TOFAC 2013
Announces the third
The Toyin Falola Annual International
Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora
(TOFAC)
July Monday 1 to Wednesday 3, 2013
Theme: ETHNICITY, RACE, AND PLACE IN AFRICA AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Venue:
Arrival date:
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Departure date:
Thursday, July 4, 2013
CALL FOR PAPERS
Submission of Abstract Due March 30th, 2013
ETHNICITY, RACE, AND PLACE IN AFRICA AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
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 of Africa 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 subthemes 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 authors’
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 diapora 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 “African” communities and in “African” 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 “black” and if so what “black” means in light of
its obvious exclusion of “white” 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 Africa’s 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
“place,” its connotations, and the semiotic burdens it is often called upon to bear are always
changing. We therefore welcome papers that radically redefine “place,” “home,” “location,” “origin,”
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
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
Orientalism
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
Home
Exile
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
New diaspora
Religious pilgrimage
Changing concepts of home
Generational dynamics