The 3rd Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies (EALCS) Conference
University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
24th-26th August, 2017
Theme: Cartographies of War and Peace in Eastern Africa
Call for Papers
The Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference Series brings together artists, media practitioners, literary and cultural studies scholars, students and teachers interested in scholarship in and on the Eastern African region. This conference is the 3rd in the series, building on the August 2015 conference held at Makerere University, Kampala, and before that, the inaugural conference held at the University of Nairobi, in September 2013.
This year’s conference theme Cartographies of War and Peace in Eastern Africa invites participants to reflect on literary, media and cultural engagements with peace and conflict in the region. Eastern Africa—pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence—has been a region marked by shifting configurations of peace and conflict, resulting from different policy and political frictions in the region. Beyond periods of warfare and violent conflict, even peaceful nations in the region have had to bear the brunt of the structural violence of poverty, economic and political marginalization unleashed by problematic macro-economic and political policies.
We invite literary, cultural and broadly interdisciplinary meditations on war and peace in Eastern Africa; through an engagement with key historical moments and policies in the region, including, but not limited to: slavery and early European struggles to control the Indian ocean, the two world wars, the Zanzibar revolution; the rise and fall of Ujamaa; the Kagera war; Structural Adjustments Policies (SAPs) and their impacts on everyday life; the Africanisation policies and Asian expulsions; the 1994 Rwanda genocide; the Lord’s Resistance Army and its activities in Uganda; post-election violence in Kenya; the historic 2015 elections campaign in Tanzania (mainland and Zanzibar); the Al-Shabaab phenomenon; the Darfur crisis; the South Sudanese conflicts; Somalia’s conflicts; the Ethiopian revolution; the Eritrean military encounters; and the recent Burundi crisis, among other landmark moments in the region’s histories.
The 3rd EALCS, therefore, invites papers that explore how historical, cultural and political borders and maps have shifted as a result of these incidences and how new allies have emerged thus the new cultural and political cartographies.
Topics include but are not limited to:
- Politics of identity including aspects of ethnicity, religion, or race.
- Violence, migration and exile.
- Language and Culture.
- Genres and trends in narratives of conflict
- Eco-critical readings of resource competitions
- Sexuality
- Popular arts
- New Media narrative engagements
- Autobiographical reflections on conflict
- African language literatures on peace and conflict
- Refugees, dislocation and displacement
- Human rights and Justice
- Representations of peace and militarism
We invite abstracts (of no longer than 250 words) for papers that engage with the above topics and related concerns. We encourage submissions in either English or Kiswahili.
Email your abstract to darconference@gmail.com by 6th January, 2017.
The 3rd Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Conference is an initiative of the Department of Literature, University of Dar es Salaam and the Department of English, Stellenbosch University.