5th Global Africas: Afrotopias

Winthrop-King Institute For Contemporary French & Francophone Studies

April 10-11, 2025 

Location: (TBA)

Keynote Speaker: Felwine Sarr, Duke University.
Organizer: Michelle Bumatay
April 3-5, 2025 (projected dates)

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

In his 2016 essay Afrotopia, Senegalese scholar Felwine Sarr posits the African continent of the 21st century as poised to become “an active utopia” that engages critically with the past and draws extensively on and cultivates Africa’s own indigenous resources, both natural and cultural. Rather than describe what Afrotopia will be, Sarr foregrounds the multifaceted work required to first imagine it by focusing on what he calls “Afrotopos” or “Africa’s Atopos.” Sarr defines Afrotopos as the “as-yet-inhabited site of this Africa to come,” that “requires investment in thought and imagination,” a “space of the possible that has not yet been realized, but where nothing insurmountable will prevent it from coming into existence.” Denouncing the myth of “infinite economic growth within a finite world,” Sarr stresses that such work necessarily involves new economic models and requires “a more acute environmental awareness” in the face of “climate change and reduced biodiversity.” Decolonization of thought and new metaphors drawn from local conditions, knowledge, and needs and are the essential tools to carry out the imagining of Afrotopos, which Sarr presents as predicated on “Africa’s creolization” through a reflexive process of “learning to get to know ourselves anew” and by “proposing new answers to the question of knowing who we are.” Evidence of this endeavor of “learning to get to know ourselves anew” is at the heart of the “Report on the Restitution of Cultural Heritage,” which Sarr coauthored with French art historian Bénédicte Savoy in 2018. This crucial report emphasized the existing and increasing calls for the restitution of African cultural objects located in institutions in the Global North. Evidence of this renewed quest for identity can also be read in the completion of the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal in 2018, and the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize going to Burkinabé architect Diébédo Francis Kéré for his innovative site-specific architecture, which prioritizes using local and renewable materials.

While Sarr’s propositions are future-oriented and seek to affect change worldwide through changes on the continent, this interdisciplinary conference asks what other kinds of Afrotopias have been imagined and created while also attending to who is responsible for the realization of such Afrotopias and who or what generates “insurmountable” obstacles to their actualization and maintenance. Key questions include: Is Afrotopia always for everyone? What distinguishes an Afrotopia from an Afro(dis)topia? What do Afrotopias reveal about structures of power? When and where have representations of Afrotopias emerged? What do the similarities and differences between Afrotopias generated on the continent and outside of it teach us?

Though the conference theme stems from a Francophone context, we invite comparative approaches that span the African continent and extend to the African diaspora.

Please send proposals of 250-300 words for 20-minute presentations by November 25, 2024. We also encourage panel proposals of 3-4 presentations.

Possible topics may include:

  • Pre & Post Colonial African Utopias
  • Pan-Africanism, pan-Africanism
  • Gender Utopias
  • Ecocriticism & More-Than-Human / Posthuman Utopias
  • Sci-Fi & Speculative Fiction
  • Afrofuturism
  • Performance Studies, Music, Dance, Theater
  • Diasporic Utopias, Transnational Black Solidarity
  • Dictator Utopias
  • Négritude
  • Visual Culture & Art
  • Comics, Graphic Novels, Bandes Dessinées, Animation, Video Games
  • Film
  • Anthropology> & Archives
  • Monuments
  • Architecture & Urban Planning

Bibliography:

Sarr, Felwine. Afrotopia. Philippe Rey, 2016.

Sarr, Felwine. Afrotopia. Translated by Drew S. Burk and Sarah Jones-Boardman. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.