Agenda is pleased to call for abstracts on the above topic. Please submit 300 word abstracts by 23 February 2025 to the Guest Editors of this Special Issue: Oceane Jasor (oceane.jasor@concordia.ca) and Nalini Mohabir (nalini.mohabir@concordia.ca)
Once abstracts have been assessed, authors will be invited to submit their full papers on Scholar One (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ragn). Full papers should be submitted by no later than 27 June 2025.
In 2019, Ghana hosted the Year of Return, emphasizing a relationship between the diaspora and the nation-state imagined through various possibilities, including diaspora resettlement and reunification, tourism and development. However, as Amina Mama (2015) noted, personal relationships also shape political affect between Africa and its diaspora. In this special issue, we seek to enrich and extend these linkages through a feminist analysis of multiple modalities of returns and encounters. While one wave of scholarship on the African diaspora emphasizes cultural survivals and continuities, a significant body of work offers more ambiguous explorations of ties between Africa and ‘New World’ Black people. Understanding Africa solely through the fixity of ‘homeland’ and ‘origins’ not only results in the “creation of a divide between studies dealing with Africa and those addressing blackness in other global contexts” (Vinson III 2006: 5). It also obscures more useful interrogations of contemporary and mutual African and diasporic realities. We share Jemima Pierre’s (2008) contention that “by directly engaging modern African communities and juxtaposing their varied historical and contemporary racial processes to those of diasporic communities, we can expand our discussions of transnational blackness” (25). Although return is usually discussed from the standpoint of the diaspora, we strongly encourage pieces that consider the interconnectedness of relationships between Africans and diasporans – as opposed to unidirectional returns and encounters.
Because race is the most obvious signifier of origins, and the main shaper of the return journey, other identity markers, such as gender and sexuality, are often elided from the literature on return. However, thinkers and writers such as Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, and Kobby Ben Ben complicate easy or romanticized narratives through gendered/queered returns. While Pan-Africanist mobilities have been narrated and memorialized primarily through a male-centered outlook, a significant body of work points to the gendered dimension of migrations. In her work on Black women’s migrations to Africa, Kendrix Williams (2006) calls attention “to the very way gender can revise the ways we theorize migration in the African diaspora” (55). From discussions of the lived experiences of returnees (Lake 1995), to the socio-cultural hierarchies that influence diasporic movements (Patterson and Kelley 2000), to repatriations of African corpses (Rapoo 2011), gendered identity is central to articulations of an African-centered understanding of diaspora and its many forms of return.
Furthermore, state-promoted diasporic tourism incorporates neoliberal masculinist and linear assumptions of progress between sites of ‘home’ and ‘away.’ Such perspectives tend to focus centripetally on a US-centred diaspora instead of exploring a mutuality of encountering across the Black Atlantic. Caribbean scholarship offers the concept of “post-diaspora” to challenge a singular place of belonging/affiliation for African-Caribbean peoples, and to emphasize fluidity and un-fixed roots and routes in the diaspora (Dunn and Scafe 2019). We too understand the multiplicity of diasporic return on both a physical and metaphorical level, incorporating a degree of flexibility that suggests going back to a place or point in time, provoking a sense of multifarious returns through relations to people, place, objects, or environments, or an altogether different sense of time and space following the rupture of the Middle Passage. We seek to understand gendered returns and encounters – encompassing movements, moments, and mobilities experienced either over short or long durations of time – as transforming or affecting African peoples both on the continent and in diaspora. In this regard, we are thinking alongside feminist scholar Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin (2022), who states: “I think it’s important to have these difficult conversations (including the distinction between anti-blackness and anti-Africanness), even as we work on linking our oppressions.”
In this special issue, we want to center women’s narratives that conjoin, co-create or complicate relations between the continent and its diaspora. We propose a transnational feminist approach that shifts our (re)thinking of Africa from nation-states as the most useful units of analysis to historical processes, international movements, and flows that have shaped trans-Atlantic encounters. We are interested in pieces from scholars and thinkers in Africa and across the various locations of diaspora, that explore the impact, relevance and legacies of gendered encounters and returns in its many lives, including at the grassroots level.
We particularly welcome narratives of racialized, queered and gendered constructions of identity and meaning that take form through transnational journeys. We are open to considering different writing formats and registers, including papers that offer a feminist analysis/critique of:
• Experiences of Return: Identity, Reconnection, and (Il)legibility of belonging
• Return and politics of protest
• Spoken/unspoken memories and cultural imaginaries
• Embodied remembrance
• Intimate returns: interrogations of love, sex, wifehood, and motherhood
• Spatialities of gendered/queered return and encounters
• Necropolitics of the repatriation of bodies and post-mortem returns
• Women and Pan-Africanist praxis
• Diaspora, gender/sexuality and tourism in Africa
• Return and spirituality; psyche and silences
• State performances and memorials of return
• Expectations of / from diaspora and the political economy of Africa
• Extractive practices and epistemologies
References
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin G (2022) Grappling with the Fragmentations: Black Feminisms, African Feminisms and the Possibilities of Black Geographies in Canada. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 44: 175-184.
Ben Ben K (2023) No One Dies Yet. Europa.
Brand D (2001) A map to the door of no return: Notes to belonging. Doubleday Canada.
Dunn L and S Scafe (2019) African-Caribbean Women: Migration, Diaspora, Post-Diaspora. Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 13: 1–16.
Hartman S (2008) Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Macmillan.
Lake O (1995) Toward a Pan-African Identity: Diaspora African Repatriates in Ghana. Anthropological Quarterly 68(1): 21-36.
Mama A (2015) “Beyond the Frontiers: Feminist Activism in the ‘Global’ Academy.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 9: 35–48.
Patterson TR and RD Kelley (2000) Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African diaspora and the Making of the Modern World. African Studies Review 43(1): 11-45.
Pierre J (2008) ‘I Like Your Colour!’ Skin Bleaching and Geographies of Race in Urban Ghana. Feminist Review 90(1): 9-29.
Rapoo C (2011) ‘Just Give Us the Bones!’: Theatres of African Diasporic Returns. Critical Arts 25(2): 132-149.
Vinson B (2006) Introduction: African (Black) Diaspora History, Latin American History 1. The Americas 63(1): 1-18.
Williams PK (2006) The Impossibility of Return: Black Women’s Migrations to Africa. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 27(2): 54-86.
General
Agenda invites contributions from feminist and gender scholars, activists, researchers, policy makers, professionals, educators, community workers, students and members of womxn’s organizations and organizations interested in and concerned with gender issues. Contributions are accepted in any form, prose (both theoretical and practical), poetry, narrative, interviews, and visual arts. Agenda also invites the submission of poems on the topic of womxn’s rights and gender. Submissions should contribute to developing new thinking and fresh debate on womxn’s rights and gender equality in Africa and other developing countries.
Writers need to:
• Write in an accessible and understandable style;
• Inform, educate or raise debate;
• Try to pin down reasons for contradictions and point out differences of opinion;
• Provide an analysis and an argument;
• Be logical;
• Be sensitive to but not uncritical of how gender, class and race affect the reporting of an event;
• Ensure the introduction encapsulates the contents of the piece and that it attracts the reader’s attention by either making a controversial statement, providing a thought-provoking or new insight into the subject;
• Utilize a gender or feminist lens.
We publish articles in various formats, which range from 6 000 words for more theorized articles, which form the main reference pieces in an issue, to shorter pieces with a minimum of 1 500 words.
Formats of Contributions
• Article (6 000 words max) should be based on new research and contain analysis and argument
• Briefing is an adaptable format for writing on a wide range of subjects (2 500-4 000 words)
• Focus examines an aspect of a chosen theme in detail (4 500 words max)
• Profile looks in detail at an organisation, project, legislation, or a person (2 500-3 500 words)
• Report-back covers reports on meetings, conferences, workshops, etc. (1 500-4 000 words)
• Review typically reviews books or films (1 500-3 000 words)
• Interview can record a conversation among a group of people or a one-on-one interview in which the writer asks the interviewee/s questions on a subject (1 500-3 000 words)
• Open Forum is a vehicle for debate and argument, or pieces which deal with argument and difference of opinion on a subject/issue (2 500-4 000 words)
• Perspective is an adaptable format in which writers are able to use a more personal reflective, narrative style (1 500-3 000 words)
Contributions should be submitted in the following format:
File type: Microsoft Word
Font: Arial
Size: 10 pt
Line spacing: Single
Justification: Left
Referencing: Harvard style
All submissions should have the following:
Abstract: 200 – 300 words
Keywords: approx 5 keywords
Bio: 100 – word author biography, including email address
Bio picture: head-and-shoulders photo in 300 dpi jpeg format
Contributors are encouraged to provide photos and/or graphics to illustrate their submission.
Selection and Editing Process
All submissions are peer reviewed. Articles, briefing and focus pieces go through a double blind peer review process, while all other contributions are reviewed by at least one member of Agenda’s Editorial Advisory Group.
Reviewers comment on the suitability of a text for publication in the Agenda journal, as well as provide comments to help develop the piece further for publication if required. Contributors will be asked to rework the paper accordingly.
On resubmission, the piece will be assessed by the Agenda editors and a final decision made regarding its publication in the journal.
Please note that Agenda reserves the right to edit contributions with regard to length and accessibility or reject contributions that are not suitable or of poor standard.
Please note, as per Agenda’s policy, writers who have published in the journal within the last two years WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to publish – to allow new writers to publish in Agenda.
