The decolonial moment in Africa was neither a linear march toward the nation-state nor ideologically uniform. Rather, it was marked by intense debate, experimentation, negotiation, and conflict over the meaning of freedom, sovereignty, and political community in the postcolonial world. Competing visions of self-determination circulated across colonial territories, diasporic networks, labor movements, religious communities, women’s associations, and intellectual circles. These visions proposed divergent futures, including centralized nation-states, federal unions, confederations, transnational solidarities, socialist internationalisms, pan-African federations, and continued integration within imperial frameworks, among others. Market women, migrant communities, chiefs, clerics, soldiers, youth movements, and rural communities articulated political imaginaries that often transcended, complicated, or resisted elite nationalist blueprints. These visions were not merely rhetorical; they shaped strikes, petitions, constitutional conferences, grassroots mobilization, and inter-territorial alliances.
Despite this diversity of political imagination, the territorial nation-state ultimately emerged as the dominant organizing principle of postcolonial Africa. Why did this model prevail? Was its triumph inevitable, strategically adopted, externally imposed, or historically contingent? What alternative futures were foreclosed, marginalized, or absorbed in the process? And how do such histories matter today, if we already know that the story ended with the nation-state?
This panel invites papers that critically interrogate decolonial thought and practices in Africa. We seek to foreground rupture, contestation, and possibility to rethink decolonization not as a settled endpoint but as a field of competing political projects.
Papers may interrogate, but not limited to, the following topics:
• Federalist vs nationalist visions (regional federations, confederations, union projects)
• Debates over imperial citizenship
• Constitutional negotiations and political possibilities
• Advocacy for continued association with imperial metropoles
• Market women’s activism and economic sovereignty
• Labor unions and working-class visions of postcolonial order
• Youth movements, student activism, and alternatives
• Religious movements and faith-based political imaginaries
• Chiefs, traditional authorities, and customary sovereignty
• Socialist and communist internationalisms
• Secessionist movements and failed or aborted federations.
Please send an abstract of 250 – 300 words and a short bio to Kwaku Mintah Danquah (edanquah@wisc.edu) by March 11, 2026.
