Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta

The concept of concurrences is a blanket term for challenging dominating statements of the past and present. Concurrent stories have varying claims to reality and fiction, as well as different, diverging, and at times competing claims to society, culture, identity, and historical past. Dominant Western narrations about colonial power relationships are challenged by alternative sources such as heritage objects and oral traditions, enabling the voice of minorities or subaltern groups to be heard. Concurrences is about capturing multiple voices and multiple temporalities. As such, it is both a relational and dynamic methodology and a theoretical perspective that undergirds the multiple workings of power, uncovering asymmetrical power relations. Interdisciplinary in nature, this anthology is the outcome of scholarship from the humanities and social sciences with an interest in the multiple temporality of postcolonial issues and engagements in various places across the world.

Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta holds a D.Phil. in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University (CEU) Budapest, Hungary. Apart from teaching at the Universities of Yaounde1, Cameroon, Central European University, and University College Dublin, he has recently completed postdoctoral research at the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. He is also a consultant for several NGOs in both his native Cameroon and abroad―thereby cross-pollinating between the fields of anthropology and development. He is the country of origin expert on asylum representing Cameroon for the United Kingdom-based Rights in Exile Programme. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork and (Co-)published on a wide range of issues focusing on Cameroon, Chad, South Africa, and Sierra Leone. His research interests include gender, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, environmental policy, ethnography, critical development studies, medical sociology/anthropology, social science and medicine, colonialism and postcolonialism.

“This collection unites eleven multidisciplinary essays that open new perspectives for understanding intersectionality, transnationality, contact zones, autofiction, temporality, power inequalities, resource colonialism, multiple identities, modern and local knowledge, entangled histories and connected sociologies, border thinking, contrapuntal perspectives, transnational ethnography, and so on. Researched by an international group of scholars, including linguists, art historians, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, the volume tells us that the concept of concurrencies is not monolithic. It evokes many things: It is a multidisciplinary and all-encompassing concept.”—Mathias Alubafi Fubah, Ph.D, Senior Research Specialist, Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa