Twelfth VIVA AFRICA conference invites participants to engage in a discussion of mutual encounters, inventions, constructions and relations of all kinds taking place between Africa and Europe, in the past, present and future. Especially – although by no means exclusively – we invite scholars studying the exchanges and entanglements between African countries and those parts of Europe that are not conventionally associated with colonialism (e. g. most of Central and Eastern Europe), but which have nonetheless participated in global economic and cultural transfers, benefited from them and developed their own colonial imageries and discourses, and which have, by the virtue of their lack of an official colonial history, only recently been drawn into the discussions on postcoloniality and decolonization. One of the aims is to give more nuance to the postcolonial debate that tends to use reified notions of ‘Europe’ as simply part of the ‘West’ or the ‘global North’, forgetting about ongoing, if more subtle, developments between European countries ‘without colonies’ and the African continent.
This interdisciplinary conference welcomes submissions on current as well as historical topics from diverse academic as well as regional and cultural perspectives. Comparative approaches are especially appreciated.
Submit to viva.africa.conference@gmail.com before Wednesday 31 March 2021
Proposal categories
- Individual papers (20 minutes maximum, with 10 minutes for discussion)
- Panel sessions (three or four papers, each of 20 minutes maximum, followed by a general discussion)
- Roundtable discussions (up to 5 participants, each giving a short position paper, followed by a general discussion, total running time of 90 minutes)
Proposal guidelines
- For individual papers: 250-word (maximum) abstract
- For panel sessions: 250-word (maximum) summary and up to 250 words for each session participant
- For roundtable discussions: 250-word (maximum) summary and up to 150 words for each panel participant