Short Abstract:

Movements, both in terms of migration and collective political movements, have interlinked sub-Saharan and North Africa in multiple ways. This panel focuses on such movements to contemplate on how African futures are likely to transgress political geographies and colonial conceptualizations.

Long Abstract:

Movements, both in terms of migration and collective political movements, have interlinked sub-Saharan and North Africa in various ways. Recent phenomena, such as the Sahel’s political turmoil since the fall of Muammar Ghaddafi in Libya, or the migratory movements towards the cities along the Northern shores of the continent, and potentially beyond, are embedded in equally diverse histories. The trans-Saharan gold trade, slavery, Islamization, decolonization movements and Pan-Africanism bespeak a complex set of historical relations, rather than a division, between sub-Saharan and North Africa. This panel explores African futures by focusing on transgressive movements across the two regions. We kindly invite case studies, historical, biographical, multi-sited and comparative approaches on the emergence of collective movements and political ideologies, and on the mobility of people, ideas and artifacts. They may focus on the contemporary significance of political history, regarding for instance the post-independence debates over Pan-Africanism between the Casablanca and the Monrovia bloc in the early 1960s, or sociological questions, such as how West African graduates and job seekers navigate and affect contemporary Tunisian urban economies. Across multiple empirical foci, our panel ultimately aims at reflections that interrogate the persistent colonial distinction between “North Africa” and “sub-Saharan Africa”, and that come to terms with Africa’s liminal spaces and futures, be it along the Mediterranean or the Middle East, as well as the continent’s internal and external transgressions of boundaries and distinctions, be it through movement or contestation.