AFRICAN HISTORY

at

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON

EQUATORIAL AFRICA WORKSHOP

13-14 OCTOBER 2006

The workshop builds on the exciting creativity of current scholarship in Equatorial Africa and promotes Francophone conversations within the new generation of international scholars that has settled in prominent US universities during this last decade. 

• Program (pdf)

• Participants

• Papers (pdf)

UW-Madison has been one of the foremost research centers for the study of Francophone Equatorial Africa in the US since the late 1950s.  It has trained not only prominent students and faculty for the last five decades, but has produced classic scholarship on Equatorial African studies, both in English and in French (Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest trans. Les chemins du politique en Afrique Equatoriale, 1990 and How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600, 2005; Florence Bernault, Démocraties ambigües en Afrique centrale, 1996).  Every year, an undergraduate course on the History of Equatorial Africa is offered at UW-Madison, as well as regular graduate seminars.  Special emphasis on the ability to conduct research and reading in French has been an integral part of all graduate students in African History.  French is mandatory in the graduate curriculum, an exceptional requirement among leading programs nation-wide.The last ten years have been conducive to a thorough reconfiguration of the field of Francophone Equatorial African History.  On the one hand, the political turmoil of the macro-region has posed considerable challenges to scholarly exchanges and creativity.  As a result, intellectual conversations between scholars established in the US, in France and in Africa have been confined to personal rather than institutional or collective contacts.   On the other hand, an increasing number of African and French scholars have been hired in US universities and have produced some of the most innovative and influential works of the last decade.  A renewed interest in themes such as cultural and religious history (witchcraft, pentacostalism), the history of globalization and commodification (the history of oil production), the history of nation-building, social history writ large (the history of food production, the history of gender identities in urban settings), and an increasing attention to the circulation of modern diasporas have carved new lines of inquiries that have contributed to the renewal of contemporary African studies at large.