Saturday, January 14, 2006

CFP: African Cities: Colonial Speculum and Post-Colonial Urbanism

African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society
Call for Papers
Deadline: May 30, 2006

African Cities: Colonial Speculum and Post-Colonial Urbanism


The Editors of African Identities and the Center for Black Diaspora, DePaul University are pleased to announce a special issue of the journal devoted to exploring African Cities: Colonial Speculum and Post-Colonial Urbanism. The special issue seeks to explore the physical and social construction of African cities and the dense web of intricate social relations, flows, exchanges, appropriations and adoptions that constantly shape and reshape their diverse geographical and social spaces.

In much of the literature on African cities which was derived from the early 20th century urban theory, the primary emphasis has been to generalize about the development of cities at different stages in history as spatially bounded entities, imprinted with a particular way of life as well as a distinct spatial and social divisions of labor. Given this framework, current literature of African cities retains a focus firmly rooted in characterizing African cities as sites of urban disorder, chaos, ungovernability, poverty, physical and symbolic violence. These images of African cities are reproduced and mediated by a grid of knowledge that privileges a particular form of city building processes which developed in Europe and North America. Criticism of this form of urban representation of African cities is extensive, yet the problem of African urbanity both in its colonial and post-colonial urban forms remains under theorized. There is therefore an urgent need to explore the nature of African cities. In part, because African cities are moving away from the "nation building" project assigned to them by the colonial powers and post-colonial states, to spaces in which African inhabitants are reconfiguring and remaking urban worlds, deploying their own forms of urbanity born out of their historical and material circumstances. It is in these new dense urban spaces with all their contradictions that urban Africans are reworking their local identities, building families, and weaving autonomous communities of solidarity made fragile by neo-liberal states. Urban Africans throughout the continent are creating and recreating dense social networks, flows, exchanges, and knowledge with their own architectural and urban development imprints. 1 Indeed, the pace of the new forms of African urbanity has accelerate in recent years by the deepening political and social crisis that has engulfed African cities. We are seeking articles that examine the significance of African urbanitiy, its complexity and vitality in a single region, social or historical context. Throughout the continent, urban Africans despite diminishing resources are appropriating and transforming the colonial city and its ideal of modernity.

Submissions
Articles should be between 6500-8000 words inclusive of notes and references, accompanied by disc in Microsoft Word. Articles may include black and white images scanned to disk at 300dpi. Manuscripts MUST conform to Harvard Reference style.

They should be double-spaced throughout (including notes and references). Because manuscripts are reviewed blind, the author's name, affiliations, address, telephone and, fax numbers (should be on a seperate sheet?-DM)

The deadline for submission is May 30, 2006.

Manuscripts for the special issue of African Identities should be sent
directly to the Guest Editor:
Fassil Demissie, Guest Editor
Public Policy Studies, DePaul University
2320 North Clifton Avenue, Room 150.1
Chicago, IL 60614
Phone: (773) 325-7356
Fax: (773) 325-7514
Email: fdemissi@depaul.edu

African Identities is a peer reviewed international academic journal that provides a critical forum for examination of African and diasporic expressions, representations and identities. The aim of the journal is to open up various horizons of the field through multidisciplinary approaches: to encourage the development of theory and practice on the wider spread of disciplinary approach: to promote conceptual innovation and to provide a venue for entry of new perspectives. The journal focuses on the myriad of ways in which cultural productions create zones of profound expressive possibilities by continually generating texts and contexts of reflective import. With an emphasis on gender, class, nation, marginalization, 'otherness' and difference, the journal explore how African identities, either by force or contingency, create terrains of (ex)change, decenter dominant meanings, paradigms and certainties.

Monday, January 09, 2006

Exile, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Exile, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism
Location: Germany
Call for Papers Deadline: 2006-03-30

21-23 June 2007
Warburg-Haus, Hamburg
Proposal deadline 30 March 2006

Research on migration, diasporas and exile suggests that the specific trans-national situation with which exiles are confronted, frequently leads to
the emergence and development of nationalist or cosmopolitan attitudes towards other ‘nations’ or ethnicities, political and social groups. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century national historiography suggests that, during the process of nation building and the formation of national identities in western Europe, tendencies to develop rival national identities in exile were much stronger than in the so-called ‘cosmopolitan age’ of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the case of the Italian Risorgimento exile in France reinforced those exiles’ ‘nationalism’, other groups in diaspora, including the Huguenots, who migrated to different European and overseas destinations between 1548 and 1787, are identified as ‘cosmopolitans’. However, closer assessment of diasporic groups and of exile makes evident that exiles frequently developed attitudes that would be identified as simultaneously both cosmopolitan and nationalist.

This conference seeks,

1. To discuss different forms of exile to approach a more differentiated perspective on exile and its consequences for groups living in a trans-national context. These groups reacted to their circumstances by creating a new political, social, economic and/or cultural identity. 2. To define and explain ‘nationalism’ and the so-called ‘rise of the nation-state’ in the context of ‘exile’ and diasporic movements. 3. To define and explain cultural, political or social ‘cosmopolitanism’ in
the context of ‘exile’ and Diasporas.

We invite papers which

1. Offer specific forms of ‘exile’ including a) exile beyond the native country; forced exile or voluntary exile, political exile, diasporas and the discrimination of groups abroad that lead to forms of ‘non-voluntary exile’ b)exile within the native country: ‘inneres Exil’, discrimination of specific groups in their home countries which, in context, led to a variety of forms of ‘exile’.
2. Present responses of ‘exiled’ groups to the challenges posed by ‘exile’ – such as acculturation, integration and assimilation, discrimination and concepts of cultural superiority or inferiority developed by both the ‘hosting’ and the ‘hosted’ groups - that could be defined as ‘nationalist’ or ‘cosmopolitan’.

Please send an abstract of your paper proposal and a short curriculum vitae to

Dr. Susanne Lachenicht (slachenicht@yahoo.com). The deadline for proposals is 30 March 2006.

Organisers: Lehrstuhl für Neuere Geschichte, Schwerpunkt Nordamerikanische, Atlantische und Karibische Geschichte, Historisches Seminar, Universität Hamburg, Prof. Dr. Claudia Schnurmann, Dr. Susanne Lachenicht and the Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, Hamburg, Dr. Kirsten Heinsohn.

Dr. Susanne Lachenicht
Universität Hamburg
Historisches Seminar
Arbeitsbereich Außereuropäische Geschichte
Lehrstuhl Prof. Dr. Claudia Schnurmann
Von Melle Park 6
Hamburg
Germany
Email: slachenicht@yahoo.com