AAR-SW Friends,
The University of Texas at Austin would like to invite regional scholars to attend this year’s annual Africa Conference. Among the invited topics for presentation they have listed a number of religion themes and subjects. The theme of this years conference is “Rupturing Colonial Legacies: Colonialisms and Decolonizations in Africa and the African Diaspora.” The conference will be held in Austin, Texas at the UT campus on March 31-April 2, 2017. For the full conference schedule and attendance information, please visit the conference website.
17th Annual Africa Conference at the University of Texas at Austin
(March 31-April 2, 2017 Austin, TX)
Convened by: Dr. Toyin Falola, Department of History, UT Austin
“Rupturing Colonial Legacies: Colonialisms and Decolonizations in Africa and the African Diaspora”
While overt colonization ended with the official independence of African and Asian countries during the twentieth century, contemporary forms of imperialism and globalization perpetuate colonial inequities and structures of power, epistemology, subjectivity, and visuality. The political-economic/social/intellectual hierarchies that were first implemented through historical colonialism continue to govern the lived experiences of people of African and Afro-indigenous descent both within and across nation states. Global critiques and responses to historical and contemporary colonialisms have taken on many names and theoretical strategies, including but not limited to decolonial, anti-colonial, post-colonial, and indigenous intellectual, artistic, epistemic, political/economic, and religio-spiritual genealogies of thought and activism.
The goal of the 2017 Africa Conference is to problematize historical and contemporary colonial and neo-colonial power structures in relation to Africa and the African Diaspora, as well as to (re)imagine and map out alternative futures both within and outside of these global matrices of power and domination.
