We are pleased to inform you that the ECAS 2025 paper submission period has opened. Authors can now submit papers to our panel, entitled “Afropolitanism in the African Indian Ocean [CRG Africa in the Indian Ocean panel]”, which has been accepted for the upcoming ECAS 2025, to be held in Prague from 25 to 28 June 2025.
Papers must be proposed before 15 December 2025 through this link: https://www.ecasconference.org/2025/call-for-papers/ - our panel is listed within the ‘History’ disciplinary stream.
THEMATIC STREAM: Afropolitanism and Afropean Belongings
ORGANISERS: Preben Kaarsholm (Denmark) & Iain Walker (Germany)
SHORT DESCRIPTION
Indian Ocean Afropolitanism has attempted to reconcile cosmopolitanism with African belonging within Oceanic settings of mobility and has interacted with debates on pan-Africanism and nationalism. The panel will discuss political and cultural expressions of this in historical perspective.
ABSTRACT
The concept of Afropolitanism – as proposed by Taiye Selasi, Achille Mbembe and Sarah Balakrishnan – may help to rethink histories of African migration, diaspora and nation-building. The notion highlights forms of intertwined and multiplied belonging as not only features of elite cosmopolitanism, but as everyday realities in the lives of migrants, refugees and people neglected by the state.
In African Indian Ocean contexts Afropolitan realities and aspirations – and resistances to them – have taken different forms. A variety of efforts have been made to reconcile non-racialism and cosmopolitanism with notions of African belonging within Oceanic settings of mobility and migration, and these have interacted in different ways with debates on pan-Africanism and secular nationalism. Can Indians be Africans? Can Mauritians, Europeans and Malagasies? If so, what are the implications?
The panel will bring together papers discussing political and cultural expressions of such efforts and controversies and their historical background. This will include social movements, literary, musical and artistic outputs, media initiatives and agendas, and will focus on both African Indian Ocean island, coastal and hinterland settings, and on urban, rural and maritime networks of interaction and migration. The panel will welcome papers addressing issues of multiple belonging and overlapping diasporas, and the impact of legacies of slavery and indenture on the conceptualization of relations between racial groupings.
We look forward to your papers and to seeing you in Prague in June 2025!