African Studies Association of Africa: Call for Papers and Panels

The 2019 ASAA Conference

The theme of ASAA’s 3rd Biennial Conference 2019 is African and Africana Knowledges: Past Representations, Current Discourses, Future Communities. The conference will be held for the first time in East Africa at the United States International University-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, from October 24-26, 2019.

The aim of this year’s conference is to invite and initiate a scholarly stocktaking of the knowledge produced by Africans in Africa and the Diaspora in various forms—from scholarly work to artistic expressions—and to examine representations and current African realities and emerging futures with African knowledges. In other words, by stocktaking accomplishments and challenges facing African peoples globally, we hope to address the ideological basis of the current disproportions in the distribution of worth, power and wellbeing affecting Africans and diasporic Africans.

Although Africa has contributed more human and material resources to global welfare, it is ironic that it continues to be regarded as the poorest continent intellectually and materially. Besides, the ‘African condition’ today is a result of those past representations and the production of a knowledge that still represents Africa in popular media and scholarship as hopeless, poor, dark and devoid of knowledge. Obviously, the multifaceted crises facing contemporary African societies are rooted in and stem from old structures of knowledge production. As a result, a disconnect has ensued between academic knowledge, often produced from an outsider’s vantage point, and African lived realities.

As academic debates intensify about the possibility of producing theoretical knowledge with bearings on transformational praxes in Africa, it is an important time to rediscover and benefit from the Afrocentric canon and kinship between African and Africana Studies. These two different perspectives on African ontologies have been pitted against each other—separated by historical, political, geographical, and economic trajectories as if they were competing disciplines, and yet they complement each other. It is ASAA’s hope that this politically-motivated dichotomy introduced between African and Africana studies can be overcome.

To this end, and against existing hegemonic discourses, this conference invites scholars, artists and activists to look at old representations, Afrocentric counter-narratives, and the futures that Africans and Africans in the Diaspora imagine and want for themselves. With a view to contributing toward the canonization of new perspectives emerging from both African and Africana scholarship, we invite interdisciplinary scholarship using empirical, theoretical and methodological approaches, including those highlighting African emancipatory traditions. It is an opportune time to critically challenge both dominant discourses on Africa and the inherited structures of knowledge production that still constrain our African imaginations.

The ASAA executive committee and the local organising committee welcome the submission of paper and panel proposals addressing the theme: African and Africana Knowledges: Past Representations, Current Discourses, Future Communities under the following sub-themes. The list is not exhaustive and the conference co-chairs welcome other proposals.

Sub-themes

1. The politics of knowledge production on Africa
2. Reuniting Africana and African knowledges
3. Celebrating and canonizing African and African Diaspora Thinkers
4. Decolonizing pedagogy in education in Africa and diasporas
5. Higher education in Africa
6. Emerging digital counter-narratives on Africa
7. African agency and perspectives in international relations
8. The politics of museums and African artifacts restitution
9. Pan-African consciousness and identity production
10. Belonging: Space, race, and culture
11. Africa’s historiographies and Africa’s intellectual histories
12. African philosophy and theology
13. Sex, queer and African sexualities
14. African and black masculinities and feminisms
15. African anthropocenae
16. Invention and science in Africa
17. Security, conflicts and African resolution perspectives
18. Development and development politics in Africa
19. Ethnomusicology and African music performance
20. Afrocentric perspectives and indigenous knowledge systems in the disciplines
21. African languages and emerging languages
22. African cinema and film
23. African democracies

The conference will present distinguished African/a and Africanist keynote speakers, award-winning films, inspirational performances and the opportunity to join pre-conference workshops.

Deadlines:

May 15, 2019 (Individual Submissions)

May 30, 2019 (Panel Submissions)