An exhibition on the history of African Studies, held at the University of Bayreuth in November 2025, inspires this talk, which intervenes in debates on the postcolonial production (not just critique) of African and Africanist knowledge in Europe. While Hamburg, London, Paris, and Berlin are commonly treated as canonical centers shaped by imperial archives and colonial institutions, Bayreuth offers a revealing perspective on how African Studies took shape in postwar Europe. Emerging within a landscape marked by Wagnerian cultural nationalism and German self-reinvention, African Studies in Bayreuth was actively reconfigured through cultural diplomacy, area studies paradigms, and evolving negotiations of Black intellectual authority. By tracing the physical visits, writings, and symbolic engagements of W.E.B. Du Bois (1936), Léopold Sédar Senghor (1979), and Wole Soyinka (1989), my talk discusses how these figures encountered Bayreuth not as a static site of exclusion, but rather as a contested terrain of cultural authority and epistemic possibility. It draws on archival sources (university correspondence, municipal cultural records, local and national press, and theoretical writings of Du Bois, Senghor, and Soyinka) reframing Bayreuth through three intersecting interpretive lenses: Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness as a mode of spatial and historical perception; Senghor’s humanist universalism as a diplomacy of recognition within European institutions; and Soyinka’s critique of cultural mythmaking as an exposure of aesthetic power masquerading as timeless tradition.

Dr Ibrahima Sene is a Germanist and historian who specializes in German colonial history, Afro-diasporic associations, and cultural and knowledge transfer. He completed his Ph.D. in German Studies at Université Cheikh Anta Diop and Saarland University, with a dissertation titled Die Geschichtserfahrung des deutschen Kolonialismus in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (1978–2015). He holds a second Master’s degree in African History from the University of Bayreuth, where he is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of African History. His current work explores Afro-diasporic knowledge production and circulation in Germany, France, Senegal, and Cameroon.

Chair: Arno Sonderegger

The event takes place in presence. 
Zoom link (for those unable to attend in person): https://univienna.zoom.us/j/63904002477?pwd=oMVxaph7T77wazJw8vei0NI8Nsewog.1