TOFAC 2013, LEAD CITY UNIVERSITY NIGERIA
THEME: Ethnicity, Race and Place in Africa and the African Diaspora
HOST: Lead City University, Ibadan
Venue: Conference Centre, Lead City University, Ibadan, Nigeria
Arrival date: Sunday, June 30, 2013 Departure date: Thursday,
July 4, 2013
*CALL FOR PAPERS
*Submission of Abstract, Due April 15th, 2013*
While ethnicity has long been a staple analytical category of scholarly engagements on Africa and Africa-descended worlds, sparking rich, variegated conversations on its many referents and meanings, scholars ofAfrica and its vast diaspora have rarely conceptualized race as a stand-alone unit of Africanist analysis outside the familiar templates of colonial and neocolonial binaries, and outside of oppressive Euro-American racial formations such as apartheid, plantation slavery, and Jim Crow. Nor have they seriously considered how the emerging grid of place as a physical, imagined, and aspirational representation of self and the other might complicate notions of ethnic identity and racial awareness.
The conveners of the Toyin Falola Annual Conference (TOFAC) solicit abstracts that address one or more of our sub-themes from empirical and theoretical perspectives. Papers may use the subthemes as framing devices and as touchstones for exploring diverse African and African Diasporic realities either separately or as a cluster. Alternatively, they may explore concepts that derive from or catalyze racial imaginations, ethnic consciousness, and a fixed or dynamic sense of place. Our view of the broad theme is that it is at once elastic and restrictive, and that authors¹ scholarly imaginations should define the parameters of how ethnicity, race, and place should be understood and how the epistemological relationship between all three can be posited.
Clearly, ethnicity is an expansive category. It encompasses a plethora of representational practices, textual productions, material cultures, symbols, aspirations, cultural retentions and mixtures, religious belief, and forms of political negotiation. These elements are individually or collectively mobilized to articulate a coherent narrative of identity and solidarity, however transient such a narrative may be. Taken together or unpacked for separate engagement, these constitutive elements of ethnicity offer the space for rich multidisciplinary analyses. They can foreground, and can be applied to, empirical and conceptual inquiries in many fields in the social sciences and the humanities. Although we welcome papers that address ethnicity and its corollaries from parochial disciplinary methodologies, we encourage authors to imagine a multidisciplinary audience for their papers and to cultivate analytical approaches that would spark cross-disciplinary conversations.
Scholars of Africa and of the African Diaspora spawned by slavery, colonialism, trade, exile, economic hardship, opportunity, adventure, and post-colonial migration, have yet to systematically grapple with the place of race, race consciousness, and constructions of racial communities and attributes in the evolution of African cultures and experiences around the world. Yet racial ideas, not just reactive ideas about racial solidarity, but proactively constructed notions of intra-racial difference have proliferated in the texts and conversations of global black elites, intellectuals, and black communities around the world. This development has in turn given political and social valence to ideas and debates about black authenticity, race treachery, racial integration and separatism, compromise and resistance, and even the philosophical implications of skin lightening, hair straightening, and other bodily practices among black folk. Differing understandings of racial destiny, black victimhood, black racial purity, and the intertwinement of authenticity and place of origin have become subjects of discussion in global black intellectual circles. Moreover, beyond the familiar analysis of the complex and at times difficult legacies of European-African, Asian-African, and Arab-African encounters and miscegenation in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the New World, recent studies have begun to unearth elaborate racial claims and narratives of racial differentiation within ³African² communities and in ³African² zones of contact previously narrated homogeneously into an African racial formation.
Some questions are already framing discussions of the role of race and racial constructs in the study of African communities around the world; questions about whether the Sahara, Indian Ocean, and certain sectors of the Red Sea constitute a racial divide that disturb the geographical continuum of Africa; whether Africa is a byword for ³black² and if so what ³black² means in light of its obvious exclusion of ³white² Africans; whether the field of play between race and ethnicity is narrow or wide; whether we can posit intra-black racism as a phenomenon; whether a black racial essence exists that connects Africa to its diaspora and produces trans-oceanic communities of solidarity; whether continental Africans and diaspora Africans relate to race and racism differently and/or have different racial imaginations that may engender intra-racial tensions; whether xenophobia and native/immigrant tensions are sustained by popular racial and ethnic stereotypes or are grounded in real differences within black communities; whether immigrant and native-born blacks can work together to pursue agendas specific to their common interests in white-dominated power structures like the United States; whether the fault lines of some conflicts in Africa correspond to a clichéd understanding of racial difference between Africans and Arabs; and whether intra-African racial claims are stand-ins for other aspirations or deserve to be understood on their own racial merits.
We encourage authors to propose papers that explore race, racial politics, and racial transformation in the context of Africa¹s encounter with the world outside, in the context of oppression, in the context of the racialization of ethnic difference, in the context of post-slavery and emancipation, and in the context of identity construction in response to colonial and postcolonial policies of differentiation and privilege.
Our conception of place ties in with the provocative outlines articulated above on race and ethnicity. We understand place to be a physical, mental, and ideological location or situation in which significant sociopolitical, economic, and emotional investments have been made. These investments often define the contours of identity, serving as anchors and referents for a variety of identity practices, including racial and ethnic self-representation. We acknowledge, however, that ³place,² its connotations, and the semiotic burdens it is often called upon to bear are always changing. We therefore welcome papers that radically redefine ³place,² ³home,² ³location,² ³origin,² and related idioms of affiliation and affinity.
Finally, we encourage ambitious proposals that bring our three subthemes into productive and insightful dialogue. The choice of doing this through empirical inquiry or conceptual reflections or both lies with the author.
Abstracts may investigate and explore one or more of the following topics:
- Ethnic Associations
- Ethnic Nationalism
- Language Politics
- Ethnicity and Colonization
- Ethnicity and slavery
- Ethnicity and slave culture
- Ethnicity and slave religion
- Politicized Ethnicity
- Ethnic Politics
- Ethnic Literatures
- Ethno-religious imaginations
- Ethno-religious violence
- Ethno-religious communities
- Linguistic politics
- Language and ethnic solidarity
- Ethnicity and civil war
- Ethnicity and electoral contest
- Ethnic cleansing
- Genocide
- Civil war
- Racial authenticity
- Intra-racial tensions
- Racialization of difference
- Arabs and Africans
- Afro-Arab solidarity and conflict
- Berber identity/nationalism
- Tuareg identity/nationalism
- African-Diasporan tensions
- Intra-racial stereotypes
- Racial Writings
- Racial representations
- Race and African identity
- Racism
- Racial mixture
- Miscegenation
- Luso-African communities
- Mixed race communities and social consciousness
- Racial revolutions
- Afrocentrism
- Black power
- Black nationalism
- Black separatism
- Race and ethnicity
- Race and religion
- Race and Pan-Africanism
- Racial origins
- Race and civilization
- Nilo-centric theories
- Ancient Egypt in Africa
- Race in Ancient Africa
- Afro-Arab borderlands
- Xenophobia in Africa
- White Africa
- Apartheid and Post-Apartheid
- Home Exile (or Self Alienation
- Exile-Exile (or Alienated Exile)
- Exilic Experience
- Origins
- Ancestry
- Local and global identities
- Rural and urban spaces
- Consciousness
- Spatial identities
- Territorial struggles
- Land politics
- Displacement and dispossession
- Refugees
- Domesticity
- Gendered space
- Mobility and migration
- Orientalism
- New Diaspora - Africa in China, etc
- Religious pilgrimage
- Changing concepts of home
- Generational dynamics
Participants will be drawn from different parts of the world. Graduate
students are encouraged to attend and present papers. The conference will
provide time for scholars from various disciplines and geographical
locations to interact, exchange ideas, and receive feedback. Submitted
papers will be assigned to particular panels according to similarities in
theme, topic, discipline, or geographical location. Additionally, selected
papers will be published in book form.The deadline for submitting abstracts/proposals of not more than *250
words*,
is *April 15, 2013*. It should include the *title, the author's name,
mailing address, telephone number, email address, and institutional
affiliation*. Abstracts should be saved with the author¹s names as it
appears on the abstract. Please submit all abstracts to the following:http://www.ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org/toyinfalolaconference/user/regis
ter* *
Professor Ademola Dasylva e-mail: dasy...@yahoo.com
a.da...@ibadanculutralstudiesgroup.org
All inquiries should be directed to Dr. Mrs Doyin Aguoru,
Mobile phone: +234(0)703 504 7854E-mail: doyina...@yahoo.com
Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Moses Ochonu, Vanderbilt University
Prof. Ken Harrow, Michigan State University
Publication of Peer-reviewed papers: Africa World Press and the Carolina
Academic Press will publish the best papers selected from the conference.
Please visit TOFAC website www.ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org/toyinfalolaconference regularly, for
update on further information on TOFAC 2013.
TOFAC/ICSG LOC Members:
Prof. Ademola O. Dasylva, Redeemer's University, Mowe, Ogun State, Nigeria
(TOFAC Board Chairman and Convener)
Prof. Ayo Olukotun, Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences and Entreneurial
Studies, Lead City University, Ibadan.
Dr. Doyin Aguoru, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State,
Nigeria.
Dr. Mark Ighile, Redeemer's University, Mowe, Ogun State, Nigeria
Dr. Anya Egwu, Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria.
