The Indian Ocean from African Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Call for Papers
“The Indian Ocean from African Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Approaches” Hybrid Conference/Workshop (Predominantly Online): November 19-20, 2026
Organizers: Center for Global and International Studies and Kansas African Studies Center (University of Kansas) in partnership with the Centro de Estudos Africanos (Universidade Eduardo Mondlane)
We invite submissions for a two-day hybrid conference, predominantly online, devoted to exploring the Indian Ocean world from plural perspectives, critically grounded in African contexts and experiences. This initiative connects histories, cultures, and contemporary dynamics across the ocean, highlighting African agency, mobilities, and epistemologies that dominant narratives often overlook. Interested participants should first submit a brief abstract by July 25, 2026. Approved proposals will lead to full papers, which will be presented and discussed during the conference and may later be included in a special issue of Africana Annual, the journal of the Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas.
We especially invite proposals that, across different thematic and chronological approaches, examine issues ranging from commercial networks — including the trafficking of enslaved people — to the multiple geopolitical constraints affecting the eastern African coast within the context of the capitalist system, for which the Indian Ocean is a space of undeniable strategic centrality. Artistic and cultural analyses are also welcome, whether focused on religious practices and multireligious identities across Indian Ocean circuits, or on cinematic, musical, choreographic, heritage, literary, and photographic productions and representations of African and Afro-Asian experiences, from colonial archives to contemporary artistic interventions. We also welcome proposals addressing urgent contemporary issues such as the climate crisis, forced displacement, gender perspectives, social movements, intellectual networks, and regimes of memory woven across this vast maritime expanse, its islands, and its coastal zones.
We encourage submissions of historical and contemporary case studies, theoretical reflections, and interdisciplinary approaches that understand these spaces as sites of memory, identity formation—political, intellectual, and social—as well as cultural production.
Brief Conceptual Notes
For centuries, the Indian Ocean has been a space of intense interconnections, shaped by trade, migration, slavery, decolonization, and contemporary globalization. Even so, African perspectives on this world remain relatively underexplored. This event and the special issue of Africana Annual seek to position Africa as a generative hub of networks, knowledge, and historical dynamics, considering everything from the Swahili coast and trade routes between Mozambique and India to Madagascar and diasporic flows toward East Africa and beyond. We privilege critical approaches attentive to historical and social contexts, approaches that challenge dominant frameworks and value plural types of knowledge, forms of resistance, and processes of hybridity.
Possible Themes
● Pre-colonial and colonial trade circuits in the Indian Ocean (for example, monsoon economies and dhow cultures).
● Transoceanic trafficking of enslaved people and African resistance networks.
● Religious dynamics, ritual practices, and networks in the Indian Ocean.
● Artistic narratives on African and Afro-Asian worlds of the Indian Ocean (literature, cinema, photography, installation, music, dance).
● Mobilities and displacements in the Indian Ocean (labor migrations, forced displacement, refuge, resettlement projects, piracy, etc.).
● African gender perspectives on oceanic worlds.
● Climate crisis and environmental histories of the Indian Ocean.
● Contemporary geopolitics: China–India–Africa disputes in the Indian Ocean arc.
● Intellectual networks and social movements in the Indian Ocean.
● Production and circulation of knowledge in and about the Indian Ocean.
● Archives, sources, and regimes of memory in the Indian Ocean.
Submission Guidelines and Key Dates
Abstracts (250-300 words): Submit by July 25, 2026 to Afroindianocean@gmail.com
First drafts of full articles: By October 25, 2026 to the same email
Hybrid Conference/Workshop (predominantly online): November 19-20, 2026
Revised drafts: Submit by February 25, 2027 to Afroindianocean@gmail.com
Notifications of acceptance for publication: By April 25, 2027
Final versions (post-review): By May 25, 2027
Selected articles will be published in a special issue of Africana Annual, the journal of the Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas.
Guidelines and previous issues: https://aaas.ku.edu/africana-annual.
Co-Editors: Luciano Tosta (lucianotosta@ku.edu) and Glenn Adams (adamsg@ku.edu), University of Kansas.
Carlos Fernandes (kulunguane@gmail.com) and Fernanda Gallo (fernandabggallo@gmail.com), Universidade Eduardo Mondlane.
Questions: Afroindianocean@gmail.com
Abstract Deadline: July 25, 2026