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Call for Papers Theme: African Intellectual History Type: International Workshop Institution: Stony Brook University Yale University Location: New Haven, CT (USA) Date: 30.3.–2.4.2016 Deadline: 1.9.2015 __________________________________________________ Historians at Stony Brook University and Yale University invite applications for a two-day workshop on African intellectual history, to be held at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, from March 31 – April 2, 2016. Our workshop has a unique format; its panels will seat younger scholars (both advanced graduate students and assistant professors) with more established experts in the field. Thus far, the following senior scholars have committed to serve as facilitators and discussants for the meeting: Isabel Hofmeyr (University of the Witwatersrand), Derek Peterson (University of Michigan), James Sweet (University of Wisconsin), Lynn Thomas (University of Washington), Rudolph Ware (University of Michigan), Sean Hanretta (Northwestern University), Paul Landau (University of Maryland), and John Thornton (Boston University). We seek one dozen additional scholars who will convene in New Haven and work collectively to develop the nascent field of African intellectual history. Travel and accommodation will be supported by Yale’s Macmillan Center and Stony Brook University. African intellectual history has both a long and short history. ‘Long’ because some scholars have explored the origins of political thought and intellectual communities in complex societies in Sub-Saharan Africa in the deep past. We have a significant body of literature on the role of African Muslim and Christian theologians and co-religionists across the Sahara and both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans since the middle of the second millennium. Yet African intellectual history is also a young discipline in that it has been limited by a narrow definition of self-conscious intellectual historical scholarship that prioritizes written texts and “great men.” Thus, for ‘intellectual history’ tends to begin and end with famed nationalist thinkers of the twentieth century, like Leopold Sedar Senghor and Julius Nyerere, who contested colonialism and imagined the world after empire. Indeed, if African intellectuals appear at all in the annals of mainstream (read: Euro-American) Intellectual History, it is the nationalists alone who make the cut, perhaps accompanied by postcolonial novelists and philosophers – people who, like the nationalists, tend to be overwhelmingly male and educated in western-style institutions of higher learning. As a subfield, intellectual history rarely acknowledges the contributions of African thinkers, particularly of non-elite status, to the collective human project of creative thought across time. In recent years, Africanist historians, anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and others have begun to challenge the meanings of and approaches to intellectual history. Scholars using written texts (many newly discovered), oral traditions, linguistic and archaeological data, and material culture such as architecture and cloth have reconstructed the roles of African healers, clerics, rainmakers, chiefs, and slaves in the diaspora in creating modes of thought that formed the basis of medical systems, durable political consciousness, and normative quasi-legal regimes across a variety of landscapes and experiences. Africanists have especially influenced the breaking down of the barrier separating ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ in modern thought, thus showing the fallacies of an outworn definition of secular modernity. African cosmologies can be approaches as narratives revealing transformations in social and political communities. While rooted in the specific dynamics of the African past, such cosmologies have deeply shaped Atlantic and Mediterranean societies, and they are not derivative of some other supposedly ‘universal experience.’ In another exciting development, historians have reexamined the dawn of mass literacy and writing culture across 19th and 20th century Africa to distill Africans’ engagements with and creative contributions to modern media. Still other scholars have exposed how the fractures in African nationalisms were not reactionary but rather originated within vibrant African intellectual communities engaged in projects of redefining ethnicity, gender dynamics, and race. Too often, however, these exciting new scholarly projects are presented in forums separated by region (South Africa or Atlantic Africa, for example) or are slotted into a disciplinary unit, precluding transnational and interdisciplinary dialogue. African intellectual history lacks a journal, representation at the American Historical Association, African Studies Association, or any other professional organization. To be sure, scholars working on intellectual histories publish broadly and cast a wide shadow; some have won the ASA’s highest honor, the Melville J. Herskovits Award, as well as other prominent prizes. It is rare, however, for Africanist intellectual historians to have an opportunity to gather together to compare notes, workshop ideas and work to shape our discipline. Indeed, to our knowledge, our workshop will be the first ever held under the banner of African intellectual history. If you’re interested in participating, please submit an abstract to Shobana Shankar ([email protected]) and Daniel Magaziner ([email protected]) by no later than September 1, 2015. __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
