Short Abstract

This panel deploys critical border studies as an analytical prism to explore border-making in precolonial Africa. It explores how indigenous societies variously imagined and performed borders across the continent, seeking to better understand African territorial dynamics prior to colonialism.

Long Abstract

Border studies have experienced significant conceptual shifts in the last three decades. If previously approached as simple lines on the ground, critical scholars now understand borders as bordering: complex processes of socio-spatial differentiation performed in both discourse and practice by state and non-state actors. Although this processual shift has recast boundaries as dynamic, diffused and multiscalar entities, critical border studies have remained largely confined to contemporary European borderscapes, however. This panel extends the geographical and temporal focus of the scholarship, using critical border studies as a prism to analyse border-making in precolonial Africa. Besides proving useful to explore colonial border-formation and its ongoing legacies, critical concepts like bordering enjoy a degree of analytical flexibility that suits well the study of precolonial boundaries, which are often reduced to ill-defined frontiers in existing territorial models. While not discounting the fuzzy nature of precolonial African territoriality, the panel seeks to better understand how African societies variously constructed borders by answering the following questions: which territorial ideas, practices and technologies shaped bordering across different precolonial societies? How were these ideas, practices and technologies engaged, enacted and exploited by different borderworkers? In what ways did different bordering processes overlap and clash between and within different societies, and with what territorial outcomes? The panel welcomes empirical case studies from across the continent that unpack indigenous bordering from economic, socio-political, aesthetic, religious and other unexplored perspectives, as well as conceptual and methodological interventions advancing the study of precolonial boundary-making in Africa through critical border studies.

Propose paper