CfP: Asixoxe – Let’s Talk!
SOAS Conference on
African Philosophy
28-29 April 2016, London
Deadline 1 April 2016
Asixoxe – Let’s Talk!
28th-29th April 2016
The annual Asixoxe – Let’s Talk! African Philosophy
conference has, since its establishment in 2014, been
a steady source of highly original research in the domain
of African Philosophy. Asixoxe is an expression in the
southern African languages Ndebele and Zulu. It means
“let’s talk!” Bearing this title the conference places emphasis
on the spoken word, togetherness and friendship as the
social basis of our scholarly engagement with African
Philosophy. At the same time, through the succession of
two click sounds, the word asixoxe iconically represents
the way human speech adds a specific rhythm to time and
to thought.
This year’s conference is organized jointly by SOAS and
the University of Bayreuth: the two-day event at SOAS
will be followed by a day’s workshop hosted by the
Department of Literatures in African Languages of the
University of Bayreuth. The SOAS conference will take
place in the SOAS Russell Square campus, opening at 9:00
on 28th April and closing at 18:00 on 29th April 2016.
We invite papers on the specific focus of this year’s Asixoxe, which is Philosophy and Area Studies; however, we also welcome papers on other topics related to African philosophy. The question of the relationship of African Philosophy to Area Studies translates into fundamentally different methods of approaching African thought, namely identitarian approaches as opposed to comparative ones. Since its inception in the middle of the 20th century, African Philosophy has been riddled with issues of identity. The discipline has predominantly been constructed and understood within an identitarian paradigm: African Philosophy is seen as the ultimate expression of a distinct African (or otherwise defined local, e.g. Akan, Bantu, etc.) identity and defined in opposition to an “other”, almost always “Western philosophy”, itself understood as an essentialized, monolithic body of thought characterized by certain key qualities. Most typically, these distinctions copy the binaries known from other forms of essentialized difference (e.g. gender): emotive, intuitive, collective, counter-rationalistic is opposed to critical, analytical, logic, rational. A major part of the debate on African Philosophy stays within the limits of reinforcing or questioning these binaries, or arguing for a grey zone between both extremes.
Bayreuth have for many years now discussed the relevance
of the identitarian perspective for African Philosophy and
explored the potential of a comparative approach: bringing
African Philosophy into a productive dialogue with the
Western tradition, a dialogue which leaves no party
unchanged and which challenges equally African
philosophical ideas and European ones. Rebecca Stacey’s
(SOAS) seminal paper identifies two alternatives to an
Area Studies approach: namely “Comparative Philosophy”
and “Global/World Philosophy”, the former striving to
bring two or more philosophical traditions into a balanced
communication and the latter aiming at an inclusion of
multiple local philosophical traditions under a globally
constructed unitarian philosophical discipline.
The conference envisages to develop this reflection further.
The debate on African Philosophy epitomizes the dilemmas
related to Area Studies when the concept is applied to
disciplines which have to deal with ways of meaning-making
which depend on the conceptualizations by the people or
discourses which are studied. These disciplines cannot treat
who and what they study as “objects” but must develop a
fundamentally ethical approach to these, based on mutual
respect as well as the willingness of the researcher to see
and challenge his/her position of power. Ultimately, this
reflection addresses the question: is Area Studies a viable
concept for such discourse-based disciplines, or does it
inevitably involve the violent imposition of Western
standards upon a region?
philosophy and about Africa, including university students
at all levels of their academic development. Indeed, the
conference aspires to foster the synergy of fresh scholarly
minds and ripe expertise in creating a platform for their
exchanges and thus nurturing the growth of the discipline
of African Philosophy. The conference has already
produced significant contributions to the field. Selected
papers from the first run in 2014 are being published as a
special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studiesand
the 2015 papers are currently being edited for publication
in a volume in 2017.We cordially invite you to participate in the event. Please
confirm your participation and submit the titles of your
papers by 1st April 2016 to asixoxe@soas.ac.uk. SOAS
students do not have to submit abstracts of their papers,
but participants who are not current students of SOAS are
asked to send abstracts of 100-200 words. Each speaker
will be given 20 minutes for the presentation, with
subsequent 10 minutes for questions and discussion.
We envisage a subsequent publication of selected papers
from the conference. There is no registration fee for
presenters and other participants.