The Annual Africa conference is an international, interdisciplinary academic gathering that brings together scholars and independent researchers, activists, policymakers, professionals, and graduate students engaged in research and scholarship across African/Africana Studies, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Literature, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Geography, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and other related fields.
The conference welcomes submissions from scholars and researchers whose work engages with the theme of each year’s conference. Interested participants are invited to submit abstracts that contribute to the conference theme and promote interdisciplinary dialogue on the diverse histories, cultures, societies, and contemporary issues of Africa and the African Diaspora.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The 13th Annual Africa Conference (2027)
Conference Theme
Conceptualizing the Black Atlantic: Migrations, Connections, Memories, and Identities in African and African Diasporan Experience
Conference Dates: April 14-16, 2027
Format: Virtual (Via Zoom)
The conveners invite submission of abstracts for and panel proposals for the 12th Annual Africa Conference on the theme indicated above. The conference will provide an opportunity for critical dialogue on the lived experiences of women, youth, and children in global African contexts. Papers will interrogate historical and evolving perspectives on these groups, the complex forces that have shaped their identities, voices, roles, representations, challenges, and agencies in diverse African and Diasporan settings. The conference will also explore how historical movements and structures have impacted these groups and how they have responded with their own imaginations of the contemporary world.
Introduction
The study of the Black Atlantic offers a unique framework for understanding the complex histories and contemporary realities connecting Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, the Americas, and other diasporan spaces. From the forced trans-Atlantic migrations to contemporary migration patterns, trans-Atlantic movements have profoundly influenced the global Black world.
But migration is not simply movements between and across geographic spaces. It entails the circulation of memories, languages, religions, political ideas, cultural forms, and other variables. The result of this is the creation of new identities at multiple levels, including notions of belonging, citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, and class and labor.
The 13th edition of the Annual Africa Conference seeks to conceptualize the Black Atlantic in the terms articulated above. The conference thus invites papers that engage in critical discourse on how Africans and their diasporian counterparts negotiate multiple forms of belonging, and how identities are constructed, contested, and transformed across geographic and cultural boundaries.
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