If you would like to be considered, please send your paper abstract by Tuesday, March 13 to me, Noah Tamarkin, at ntamarkin@gmail.com, cc'd to my co-organizer Rachel Giraudo at rachel.giraudo@csun.edu. We will notify you by Wednesday evening, March 14th.

Best,

Noah Tamarkin
Brandeis University

Abstract:
In the past two decades, the study of global indigeneity has suggested new ways to understand indigenous rights, indigenous organizing, indigenous alterity, and indigenous cosmopolitics. But as Dorothy Hodgson has pointed out, African indigeneity does not always fit neatly into models of indigeneity that have emerged from the long histories of settler-colonialism in American and Australian contexts. African indigeneity is anything but straightforward in terms of who and what might be encompassed within its frame. In this panel, we consider African indigeneity as a frontier in several senses: the multiple and shifting frontiers resulting from historical and ongoing migrations that have troubled the place-specific time-depth often assumed and required of indigenous peoples in juridical contexts; the shifting frontiers of identity and identification among culturally, linguistically, or politically defined entities who see themselves or are seen by others as “indigenous;” and the contested frontiers of “indigenous” claims to material, cultural, and symbolic resources such as land, parks, minerals, bones, and heritage. As we examine the frontiers of indigenous politics in African contexts, we ask the following questions: how is indigeneity defined, lived, and contested in Africa, and how do specific forms of African indigeneity articulate with and differ from global discourses of indigeneity?