Abstract
This paper offers a glimpse of work generated by the 2014 John Douglas Taylor
conference on ‘Contemporary Orientations in African Cultural Studies’. The
conference generated a number of inquiries into the time and place of contemporary
African cultural work, many of which theorized beyond the frameworks that
postcolonial and globalization studies frequently offer. Under the shifting paradigms of
cultural studies, the work of this conference, as well as the current project, moves away
from reading the African everyday as exclusively a construction out of a series of
colonial histories and relationalities, or global cultural flows. In line with Jean and John
Comaroffs’ Theory From the South, this issue is instead dedicated to relocating the
global centres from which cultural studies emanates and positing African work’s
challenge to normative zones of cultural critique. ‘Contemporary orientations’ attempts
to relocate the time and space of critique in African studies, but it resists the gesture to
posit a stable trajectory through which time moves. Rather, the terms of the
contemporary and the orientation depend on how they are read in relation to a multitude
of other temporalities, orientations, and objects.