Intergenerational Collaboration as Late Style: In Honor of Eileen Julien

Intergenerational conflict, rather than cooperation, is a dominant theme in the global scholarship on aging and later life and in the leading research that documents the lives of younger people across Africa. A different set of questions is asked by scholars who write about intergenerational cooperation, and many of these scholars are themselves practitioners and theorists of such forms of collaborative generosity. University classrooms (because of the unequal power relations of academic life) exaggerate intergenerational conflict, a topic that is often explored in films and novels set on campuses. Many of these representations, in African literary and cultural production as elsewhere, include an older male teacher who preys on and exploits women students. Instead of focusing on how these often gendered power inequalities define the intergenerational possibilities of the classroom, I argue that a focus on temporality provides different and more optimistically future-oriented ways of theorizing and practicing intergenerational collaboration. Such an approach to aging complicates understandings of late career as inevitably a time of disappointment and conflict.