Call for Papers
ANXIETY IN AND ABOUT AFRICA
A two-day interdisciplinary conference, 15-6 June 2016
Location: Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT
Keynote speaker: Emmanuel K. Akyeampong (Harvard University)
Other confirmed speakers include: Stella Nyanzi (MISR / Makerere University) and David Pratten (University of Oxford)
In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the ways in which colonial encounters between Europeans and Africans were fraught with anxiety. Historians and other scholars have shown how ‘colonial anxieties’ about sexuality, authority, modernity, climate, and race shaped attitudes and policies in colonial settings, and help reveal the vulnerability of the colonial enterprise. Despite its widespread use, however, scholars have rarely interrogated the term ‘anxiety’ itself. This is in contrast to the literature on colonialism elsewhere, where literary and critical theorists have drawn distinctions between ‘anxiety’ and ‘fear’.
Within anthropology, meanwhile, scholars have become increasingly interested in ‘insecurity’ and ‘uncertainty’, drawing out their ‘positive and productive potential’ (Cooper and Pratten 2015:1). What is often missing in this work, however, is historical depth—uncertainty and insecurity are conceptualised as modern phenomena, and the literature on earlier forms of anxiety, particularly related to the colonial project, is often ignored. This work also often fails to take into account recent research on affect and emotion, which explores how feelings, moods, and sensations are socially and culturally constructed.
This conference will bring these different research trajectories together for the first time. It will engage scholars from history, development studies, anthropology, geography, sociology, law, and other disciplines in a new conversation on anxiety across time and space. It aims to explore common themes and ideas about anxiety across disciplinary boundaries; consider the conceptual meaning(s) of ‘anxiety’; explore anxiety as a lived experience and investigate how individuals and communities within Africa attempt to navigate it; critically examine how states and institutions instrumentalise anxiety for various political ends; and consider how anxiety in Africa relates to global concerns, particularly around notions of security and ‘terror’.
The conference organisers invite scholars and practitioners working on relevant topics to submit a 250-word abstract and CV for consideration.
Papers that relate to the following themes are particularly encouraged:
Spiritual anxieties
Institutional anxieties
Generational anxieties
Intimate anxieties
Anxieties of health
Security and anxiety
Please send all abstracts and CVs to [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>. The deadline for abstracts is 26 February 2016.
Speakers selected through the Call for Papers will be notified by the end of March. Registration will open in April via the conference website: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26188 <http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26188>.
The conference is supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) and the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge.
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