Pan-Africanism, Agenda of African Research and Planetary Futures
Guest Editors: Cheikh Thiam, Amherst College: cthiam@amherst.edu Mjiba Frehiwot, University of Ghana: mfrehiwot@ug.edu.gh
Pan-Africanism is fundamentally an epistemic project, born out of ontologies centered on Africa and rooted in a history that challenges and resists the pervasive influence of coloniality and the dehumanization of people of African descent. From the Haitian Revolution to decolonization, through Negritude, hip-hop, Afro-chic, and Afrobeat, Pan-African cultural, intellectual, and political movements have always sought to acknowledge the continuities and discontinuities in the lives of people of African origin while engaging in a common process of integration and liberation for Africa. Politically, Pan-Africanism is a condemnation of colonialism and its corollary, the partitioning of the continent. Culturally, it re-centers African modes of creation and voices in the complex task of envisioning and conceiving a Pan-African presence in world history. Epistemically, Pan-Africanism provides a theoretical foundation from which it is possible to question the foundations of coloniality. As such, it constitutes an epistemological alternative to the reductionist universalism of Western modernity.
The 20th anniversary of the African Union, one of the most recent institutional forms of the Pan-African project, provides an opportunity to reexamine the epistemic relevance of Pan-Africanism in the context of unfinished decolonization. Despite two centuries of discourse on the meaning, relevance, perspectives, and challenges of the movement, a special issue on Pan-Africanism is particularly timely as it allows for a rethinking of Africa's presence in contemporary knowledge creation processes. It is essential to read recent African intellectual propositions such as Afropolitanism, Afrofuturism, Afro-chic, as well as postcolonial and decolonial theories in light of the Pan-African tradition.
A dossier on Pan-Africanism is even more relevant as it has the potential to create the conditions for radical engagement with the major issues confronting our world, such as the planetary boundaries posed by the Anthropocene. Its most detrimental effects include the destruction of natural habitats, climate change, and biodiversity decline, which threaten the future of our planet. Pan-Africanism also allows us to reconsider the unprecedented challenges and opportunities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by the data economy, the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the extraordinary projections of transhumanism, and the digitization of societies that are reshaping the limits of our existence.
How can Pan-Africanism contribute to identifying and constructing research agendas, intellectual priorities, and heuristic postures from Africa and the African diaspora? How can the Pan-African tradition help us question, support, nuance, and advance our engagement with the pluriverse and confront exclusion as well as the limitations of modern teleologies of progress? Under what conditions can it be a source of innovation and disruption when it comes to global governance, racism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, social inequalities, religious extremism, and armed conflicts? In other words, how can Pan-Africanism contribute to redefining the possibilities of a convivial and just world when it is increasingly shaped by populist, nativist, isolationist, and hostile discourses towards multiculturalism? The editors of this special issue invite researchers, activists, and artists to propose innovative contributions based on these inquiries.
The proposed abstracts must be submitted to: https://globalafricapress.org/index.php/globalafrica/about/submissions
Submission deadline for abstracts (500 words): October 11, 2022
Notification of abstract acceptance: October 21, 2022
Submission deadline for full papers: January 21, 2023
Final acceptance deadline: February 11, 2023.
For any inquiries regarding the special issue, please contact the editors at: redaction@globalafricapress.org
See the call in French.
See the call in English.