sierra Leone. His research interests include gender, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, environmental policy, ethnography, critical development studies, medical sociology/anthropology, social science and medicine, colonialism and postcolonialism.

“If you have been asking yourself where the contributions from the humanities and the social sciences to understand the complexities of the troubled times we live in are, you may want to read this book. Revitalizing terms such as ‘culture’ or ‘history’ for their multiple, conflicting, contradictory, and messing meanings;  by putting us in the midst of the interplay of multiple voices, agencies, and desires which make up social relations; by refining the notion that societies and histories are complex and must be analyzed in their concurrent dimensions, the essays in the anthology provide a unique operational tool to think of the present, to rethink and re-write distinct pasts that we have taken for granted, and – in sum – to decolonize our ways of thinking.”—Dr. Nuno Porto, Curator—Africa and Latin America—Museum of Anthropology, Associate, Department of Art History and Visual Art & Theory, University of British Columbia

“The category ‘concurrences’ acknowledges the reality that our one postcolonial world is ticking to multiple temporalities. The world is one precisely because it is many, and ‘concurrences’ is a measure of the world's multivalent, heterogeneous, and polyphonic relationship with itself.  The term as such is an endeavor to imagine a cartography, both structural and phenomenological, of the many worlds within the one world as it pulsates variously and differentially beyond and across the shadow-lines of national sovereignty and belonging.”—R. Radhakrishnan, Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California-Irvine

“This collection unites eleven multidisciplinary essays that open new perspectives for understanding intersectionality, transnationality, contact zones, autofiction, temporality, power inequalities, resource colonialism, multiple identities, modern and local knowledge, entangled histories and connected sociologies, border thinking, contrapuntal perspectives, transnational ethnography, and so on. Researched by an international group of scholars, including linguists, art historians, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, the volume tells us that the concept of concurrencies is not monolithic. It evokes many things: It is a multidisciplinary and all-encompassing concept.”—Mathias Alubafi Fubah, Ph.D, Senior Research Specialist, Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa

“This volume is a refreshingly novel foray into the subject of globalization and its inherent contradictions. It has something for anyone interested in insightful, innovating discourses on the 21st century global interconnectedness.”—Victor N. Gomia, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Delaware State University