NCOBPS Annual Conference

Dates: March 19-22, 2008
Location: Allegro Hotel, Chicago, Illinois
Call for submissions deadline: TBA (please check NCOBPS website)
Website: http://www.ncobps.org/

Identity Politics in the US and Abroad: Race, the Black Diaspora, and Electoral Politics
 
Globally, electoral politics in the 21st century are being impacted by the presence and political voice of African Diaspora populations in ways heretofore unseen. Immigrants, expatriates, refugees, repatriates, and the undocumented have become part and parcel, either as participants or subjects, of national discourses about citizenship, immigration policy, race, and the meanings of Blackness—an interrogation sometimes prompted by Diasporans themselves who attempt to determine group inclusion and group exclusion.

From political campaigns in which African Diasporans run for public office in the Global North such as that of US Democratic Presidential aspirant Barak Obama; to the political victories achieved against formidable odds such as the elections of Nigerian-born Rotimi Adebari as first Black mayor of Portlaoise, Ireland, Togo-born Kofi Yamgnane as mayor Sant-Coulitz, France, and Nigerian-born Emmanuel Onunwor as mayor of East Cleveland Ohio, USA; to African expatriates in the Diaspora calling for democratization, elections, transparency, probity, and accountability on the continent including the Beninnois in France, Ghanaians in Britain and the US, Liberians in the US, Togolese in France, and likewise Haitians expatriates world over; to debates about the place, space, and rights of African immigrants now living in former colonizing countries becoming priority issues on political platforms seeking to address assimilation and national identity quagmires as in France; to African Diasporan repatriates calling for dual citizenship and voting rights in Ghana amidst unbending opposition, albeit rarely publicly vocalized, African Diasporan populations worldwide are proving to be emerging pivotal actors with influence in national electoral politics. The election of African American US Representative Keith Ellison is a case in point illustrating the political strength of the new Somali community in Minneapolis, Minnesota USA that is considered by some a “voting bloc.”   

The post-cold war waves of globalization and neo-liberalism, though making possible the mobility and further expansion of the African Diaspora, along with equipping Diasporans with the nominal power to demand civil and political rights respectively, are also being challenged concomitantly as hegemonic movements and discourses by the African Diaspora in their articulations about the false hopes of global homogeneity, multicultural egalitarianism, and liberal democracy as the "final form of human governance." 

The political and economic marginality of Africans, wherever we are dispersed in the world, in its various manifestations of discrimination, racism, poverty, dependence, profiling, disaffection, underdevelopment, social exclusion, and overriding problematic relations with Eurocentric societies, illustrate the reasons for the continued salience and sustained expression of identity politics globally. African Diasporans are demonstrating discontent in the streets, in popular culture, in the academy, in transnational interest-group political alliances, and at the ballot box. The African Union has recognized this marginality of the continent and the Diaspora, as well as the potential of their symbiosis, and on these bases has invited Diasporans, as the continent's declared 6th region, to join its relatively newly installed supranational Pan African Parliament. In this unprecedented move, Old Diasporans and New Diasporans are now debating identity politics among themselves, against global hegemonic systems, and rethinking whether or not Pan Africanism vis-à-vis globalization and neo-liberalism is relevant for our collective liberation in the 21st century.
 
The 2008 National Conference of Black Political Scientists invites a wide range of papers that interrogate identity politics, race politics, Diaspora politics, transnational politics, electoral politics, the intersection of the afore-listed, and other related topics, especially ones utilizing comparative Diasporan perspectives.  We encourage participants to think across disciplinary boundaries in organizing panels and contributing to the program. 

For complete information please visit http://www.ncobps.org/call_for_papers.htm