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Center for African Studies

Gwendolen M. Carter Conference 2025

For over 30 years the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida has organized annual lectures or a conference in honor of the late distinguished Africanist scholar, Gwendolen M. Carter. Gwendolen Carter devoted her career to scholarship and advocacy concerning the politics of inequality and injustice, especially in southern Africa. She also worked hard to foster the development of African Studies as an academic enterprise. She was perhaps best known for her pioneering study The Politics of Inequality: South Africa Since 1948 and the co-edited four-volume History of African Politics in South Africa: From Protest to Challenge (1972-1977).

 

In the spirit of her career, the annual Carter lectures offer the university community and the greater public the perspectives of Africanist scholars on issues of pressing importance to the peoples and societies of Africa.

 

Coming Soon!

Knowledge Production and African Intellectual Histories

March 27-28, 2025

Convenor: Philip Janzen, University of Florida, Department of History

Conference Abstract

Scholars have long considered the contributions of African intellectuals across the continent: early forms of social organization and public healing in the Great Lakes region; oral traditions in Central Africa, the political discourses of peasants in East Africa; the creation and study of Islamic texts in West Africa; the careers and writings of missionary-educated intermediaries; the spread of print culture in the early twentieth century; and the nationalist intellectuals of the 1960s. More recently, scholars have also turned to questions of knowledge production in and about Africa—not only in history, but also in literature, anthropology, global health, and other disciplines. This conference will explore the newest approaches to the study of African intellectual history and will also consider the dynamics of knowledge production in and about Africa. The presenters will focus on a series of questions: Who are African intellectuals? What kinds of knowledge have been produced about political, social, and cultural institutions in Africa? By whom? Toward what ends? Using what sources, languages, and methods? And how have scholars in Africa and other parts of the world questioned the colonial legacies of knowledge production? Across five panels, scholars of history, archaeology, anthropology, literature, geography, and other disciplines will offer their ideas and perspectives on these themes and questions

 

Please check the links below for more information about previous Carter Conferences.