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| Call for Papers: Intellectual Elites and Socio-Cultural and Political Power in AfricaWale Adebanwi (UPenn) and Antoinette Handley (UToronto) invite paper proposals for a panel at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, September 11-14, 2025. While modern African elites have attracted scholarly attention, particularly since the 1960s, one group that has attracted less attention as elites are those whose power and eliteness are derived from knowledge, expertise, creativity, and the life of the mind (Handley 2024: 270-271). They are often approached only as intellectuals, with their eliteness and membership in elite networks downplayed or suppressed in scholarly analysis of power and influence in Africa. Yet, intellectuals are elites and constitute an important faction of the elites in the continent. As elites, African intellectuals—including scholars, griots, philosophers, writers, poets, journalists, essayists, editorialists, artists, etc.—have arguably been highly influential in shaping local and global reflections on African agency and the nature of the continent’s historical and structural challenges. This panel considers how African intellectual elites (re)shape the social order, examining the nature, precepts, contributions, reflections, and actions, as well as the works of African intellectual elites. We define intellectual elites as those whose life of the mind demonstrates attentiveness to matters of public interest, responsibility for public problems and the solutions to them, and obligation for taking (symbolic and/or material) actions through thinking and writing about matters of public interest. How then do members of the intellectual elite engage with the social process and, simultaneously, ‘develop an active neutrality, [and] a positive autonomy’—to use the words of Joseph Ki-Zerbo, the Burkinabé historian, writer, and one of Africa’s foremost thinkers? How can we account for the mediating role of intellectual elites in Africa, both in contemporary times and in the longue durée? How can the analysis of the labor of the mind and its travails and tribulations shape our analysis of political and social (dis)order in Africa? What might an account of intellectual elites contribute to our understanding of what it means to be an elite in Africa and of social thought concerning economic and political processes in the continent? Please send a proposed paper title and 200-300-word abstract to Dr. Gayatri Sahgal by 25 November 2024. Clic here to send your proposal |