Programm Panels Zu den Panels Panel 22
Authority down the Line:
Change and Stability in African Power Relations
Convenors: Elísio Macamo (Bayreuth), Dieter Neubert (Bayreuth)
The panel addresses power and domination in Africa and asks how far they have changed or remained stable since independence. The focus of the inquiry is the notion of authority which broadly speaking refers to the social nature of the exercise of power. In this respect, it begs questions concerning sources and forms of power, how they have been secured over time and what effects their nature has had over the everyday life of Africans. This approach speaks to those scholars who have been concerned with the State in Africa and the manner in which it has discharged its functions. It seeks to place the immediate conditions under which power is exercised at the centre of analysis. The panel assumes that the notion of authority can provide useful insights into the nature of continuities, dislocations and transformations that have made the past 50 years in African lives.
Following the Nigerian novelist and literary theorist, Isidore Okpewho, who once described sociology and literature as, respectively, the aerial and the close-up view of phenomena, the panel invites contributions by social scientists and scholars in the field of literature on the following key questions:
What notions, types and forms of authority have (i) occupied centre stage in the political and societal realm in Africa since independence, (ii) what conflicts have shaped them, (iii) how have they been represented in works of fiction, both print and film and (iv) which have proven most resilient and persistent and how could this be accounted for?
Theoretical papers discussing the relevance of the notion of authority to social and political analysis in Africa are just as welcome as empirical papers documenting aspects of the way in which authority in Africa has been discharged over the ways.
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