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The 2024 Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and Her Globalization — Accra Edition

The second edition of the Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and Her Globalization - Accra Edition will be held from June 3-6, 2024 at the University of Ghana, Accra, with an optional sojourn to Elmina Castle in Cape Coast from June 7-8 sponsored by Rutgers Global. 

The Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and Her Globalization (DTS) brings together people invested in Africa and her Diasporas to engage questions of language, history, archive, translation, culture, and diaspora that shape the discourses surrounding Africa and Her Globalization across intellectual fields and disciplines. While exploring new possibilities for our communities and connected worlds, DTS fosters a global dialogue that is theoretical, cultural, and imaginative, bringing together speakers and participants of national and international research capacities from various disciplines who are invested in Africa and the Black diasporas. 

This second edition will explore some of the most urgent issues in the fields of social sciences and humanities including literature, history, sociology, gender, anthropology, economy, and law, among others. The working languages for the 2024 DTS are, alphabetically: Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Twi, and Wolof.

Sponsors

Partner institutions co-sponsoring the symposium include the Office of Inclusion and Equity at NYU Abu Dhabi, the Arts and Humanities Division at NYU Abu Dhabi, Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University, Rutgers Global, the Department of French Rutgers New Brunswick, the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora, NYU Washington Square, the Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation at NYU, Assane Seck University in Ziguinchor, Senegal, the J. H. Kwabena Nketia Archives of the Institute of African Studies, the University of Ghana, and NYU Accra.

African languages and names were banned in the plantations; and later in the continent as a whole, so much so that African people now accept Europhonity to define their countries and who they are: Francophone, Anglophone or Lusophone.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Africa’s identity today is still conspicuously marked with the scars of colonialism. That "colonialism and its habits die hard," as Kwame Nkrumah states in Africa Must Unite practically shows when even today as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o notes: "African people accept Europhonity to define their countries," such that Ghana is Anglophone, Senegal is Francophone and Angola is Lusophone. Thus, challenging European colonialities of power becomes a multidimensional project and multidisciplinary practice in Africa and her diasporas. 

The Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and Her Globalization centers Africa as a global force in which her Black Diasporas think diaspora across boundaries of language, discipline, history, and culture. This symposium conceives TRANSLATION as a mode of thought that allows for the creation of intellectual spaces and communities of practice to transcend colonial structures of separation and open spaces for new possibilities of gathering that are multilingual, translingual, collaborative, interdisciplinary, communal, and transnational.

The inaugural Dakar Translation Symposium (DTS) gathering took place in Dakar, Senegal between June 12-20, 2022 at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, Senegal, and fostered dialogues about the future of the humanities and social sciences and international collaboration within the Black Diaspora and beyond. The Second Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and Her Globalization - Accra Edition (DTS- Accra Edition) will be held from June 3-6, 2024 at the University of Ghana, Accra. It brings together people invested in Africa and her Diasporas to engage questions of language, history, archive, culture, and diaspora that shape the discourses surrounding Africa and Her Globalization across intellectual fields and disciplines.

Inaugural Dakar Translation Symposium (DTS)

DTS in Dakar marked the first multinational, multidisciplinary, multilingual symposium focused on the African diaspora of its kind in Africa. Panels captured the value of connected stories through multiple themes such as reconnecting identities, gender and diversity, nationhood, Black Lives Matter, and more. This symposium culminated in a Juneteenth memorial gathering on Gorée Island, one of the largest slave trading ports on the African coast from the 15th to the 19th century. 

The DTS Symposium in Dakar also served to raise awareness and funds to support the creation of a collaborative Center for Translation Studies, Literature and Writing at Assane Seck University in Ziguinchor, in southern Senegal, which is located at the crossroads of French, English, and Portuguese speaking-regions, historically imposed on half a dozen local languages and their resulting creoles. This Center will serve as a hub and incubator for scholars, artists, curators, and performers from around the world to come together to think and do archival work and research inside Africa. There will be multidisciplinary residencies where scholars, artists, curators, and performers think together to create an intellectual space for archiving language, culture, and our shared histories within a community in practice. Regular summits will be organized to foster dialogues and exchanges about Africa and Her Diasporas across disciplines and across space and time. Mentorship of fledgling scholars and thinkers will be a critical element of the Center. 

Dakar Translation Symposium (DTS), Accra Edition

As the DTS-Accra Edition hopes to enlarge and improve its communities beyond Senegal, it is aware that the world today is no more stable, and no more at peace than it was in the year 2023. Rather than letting politics and violence dissuade us from our intellectual relationships and building purposes, we call upon the continue empowering histories of diasporic relations to remind us that our work must endure; in times like ours, the convenors of this symposium believe that it becomes even more imperative that we come together across communities, disciplines, geographies, languages, and practices to share the insights of our expertise that will allow us to imagine more equitable futures together.

Logistics

What to Pack