Felwine Sarr
is a Senegalese scholar and writer. He currently teaches at University Gaston Berger in Saint Louis (Senegal). His lectures and academic research focus on epistemology, economic policies, and the history of religious ideas. As a writer, he has published to date Dahij (Gallimard, 2009), 105 Rue Carnot (Mémoire d'Encrier, 2011), Méditations Africaines (Mémoire d'Encrier, 2012), Afrotopia (Philippe Rey, 2016), Ishindenshin (Mémoire d’encrier, 2017) and Habiter le Monde (Mémoire d’encrier, 2017). In 2018, Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, published “Restituer le patrimoine Africain” (Seuil/Phillipe Rey), a report on the restitution of African artifacts taken by France during the colonial period, commissioned by the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

The annual Berlin Southern Theory Lecture
is organized by the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Freie Universität Berlin and the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient.
It foregrounds southern theory and epistemology, thereby honoring diverse starting points and relations—“from”, “with” and “for”—forms of theorizing whose starting points often depart from dominant Euro-American traditions. Even today, the global South is still too often taken to be merely a source of raw data, assembled and processed elsewhere, and not as a creative motor of independent and critical thinking in its own right. This lecture series redresses such lingering postcolonial asymmetries and aims to decenter and diversify theoretical debates in the social sciences and the humanities.

Please find further information on the website of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.