What would it mean for Global Studies to become genuinely global? Much of the debate has understandably focused on positionality, Eurocentrism, unequal structures of knowledge production, and the need to reverse established intellectual gazes. Drawing on debates within African Studies, Macamo argues that globality cannot be achieved simply by expanding the geographical range of scholarship or by incorporating perspectives previously excluded from supposedly universal conversations. The more demanding question concerns the conceptual conditions under which the world becomes intelligible.

African Studies provides a particularly productive site from which to pose this question. African societies have repeatedly confronted scholars with historical experiences and social realities that sit uneasily within inherited theoretical vocabularies. Such moments of conceptual friction need not be understood as evidence of African exceptionalism or of the inadequacy of theory for understanding Africa. They can instead become occasions for conceptual creation, i.e., opportunities to develop distinctions, concepts and, indeed, explanations whose analytical significance travels beyond the circumstances from which they emerged.

The lecture, therefore, proposes a movement from the politics of inclusion towards the intellectual production of universality. Rather than asking how Africa can be better represented within Global Studies, it asks what studying Africa might enable us to understand about the world that would otherwise remain difficult to see. A genuinely global Global Studies, Macamo suggests, emerges when different locations become sources not simply of empirical knowledge or alternative perspectives, but of concepts with which the world itself can be thought.

Elísio Macamo is Professor of Sociology with a focus on Africa at the University of Basel (since October 2009). He previously taught development sociology at the University of Bayreuth, where he was a founding member of the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies.