Conference Title: Entangled Histories, Shared Futures: South Asia and Africa
Date: June 4 – 5, 2026
Venue: Zanzibar, Tanzania
Aims & Rationale:
The historical and contemporary interconnections between South Asia and Africa represent a vibrant and underexplored field of inquiry, offering crucial insights into global processes of trade, migration, cultural exchange, political movements, and developmental trajectories. These two regions were often studied in isolation or through Cold War geographical frameworks, obscuring the entangled histories of trade, migration, shared ideas, solidarity, political alliances and rivalries. Recognizing the need to think past these regional frameworks, this conference seeks to bring together scholars from various disciplines – including history, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, literary studies, environmental studies, and public health – to explore the multifaceted relationships that have shaped and continue to link South Asia and Africa. We invite papers that think through regions and geographies of commerce, migration and ideas, focusing on transnational connections as well as convergences and comparisons around shared processes like decolonization, development or democracy.
We invite papers that delve into the deep historical roots of these connections as well as their evolving contemporary forms, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and innovative research. The workshop will be hosted in Zanzibar, recognizing its unique geography and history as a site of interaction between South Asia and Africa.
We welcome proposals for individual papers and pre-organized panels that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Pre-colonial Connections: Networks of trade, commerce, religious authority and political formations.
Colonial Histories: The impact and effect of European colonization across both regions, the transplanting of legal and administrative models, migration and formation of diasporas, the creation of new economic relationships, anti-colonial movements.
Decolonization and the Postcolonial State: solidarity between independence movements, new political relationships between states and through international bodies, engagements between writers, artists and thinkers, changing orders of citizenship, shared and divergent development models.
New Relationships: investment flows between the regions, the sharing of expertise, foreign policy, new migrations and movements, cultural influences in music, film, art and literature.
Shared Challenges: Similarities and differences in land redistribution, resource extraction and environmental challenges, models for democratization, socialism and challenges to authoritarianism, thinking across caste, race and ethnicity.
Submission Guidelines: Please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words (1,500 characters maximum) and a brief biographical sketch (max. 150 words and no more than 1,000 characters).
Submission Deadline: December 16, 2025.
Please Submit Abstracts here.
Direct Questions to: africanstudies@yale.edu
