International Conference “Circulations: the (un)making of Southern Africa beyond and across borders”

CALL FOR PAPERS

Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, Wits University, East Campus, South Africa

3-4 November 2016

Deadline for submission: 31 May 2016

Organization:

In 2015, international migration attracted a great deal of attention in academia and public spheres alike, prompted as it was by the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East. In South Africa, too, violent attacks targeting immigrants in Kwazulu-Natal not only raised serious concerns about the effects of social inequalities in the country but also exposed a profound fracture in the post-apartheid project of commitment to human rights and non-discrimination (including based on nationality). They were a clear reminder that some of the promises that the dream of the “rainbow nation” entertained still remain dangerously unfulfilled. In neighboring countries where migration to South Africa has been a historical constant, these events provoked strong reactions and public criticism. In Mozambique, the long history of labor migration to the mines and past solidarity against apartheid were often mobilized to stress the powerful connections between these countries and their peoples, and advance a view of Mozambicans in South Africa as active members of that society, and not just “outsiders”. The public debate triggered by the attacks is telling of how central human mobilities have been in the history of the region, and how critical these histories remain in our present moment, where long-standing tensions and deep-rooted inequalities are still being worked out.

The International Conference “Circulations: the (un)making of Southern Africa beyond and across borders”, to be held in Johannesburg, 3-4 November 2016, will address some of these critical issues, in their historical depth and contemporary resonance.

Organizing Committee:

Ana Balona de Oliveira (IHA/FCSH/NOVA and CEC/FLUL)
Caio Simões de Araújo (Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland).

Ana Balona de Oliveira (PhD, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2012) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Art History of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and at the Centre for Comparative Studies of Universidade de Lisboa. She wrote her doctoral thesis on the artwork of the Portuguese and South African artist Ângela Ferreira (b. Maputo, Mozambique, 1958) and notions of displacement, hybridity and unhomeliness at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she has also lectured. Her current research is focussed on narratives of empire, anti- and post-colonialism, migration and globalization in contemporary art from ‘Lusophone’ spaces and beyond. Ana received doctoral and postdoctoral grants from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal). She lectured in several institutions in the United Kingdom and Portugal and published in Third Text, Mute, Fillip, Aniki, among others. She is a member of the research group ‘Contemporary Art Studies’ at the Institute of Art History and the coordinator of the research line ‘Visual Culture, Migration and Globalization’ at the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC-CITCOM-Dislocating Europe). She is also an independent curator.

Please visit the Call for Papers.
Please visit the conference’s website.