Symposium: Performing Diasporic Belonging: The Experiences of African Migrants in Europe

This one-day interdisciplinary symposium brings together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to examine how African diasporic subjectivities in Europe represent themselves and are represented across expressive domains. 

By foregrounding performance as both metaphor and analytical lens, the symposium explores the many manifestations of belonging in the lived realities of Africans in contemporary Europe.

Belonging in migratory contexts is neither static nor singular. It is shaped by histories of colonial entanglements, racialisation, migration governance and transnational connections. African migrants in Europe enact, perform and contest their belonging through linguistic practices, sport, music, literature, heritage, visual culture and other forms of everyday social life etc, which are negotiated in different contexts and experienced through processes of both inclusion and exclusion.

This symposium is structured as a roundtable workshop built around pre-circulated draft manuscripts, facilitating in-depth, dialogic engagement. Rather than conventional paper presentations, sessions will focus on thematic interconnections and collaborative discussion, reflecting the organisers' conviction that the best scholarship emerges from interdisciplinary conversations of this nature. Accepted contributors will have circulated full draft papers in advance of the event, and will revise their papers for journal submission following the symposium.

Organisers

This event is conceived as the foundation of a special issue of African Identities (Taylor & Francis), guest-edited by Kingsley Ugwuanyi (King's College London and SOAS University of London) and Ikechukwu Ejekwumadu (University of Tübingen). 

The symposium and the special issue are designed as a single integrated scholarly endeavour, intended to produce rigorously developed, dialogically informed work.  

Attendance

This event will be held in a hybrid format to reduce financial and environmental costs, with convenors and some participants attending in person at SOAS University of London.

Contact

Dr Kingsley O. Ugwuanyi: ku1@soas.ac.uk

Image credit: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Unsplash