I am seeking co-panelists to participate in a capacious conversation about gender and social order in precolonial Africa. This panel aims to redress the dearth of scholarly publications concerning gender in this vast era of the continent’s history. The twenty-first century has witnessed a breathtaking expansion of Africanist scholarship that prioritizes queer, feminist, and decolonial analysis, aiming to destabilize categories of gender and personhood affiliated with colonial “universalisms” and their attendant ideologies. In theorizing the coloniality of gendered identities, norms, and relations, Africanist scholars have scrutinized colonial and postcolonial evidence to critique the present and its prologue. Inspired by these efforts, this panel aims to probe the epistemological limits of precolonial gendered ways of being and historicize them.
Proposals in English or French, concerning any region of the continent, are welcome. Prospective presentations could engage innovative methodologies and/or theories to (re)examine primary sources relevant to precolonial Africa. Given the corpus of precolonial primary sources, how can we write histories of gendered order beyond elite perspectives? Papers could address how authority, access, or possible futures were gendered in precolonial Africa. Papers could interrogate gender as one contingent component of personhood or communal association, as gender identities are embedded in social relations informed by generational distinction, lineage or household membership, inheritance/succession traditions, cosmological/religious beliefs, class or caste affiliation, artisanal occupation or material production, ethnolinguistic differentiation, and enslavability or marginalized status. I also welcome presentations that expand the “limits of invention” debates related to gendered norms, traditions, and institutions.
I will present a paper informed by oral traditions on matrilineal inheritance and gendered authority in sixteenth-century Senegambia.
Please send a title, abstract (200 words), and a two page cv to sarah.zimmerman@wwu.edu by end of day March 8, 2026.
