Short Abstract

This panel marks the centenary of the journal AFRICA, published since 1928. Papers are invited that engage with the journal’s intellectual heritage, asking how those concerns may develop in the future. Contributions selected will be invited to submit to a special issue of AFRICA.

Long Abstract

The International African Institute (IAI) was founded in 1926 and its flagship publication, AFRICA, appeared in 1928. This panel reflects on a century of Africanist anthropology represented in the journal with an aim to envisage the discipline’s future. A prism may reflect light, or refract, split or focus it. In that spirit of disciplinary enlightenment, contributions are invited that engage the journal’s intellectual heritage closely while pushing disciplinary boundaries. Authors are encouraged to engage in critical historiographical reflections that trace and contest the evolution of key debates, methodological innovations, once seminal discoveries and influential figures that have appeared within AFRICA’s pages. We anticipate state-of-the-field interventions that may address contemporary, urgent themes such as decolonization, digital transformation, climate change, urban futures, the dynamics of African universities, and the lived realities of African societies. In short, we seek provocative, prospective essays that envision new theoretical, empirical, and ethical pathways for the anthropology of Africa, welcoming comparative, interdisciplinary, and decolonial perspectives that link historical trajectories with emerging concerns. Papers may be empirical, theoretical, or historiographic, but should demonstrate clear relevance to the journal and/or Institute centenaries and contribute to prospective dialogues about the discipline’s future. Submissions should demonstrate rigorous scholarship, conceptual innovation, and an explicit consideration of how past insights inform, whether positively or by reaction, contemporary challenges and future possibilities. Papers selected for the panel will be invited to submit to a special centenary issue of the journal AFRICA.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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