University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, June 22- 27

The Canadian Association of African Studies acknowledges the strain of colonial biases that follow Africans and their “Africanness” everywhere they go. Despite the biases, Africans continue to move upward in international mobility and are becoming leaders and frontliners in different fields on the global stage. However, the colonial disenchantment and Africa’s post-independent leadership and governance crises have consistently caused disillusionment among Africans and people of African ancestry all over the world. African resistance to colonial oppression has matured from the early struggles against the deportation of enslaved people to the recent global collective mobilizations witnessed around the Black Lives Matter movement, encompassing the struggles against Jim Crowlaws in the U.S., the decolonization movements in Africa and the current mobilizations of Black north Africans against structural anti-Black racism in North African countries. It is now time for Africans and all those interested in Africa to start asking tough questions about how local and global systems that derail Africa’s development have been enabled. We want to particularly respond to ways we can set about the right path to a holistic and inclusive development in Africa.

The 2027 conference of the Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS) is all about the subject of RENEWAL. Beyond window-dressing and formulations, we call on participants from all walks of life to join us in initiating honest, hard, and provocative conversations on what it means for Africa and Africans to engage int he process of renewal. What can we do to reclaim Africa’s cultural pride that is hoisted on the flags of colonialism? What does it mean for African, African studies and Black studies scholars in the West and on the Continent to engage in discourses of repatriation and restitution with research funds granted by Western institutions? Are personal remittances and NGO funds helping Africa develop or do they re-inscribe colonialism? Where is the place of African cultural epistemology when scholars/educators in the motherland engage pedagogical materials that have significant “Westernized” orientation. Beyond rhetoric and performative politics for the purpose of grants and publications, what are scholars of African/Black Studies truly decolonizing? What does it mean that a significant number of asylum seekers in the West who are from Africa base their claims on persecution related to their sexual orientation in Africa? Or that the African continent is the hardest hit by femicide? How do we address the recurring outbreaks of xenophobia/Afrophobia/anti-Black racism on the continent? What does it mean to belong to a dis/advantaged social class in an African country and then transform into a member of a minority group after becoming a diasporan? But also, what significance does the phenomenon of the diaspora returning to the continent hold, and what are the challenges and implications of those returns? What does it mean that African economies are still dominated by Western logic and interests? Do conversations at African/Black-themed conferences in the West truly support the conditions of development in Africa? Can oppressive systems really be resisted without creating space for individual and collective renewal?

These and several inter-connected perspectives are the focus for CAAS 2027.