Overview

This symposium traces Sudanese thought through its intellectuals.

In a way we are all trained—or should be—to ask questions about how we know what we know.  Who has brought us particular ideas? Who has been served by them?  How organic or global are Sudanese ideas? 

In a series of essays in Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said (1994) claims that intellectuals should maintain a vigilant skepticism toward all received wisdoms.  He saw the ideal intellectual as in “exile and marginal, as [an] amateur…[and as someone who] tries to speak truth to power.”  Said, along with other western thinkers like Noam Chomsky, have been represented as the quintessential “public intellectual.” These are people, most often, but not exclusively, academics who participate in or lead public discourses about society, responding to its problems, a social critic  differentiated from the “thinker,” perhaps, or the academic or “intelligentsia” (member of a highly educated social class).  Even more differentiating is the concept, most often associated with Antonio Gramsci of the “organic intellectual.”  Although Gramsci had a rigid Marxist interpretation of the organic intellectual (to him they are the ones who are created by their class and spread the ideology of that class) popular thought sees them as emerging from a particular class, usually not of the intelligentsia, but more of the people. At any rate, every social class requires a native intelligentsia which shapes the ideology (world view) particular to that social class from which they originated.

Therefore, if intellectuals are spokespeople for their particular group and who articulate the ideas of that group, then what are the groups that are represented by Sudanese intellectuals?  Idris Salem el-Hassan, in an unpublished paper on “The Intellectual and Power in Sudan” (2016)[1] differentiates among the educated, the intellectual, and the thinker (he uses the last two terms interchangeably).  By “educated,” he is referring to anyone who gained a modern education toward a particular job; whereas the intellectual is one who has also gained formal knowledge, but he/she has, in addition, gained informal knowledge that allows him/her to analyze issues and connect levels of ideas that require thinking skills that are greater than the educated can do.

In this symposium we are considering the erudite thinker who develops abstract ideas and theories (perhaps an academic or an organic intellectual); a professional (someone in science, law, sociology, medicine, literary criticism, philosophy, etc.) who produces cultural capital; an artist who writes, composes, paints, etc.; a religious thinker, perhaps within the Sufi tradition.  We are considering thinkers as those who produce knowledge, not material goods.  

We will consider these questions and themes within the context of Sudan and within the Global context:

1. Who is the intellectual? Do we need them, and for what?
2. How and where are intellectuals, including organic intellectuals, formed?  (e.g., from what class, institution, milieu?)
3. What do we think intellectuals are responsible for? What is at stake?
4. What are some of the old and new types of intellectuals that we see around us? If there are generational, historical, or technological contextual indicators of change, what changes are significant?
5. Do we see gender, ethnic, or class differences in these categories of intellectuals?
6. What intellectual processes do we see at play in post-colonial Sudan? In what directions are those processes leading us?
7. What are the sources of power upon which Sudanese intellectuals can draw, or what or who might intervene in their thought process? Whose "truths" do they seek?
8. Where do we see the contributions of our intellectuals? Who benefits?
9. When we refer to intellectuals or public intellectuals, are we usually referring to secular thinkers? Academics? Or broader?
10. Where do Sudanese intellectuals fit within the global context?  What are their contributions to global thinking and the reverse?

Coordinators/Conceivers: Gada Kadoda and Sondra Hale

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[1] Delivered May 28, 2016.  Khartoum, Villa Toubia, at a Roundtable on “The Intellectual and Power.”