CfP 2nd Annual International Conference of the Centre for African Phenomenology (CAP)

[Olivier, Abraham]

Call for Papers

Theme: In Commemoration of Two Recent Ancestors in Francophone African

Phenomenology: Paulin J. Hountondji and V.Y. Mudimbe

2nd Annual International Conference of the Centre for African Phenomenology (CAP)

Dates: 24th and 25th September 2026 

Location: l’ École des sciences de la gestion (ESG), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Organizers:  Marie-Pierre Leroux (UQAM), Jane Anna Gordon (University of Connecticut and University of Fort Hare), Lewis R. Gordon (University of Connecticut and University of Fort Hare), and Bettina Bergo

(Université de Montréal)

 

Paulin J. Hountondji made critical interventions into the study of African philosophy through attention to how ethnophilosophy mistakenly approached African philosophical reflection with a narrow set of anthropological methods. After earning his doctorate at the École Normale Supérieure  in 1970 with a thesis on Edmund Husserl, Hountondji was Professor of Philosophy at the Université Nationale du Bénin in Cotonou, except for a period during which he served in government as Minister of Education and Minister for Culture and Communications. He was also Director of the African Centre for Advanced Studies in Norto-Novo, Benin. He participated in the foundational work that led to the creation of the Centre for African Phenomenology. 

Philosopher, novelist, poet, and transdisciplinary scholar, V.Y. Mudimbe made some of the earliest and most profound challenges to how Africa was represented in global thought. His 1988 The Invention of Africa, which won the Herskovitz Prize in African Studies, encouraged a more reflexive and critically engaged practice of knowledge. Born in the Belgian Congo, he earned his doctorate at Catholic University of Louvain in 1970 and taught at the Universities of Louvain, Paris-Nanterre, Zaire, Stanford, Duke and Haverford College. Felwine Sarr, Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of French and Francophone Studies, described Mudimbe as one of the first authors “to think about the possibility of building African social sciences and African humanities aside from the European invention of Africa.” Central to the Thinking Africa project organized in Makanda in 2011, his ideas informed the intellectual project of the Centre for African Phenomenology. 

The upcoming conference aims to honor these two recent ancestors through either explicit exploration of their thought or of how participants’ own research builds from or relates to the ideas of one or both of these giants of African phenomenological philosophy. 

 

Keynote speakers will include Alia Al-Saji, James McGill Professor of Philosophy, McGill University; Derefe K.

Chevannes, Assistant Professor in Black Thought, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto;  and Natalie Etoke, Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies, The Graduate Center, CUNY.

 

Submission Guidelines

Please submit a paper title and 300-word abstract for blind review to jane....@uconn.edu and

lewis....@uconn.edu. Full papers should be limited to 3500-4000 words for a 20-minute presentation. Proposals for panel discussions are also welcome.  All presented papers will be eligible for review for publication in the open-access, peer-review journal, Philosophy and Global AH/)-2F

Deadline for Abstracts 1st February 2026 

Notification of Acceptance: 1st March 2026 

Deadline for Full Papers: 31st August 2026

This communication is subject to the University of Fort Hare e-Mail Disclaimer