The primary objective of the international and interdisciplinary conference consists in scrutinizing the multilayered issue of Africa in the making. It demonstrates an intellectual alignment that scholars and academics from diverse affiliations have persistently endorsed: the African continent incorporates the genes of replenishment for, it has a boundless prospective for economic, cultural and political regeneration. The African resumption conception is a long-standing notion. In Gargantua, the narrator uses a proverb quoted by Erasmus in the axiom 2610 which quintessence is borrowed from Pliny the Elder and Aristotle: Ex semper Africa aliquid novi. Encumbered with negative values (Afro-pessimism), positive tenets (Afro-optimism) or beheld according to the procedures of stringent scientific judiciousness, Africa is a continent that counts. As such, it has the status of a fatality engraved at the core of the tragedy of History, as the ideologists of Negritude have already assumed.
In that perspective, Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar summons the African and international intelligentsia for the promotion of the morals and ethics that shape the continent. The wide scope of immutable representations referring to the continent assents researchers to postulate the image of their motherland through which numerous tribulations are theoretically envisioned, mentally internalized and socially experienced. A most positive imagery emerges which, in many ways, makes Africa a figure that escorts researchers' journey in their deepest aspirations and wildest dreams.
Subsequently, the area of research defined enables to accurately delineate the nature of the issues at stake between Africa and modernity, the connection between the two being conceived as the procedure of the problematization of its affiliation to tradition. Considering modernity as a "disorder of circulation and precipitation" (P. P. Diop) and haunted by the prescience of irremissible disasters and calamities, intellectuals and academics relentlessly invest the problematic of Africa’s future. This intellectual alignment lies at the core of 'modernity' which it haunts and through which it is defined today; it irremediably helps to shape identities as found in Amin Malouf's Les identités meurtrières (1998). It is then a requirement for Africa to find a suitable place in the heart of the "clash of civilizations" (Samuel Huntington) and to redefine itself in the framework of several issues pertaining to identity, security, research, ideology, education, globalization, digital, and so on...
In that angle, it is necessary to acknowledge that Africa’s background is multifaceted as it appears in diverse and complex forms; each region of the world asserts itself primary by claiming its specificity. In terms of representation, it is most appropriate to set the frame and measure the stakes in the utmost vivid awareness that there is nothing observable or thinkable that is not conceivable both in its double or opposite. Investigated through the prism of what they represent and what they mobilize, the intellectual standpoints on Africa have an ideological, philosophical and aesthetic status. In short, each conception is only received or disappointed in its secular or religious inspiration, as well as in its aspirations, only referred to the theoretical edge on which it is located.
In the context of globalization, the relationship between civilizations takes on all sorts of configurations: contacts, exchanges, frictions, conflicts... But, against the attempt at homogenization, the symposium (re) cogitates with distinct alertness the issue of diversity. It is a huge laboratory within which researchers consider the question of the relationship with the "other" and the interchange of cultures structured in the mode of enrichment instead of uniculturalism that would expunge all differences. The ideological system being promoted here is based on an approach that values diversity; it does not tend towards a uniformity that would obliterate all singularities; on the contrary, it recognizes and accepts differences.
It is around these issues, rich of future queries, that the conference of the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences (Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar) will be held.
CONFERENCE THEMES
The Faculty Conference is seeking submissions related to the following areas:
Theme 1: Research in Africa: Challenges and Prospects;
Theme 2: Higher Learning, Education, and Culture;
Theme 3: African States and Security;
Theme 4: Africa health issues and challenges ;
Theme 5: Africa, Governance, Globalization and Geopolitics;
Theme 6: Citizenship and African Societies;
Theme 7: Africa, Diasporas and Identities;
Theme 8: Africa and Gender Issue.
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