Call for Papers: ACAS Bulletin on Race and Racism in Africa, 10/05

The ACAS Bulletin has extended its call for papers for its special issue on Race and Racism in Africa to October 23. Please consider sending us something for this important issue.

Call for Papers -- Race and Racism in Africa

ACAS Bulletin #71 [Association of Concerned Africa Scholars]

Contact: Jesse Benjamin, bulletin editor, benjamin@stcloudstate.edu

DEADLINE EXTENDED: October 23, 2005

Overview:

The ACAS Bulletin is putting out a special issue on "Race and Racism in Africa: Colonial and Imperial Legacies in the Present." We seek short reports, position papers, reviews and provocative essays [500 to 3000 words] on this topic, focusing on specific countries, regions and/or historical moments. The focus is on the ways in which race, racial categories, and racism has been and continues to be part of social and cultural issues within African cities, regions and countries today.

Abstract:

The crisis in Darfur has, among other things, resurrected a racial language of "Black Africans" [as victims], and highlighted the continued existence of racial issues on the African continent. This seems like an appropriate juncture in which to raise discussion of race and racism in Africa. Some of our starting assumptions, themselves open to debate, include the following: racial categories are arbitrary social constructs first imposed during colonial divide-and-rule policies, primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and these categories and social tensions did not end with formal colonial rule, but are still a part of many social tensions throughout post-colonial Africa today. While undoubtedly a very controversial subject area, we hope to generate an open dialogue about race and racism in Africa in order to support movements for social equality and justice in the continent and beyond.

Longer Rationale:

In regions throughout the world where slavery and colonial racism were a part of local history for several centuries, the [official and often popular cultural] confusion regarding racial issues and their legacies is often heightened, particularly among privileged groups. This is true of societies throughout the Atlantic world, such as the United States and the rest of the Americas, but is no less true of the African continent itself, or the adjacent Indian Ocean and Middle East regions. This remains true in most places, despite concerted and longstanding efforts to contest racial and related hierarchies wherever they exist, and despite the fact that race manifests itself differently everywhere it appears.

The powerful but ambiguous presence of race in African societies today has been poignantly illustrated in recent months by the resumption of antiquated and discredited racial language in the context of reporting on the Darfur catastrophe. After falling out of favor in recent decades, with a few notable exceptions to be sure, there has been a major resumption of the language of "Black Africans" - posited here as victims - throughout mainstream and even progressive media outlets. These "Black Africans," or sometimes "Black Muslims," are juxtaposed to "Arab Africans," "African Arabs" or just "Arabs," and are a population that has suffered tens of thousands dead and millions displaced in recent years. Yet, the press admits a certain confusion, in that the Arab perpetrators are themselves "Black" in appearance, if anything indistinguishable from their victims in terms of phenotype. Further, both sides of this lopsided conflict are Muslim.

The reporting around the Darfur crisis illustrates well the more generally applicable points that: 1. race and racism are still a part of many social tensions throughout post-colonial Africa today; 2. race and racial categories are awkward and arbitrary social constructs that elide complex social histories and divide people into camps along lines first enforced during colonial divide-and-rule policies, primarily of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; 3. the social cleavages that led to and perpetuated the use of racial categories to segment power relations in colonial states have continued into the present post- or neo-colonial era, and need to be more deeply explored and understood, and 4. colonial and slavery-era terminologies and social categories are still very much in use throughout much of the African continent and the world beyond.

One of the legacies of these racial categories and their hidden or repressed nature in the present is that people living in various parts of Africa continue at times to question their very Africanness and/or their blackness, as these are categories still associated with status at-or-near-the-bottom of many contemporary social hierarchies. We wish to discuss how and why some Africans have tended to shift away from defining themselves as part of African lineages, often by stressing non-African, Arab or Asian lineages instead. We hope to situate such shifts as part of colonial discourses which valuated African identity as the lowest position within 'invented' identity hierarchies.

Such an enterprise was attempted, controversially for some, by Mahmood Mamdani in, When Victims Become Killers, which posited some general outlines of colonial-racial coordinates, starting from the case of Rwanda and mapping from there across the whole of the continent. Mamdani's is just one of a growing number of new attempts to talk about racial issues in Africa.

Neither do we wish to ignore the important movements and people who consciously embrace African and/or Black identity in the face of these colonial legacies -- though such people and movements are themselves not always free of extraneous political and ideological baggage and agendas and must also be critically evaluated.

The hope of this collection of essays is to bring together grounded research and activism on these important and under-represented themes, to promote further discussion and engagement along these lines, to share various methods and ideas about approaching this subject. We seek short essays that outline racial issues in various parts of the continent and provide updates about social conditions and movements that will provoke further critical discussion and research for the future. It is understood that even the tentative statements of this Call for Papers may themselves be controversial in certain respects, and it is hoped that this project will lead to an opening of further debate and discussion of the very terms and categories we use in such conversations.

For submissions and for further information, please contact Jesse Benjamin: benjamin@stcloudstate.edu.

Page Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Ph.D.