The upcoming Corpora and Doctrines of African Socialisms: A Global Historical Framing conference at the Institute of African Studies is the culmination of a long-term international collaboration known as the African Philosophy and Politics Project. Made possible through the support of the Partnership University Fund of the French-American Cultural Exchange and the Alliance Program, this project began with a three-day conference in Paris in 2016, and continued with a workshop at Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar in Dakar, Senegal the following year. The conference at Columbia University will mark the final installment of the project’s international symposia, and will ultimately yield an edited volume of essays on African socialisms.
Throughout the collaboration, researchers have highlighted the interconnections and relationships between African thinkers and demonstrated the complexity of source materials that inform socialist ideas globally. Participants have sought to understand the hybridity, adaptations, intertextuality, and circulations of African socialisms in an historical and global framework. In this way, the project has sought to cast light on local as much as global borrowings. Beyond the genesis of the texts of African intellectual thinkers, participants have analysed the production of African social sciences and cast light on the writings of theorists such as Amady Aly Dieng or Boubakar Ly, and Archie Mafaje, and the role of journals such as Présence Africaine and George Padmore’s “The Negro Worker” in the fabrication and diffusion of African socialisms.
