Crossing Boundaries and Recovering Intellectual Traditions 

Atlanta, GA November 20-22, 2025

68th ASA Annual Meeting Call for Proposals
Program Chairs: Pedro Monaville (McGill University) and Anatoli Ignatov (Appalachian State University)

This call for papers for the 68^th annual meeting of the ASA invites participants to reflect on the politics of knowledge in African studies. We aim to engage with the structural inequalities and erasures that continue to exist within our fields of study; and to interrogate the relevance of African studies for Africa and the world. Critical voices have addressed these issues within and through African studies time and again. A few years ago, James Pritchett and then Jean Allman used the ASA presidential lectern to remind us about the decades-old marginalization of Black voices within African studies. In the call for papers for the 63^rd annual meeting of the association, Prinisha Badassy and Carina Ray centered the persistence of racialized structures of power in the study of Africa. Four years later, Alice Kang and Olajumoke-Haliso also emphasized questions of power and the need to reconsider how African studies “approaches, positions, and interprets Africa.” The 68^th annual meeting heeds these and other past efforts to address questions of relevance and potentialities, while fostering new conversations around the plurality of systems of knowledge, bodies of ideas, and imaginaries that have mediated social, cultural, and political lives in Africa.  

We invite submissions that explore the role of African thinkers and intellectual traditions in developing forward-looking ways of thinking about the contemporary condition of multiple, intersecting crises: the crisis of late capitalism, leading to growing socio-economic inequalities and precarity; the crisis of the nation-state and liberal democracy, signified by the global resurgence of far-right populism; the crisis of militarism, made visible by the suffering and deaths of thousands of people fueled by record high world military expenditure; and the ecological crisis, which has not only threatened life on earth as we know it, but has also exposed sharp differences of people’s abilities to be resilient across North-South divides, as well as inequities in the distribution of climate hazards faced by historically marginalized populations. We welcome papers that highlight the enduring presence in Africa of diverse institutions, concepts, and thought systems of universal significance that enable us to shed light on such pressing conditions and dilemmas of the present. 

Here we welcome for instance contributions that challenge mainstream narratives of democracy and human rights in Africa as one of transfer from the West. This includes papers that engage the various strategies of imagination, experimentation, and politics of possibility advanced by Africans in struggles for freedom and self-determination from slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism. We welcome papers that examine the plurality of conversations that intellectual traditions such as Negritude, Pan-Africanism, Humanism, and African Socialism have inspired not only across Africa and the African diaspora but also between Africa and the rest of the world regarding freedom, rights, emancipation, international morality, and justice.  

We encourage submissions that reflect on how African traditions, institutions, and concepts travel across disciplinary, geographical, and cultural boundaries, taking on new meanings and lives beyond their sites of origin and new relations of creolization. For example, the global circulation of African concepts of humanity such as ubuntu has enlarged philosophical understandings of what it means to be human in close interdependence with past, present, and future human generations and with the natural environment. It has contributed to the emergence of new articulations of Afro-ecofeminism, degrowth, post-development, and restorative justice ranging from Africa to Turtle Island. Theories of African socialism, expressed in concepts such as Nyerere’s ujamaa, have advanced possibilities of constructing socialist models in non-European societies and visions of sovereign equality and wealth redistribution in a new international economic order. Sankara’s and Maathai’s far-sighted visions of ecological justice, which conceived of the struggles for green Burkina and Kenya as broader global struggles, have now taken on a new life of large-scale collective tree-planting initiatives such as the Great Green Wall. 

We do not merely ask for contributions on how African intellectual traditions circulate across different ethical, disciplinary, and geographical contexts and boundaries. We encourage proposals that explore what productive engagements can be forged at the point where such traditions are no longer transferable, or their limits of translatability become evident. And  

we seek contributions that enlarge our understanding of what counts as “African intellectual traditions,” archives, and modes of knowledge production including engagements with texts – oral, manuscript or print – and archives of local thought and commentaries produced outside the literary or academic mainstream. This is also a call for revisiting the neglected contributions of African women, as many scholarly approaches still too often ignore their significance as thinkers, makers, and dreamers.  

It is striking to notice how the need to account for the challenges of Africa in the 21^st century has resulted in recent years in repeated returns towards earlier histories of political struggles on the continent, with scholars returning to the legacy of African thinkers and activists who offered visions of liberation and transcended the colonial order by imagining worlds rooted in solidarity, self-determination, and radical transformation. We invite papers that examine the circulation and reinterpretation of these “canonical” thinkers and their changing reception in everyday life, popular culture, street art, and social media networks. Recent reappraisals of critical voices from the past are not limited to political leaders; they also encompass the work of African scholars whose voices were previously neglected within the canon of African studies. There is a growing movement to reclaim the contributions of these scholars, from established academics whose ideas travelled internationally, to those who have worked in more localized, non-institutional contexts. We invite participants to reflect on how to further sharpen our methodological and conceptual approaches in ways that make possible engagements with figures whose works and ideas complicate the universalizing frameworks imposed by established academic paradigms.  

African studies create the possibility to embrace diverse ways of knowing, and resist the essentialization of African experiences through narrow, externally imposed lenses. This requires crossing multiple boundaries: disciplinary, geographical, and epistemological. What are the new archives emerging from these crossings? Which marginalized, forgotten, and poorly understood authors and thinkers are being recentered? And which kinds of conceptual reframing remain to be done?