Conference

The Indian Ocean from 
African Perspectives: 
Interdisciplinary Approaches

Hybrid Conference/Workshop

November 19-20, 2026 
Online & In-person 
University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA

For centuries, the Indian Ocean has been a space of intense interconnections, shaped by trade, migration, slavery, decolonization, and contemporary globalization. Even so, African perspectives remain relatively underexplored. This conference seeks to explore the Indian Ocean world from different perspectives, critically grounded in African contexts and experiences. This initiative connects histories, cultures, and contemporary dynamics across the ocean, highlighting African agency, mobilities, and epistemologies that dominant narratives often overlook.

This conference is organized by KU’s Center for Global & International Studies and KU’s Kansas African Studies Center in partnership with the Centro de Estudos Africanos, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, in Maputo, Mozambique.

Conference focus 

This conference will explore the Indian Ocean from African Perspectives across different thematic and chronological approaches. We will examine issues ranging from commercial networks — including the trafficking of enslaved people — to the multiple geopolitical constraints affecting the eastern African coast within the context of the capitalist system, for which the Indian Ocean is a space of undeniable strategic centrality. Artistic and cultural analyses will also be discussed, whether focused on religious practices and multireligious identities across Indian Ocean circuits, or on cinematic, musical, choreographic, heritage, literary, and photographic productions and representations of African and Afro-Asian experiences, from colonial archives to contemporary artistic interventions. We hope discussions will address urgent contemporary issues such as the climate crisis, forced displacement, gender perspectives, social movements, intellectual networks, and regimes of memory woven across this vast maritime expanse, its islands, and its coastal zones. We look forward to discussions of historical and contemporary case studies, theoretical reflections, and interdisciplinary approaches that understand these spaces as sites of memory, identity formation—political, intellectual, and social—as well as cultural production.