Victoria Ketz (La Salle University)

Cris(tina) Robu (Davidson College)

Simona Wright (The College of New Jersey)

This board-sponsored session welcomes proposals on the power dynamics and historical landscapes of the African continent and its diasporic network. From pre-colonial epistemologies to colonial and postcolonial reconfigurations, the panel seeks to interrogate how space and history intersect to shape, constrain, and enable forms of agency across diverse African and Pan-African realities.

We invite contributions that examine the production, representation, and contestation of space—geographical, political, cultural, and symbolic—and their implications for belonging, identity, power, and the rapport to the Other. We are interested in exploration of interdisciplinary fields and genres and seek to know how colonial cartographies, borders, and spatial imaginaries have been imposed, resisted, or reworked in various fields and by different artists, scientists, curators, and historians. From deterritorializing dominant cultural forms to reterritorializing practices of memory and identity, we seek to explore the paths taken by artists, scholars, and activists to address the ongoing dynamics of cultural extraction and epistemic violence.

This panel is particularly interested in work that foregrounds African perspectives and methodologies, challenging Eurocentric frameworks and re-centering localized epistemologies. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches, including but not limited to history, literature, cultural studies, anthropology, geography, visual arts, and critical and political theory.

This board-sponsored session welcomes proposals on the power dynamics and historical landscapes of the African continent and its diasporic network. From pre-colonial epistemologies to colonial and postcolonial reconfigurations, the panel seeks to interrogate how space and history intersect to shape, constrain, and enable forms of agency across diverse African and Pan-African realities. We invite contributions that examine the production, representation, and contestation of space—geographical, political, cultural, and symbolic—and their implications for belonging, identity, power, and the rapport to the Other. We are interested in exploration of interdisciplinary fields and genres and seek to know how colonial cartographies, borders, and spatial imaginaries have been imposed, resisted, or reworked in various fields and by different artists, scientists, curators, and historians.