Call for Papers: Creativity and Cultural Expressions in Africa and the African Diaspora — Proposals Due March 30, 2011
The Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora — Dates: July 4-6, 2011
Venue: Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
Convener: Ibadan Cultural Studies Group
We are inviting scholars to submit conference papers and full panel proposals for The Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa on “Creativity And Cultural Expressions in Africa and the African Diaspora”. Accounts of creativity and the imagination have emerged in numerous areas such as literature and the arts, psychology, mathematics and the sciences, business, popular psychology, the social sciences, engineering and technology. The discourse of creativity that surfaces within multiple fields reveals that the notion of the individual creator is not simply widespread, but omnipresent; indeed, it is a fundamental ideology of Western culture.
Challenging the individualist and depoliticized ideology of creativity, the conference calls for papers that present alternative accounts of the social and political dimensions of creativity as they relate to invention, technology, work, artistic and cultural production, the body, desire, pedagogy and social change. The conference aims to reach a multidisciplinary academic audience; artists and grassroots activists; the political, journalistic, and information technology communities; and interested members of the general reading public. The conference promises to create a provocative space for comparative critical dialogue between scholars and dancers, actors and writers, songwriters and singers. The conference invites papers on all aspects of creativity, from the artistic to the scientific and the humanistic.
Scholars in all disciplines are invited to propose papers on various aspects, including but not limited to any of the following:
√Creativity Profile: what is novel and original among Africans and Black people generally?
* Value Added to Progress: development ideas, new thinking
* Globalized Modernity and its consequences on music, dance, performance, home-video culture, African Traditional Religion, indigenous African clothes and textile designs, indigenous African philosophies, wise sayings and general thought process.
* Music
* Dance
* Performance
* The creative process in Africa and the African Diaspora (e.g., how do the diviners work; how do masquerades perform?)
* Creative thought processes (what do texts in divination represent? how do we interpret works of literature? etc)
* Creativity and the Everyday
* Gender, Imagination, and Creative Space
* Ethical issues such as in technological innovations, stunning improvements in our knowledge of and mastery over the natural world and living organisms, concentration of power, wealth and resources in the first world; the concomitant impoverishment of the rest; global environmental destruction; and applications of new knowledge and technology that may be harmful or dangerous.
* Histories of creativity and inventions.
* The politics of creativity (e.g., creativity and resistance, anti-colonial genres, creativity and apartheid, creativity and democratic movements)
* Nollywood (production, text, marketing, impact, etc.)
* Technology, Information, Innovation (e.g., the ambivalent effects and challenges of proliferating technologies and information).
* “Beyond Art?” as expressed in the current range of artistic and cultural practices, especially in the wake of the drastic shifts in critical paradigms associated with women’s studies, multiculturalism, cultural studies, women’s art, popular culture, queer studies and Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s.
* The Expanding Body: e.g., the widespread experimentation and new theorizations with regard to the body and its relation to subjectivity.
* The pedagogy of creativity: strategies, agents and locations that have sought to transcend the hierarchies and limits of traditional pedagogy.
* Social Movements: developments in new social movements and their creative strategies for political organizing, protest, and autonomy; how activists and communities have been imagining and enacting their political aspirations and organizing.
Participants will be drawn from different parts of the world. Graduate students are encouraged to attend and present papers. The conference will provide time for scholars from various disciplines and geographical locations to interact, exchange ideas, and receive feedback.
Submitted papers will be assigned to particular panels according to similarities in theme, topic, discipline, or geographical location. Additionally, selected papers will be published in book form.
The deadline for submitting paper proposals is March 30, 2011. Proposals should include a 250-word abstract and title, as well as the author’s name, address, telephone number, email address, and institutional affiliation.
Please submit all abstracts to:
Professor Ademola Dasylva <dasylvang@yahoo.com> or <a.dasylva@ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org>
A mandatory non-refundable registration fee of N5,000 or (USD 100/BP50 for participants from the US, Europe, and other African countries) must be paid immediately when an abstract is accepted. (Students: N3,000 or USD65/BP40).
It is expected that all participants will raise the funding to attend the conference.
For more information, please visit the conference website:
http://www.ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org/toyinfalolaconference/
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