Conference Description: The focus of this conference is premised on the recognition that Africa, like other non-western cultures, has suffered from what Edward Said has identified as the phenomenon of “Orientalism”: throughout history Africa has been misrepresented and devalued when compared with western civilizations by images that stress negative values such as disorder, violence, anarchy, and laziness as enshrined, for instance, in historical, literary and artistic representations of Africa , as well as in “documentary” description (including that written by missionaries) and colonial policies. This conference will explore the history of western attempts to categorize the “self” and the “other” in terms of a hierarchy of superiority versus inferiority, a phenomenon which extends its roots as far back as Aristotelian philosophy: man versus woman, freeman versus slave, Greek versus barbarian. By exploring the history of Western thoughts and ideas, and how these came to construct the definition of Africa as we “know” it and have known it over the centuries, we can begin to understand African civilizations better and give them their due place in history.

Our conference features papers in diverse interdisciplinary fields — such as political science, philosophy and religion, literature, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, women’s studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, history, Black American and Diaspora studies, economics, classical tradition, etc. These papers will examine idiosyncratic aspects of the African world and/or focus on traditional western preconceptions of Africa and their historical construction and divergence from Africa’s sociohistorical and sociocultural realities.