Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies

Call for Papers: Creolization and African Culture

Paper Abstracts due November 15, 2013

This special issue of Ufahamu addresses the growing interest in theories of creolization as they relate and manifest in African cultural production. While commonly associated with Édouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse (1980) and Poetics of Relation (1990), this issue seeks to broaden the geographic relevance of Glissant’s thought to African spaces outside of the Caribbean. In particular, as Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih write in The Creolization of Theory (2011), the issue intends to “argue […] against the easy universalization of the notion of creolization,” while at the same time, “putting the notion to more general use.” As Lionnet and Shih note, “Creolization in the most general sense refers to the results of a history of contact…it underscores racial and cultural mixing due to colonization, slavery, and migration.” This issue intends to reflect on these histories of contact and processes of mixture as they relate to African cultural production. What are the implications for thinking creolization in the African context? How has this concept operated historically on the continent? Does thinking about African forms of creolization offer us new or alternate genealogies for concepts such as the ‘postcolonial’ or ‘transnationalism’ in these contexts?

Suggested items and directions include:

-Creolization of indigenous languages.

-The creolization of aesthetic form.

-Creolization as cultural and historical process.

-Pre-colonial creolization.

-Creolization and nation.

-Indian Ocean and South Atlantic creolizations.

-Creolization and the environment.

-Creolization and political formations.

-Creolization as politics.

-Creolization and race discourse.

-Ethnographic practice and creolization.

Please send a 300 word (maximum) abstract to ufahamu@gmail.com by November 15, 2013.