Decolonizing East African Genealogies of Power

Dear Colleagues,

We would like to invite you to submit a paper for our Special Issue on Decolonizing East African Genealogies of Power. The aim of this Special Issue is to provide a space for narrating the genealogy of East African peoples, their lived experiences, indigenous knowledge, and local stories by disentangling their dependency on the interest in colonial categories and Eurocentric theoretical constructs.

East Africa provides complex and contradictory genealogical narratives in world history. The region is the cradle of humankind, the source of ancient civilizations, and a melting pot of diverse ethnic and religious groups that interacted with each other and with foreign traders along its coast and interior areas. It is also a region devastated by war, disease, famine, and climate change. It has been heavily affected by slavery, European colonialism, The Cold War and Post-Cold War developments, and great power rivalry across the Indian Ocean region. Studies on East Africa often apply a “Western lens” that decontextualizes and (re)invents local identities into colonial narratives. Tribal and ethnic genealogies are often essentialized and antagonized to provide nationalist narratives for the state building agenda of post-colonial elites. Large-scale investment and security projects further construct or use these colonial narratives in building new architectures of power into the future. These processes impact the continuity of indigenous knowledge, traditional lives, and local economies, and they subvert the expression of cultures and transmission of stories across East African generations. East African colonial genealogies express the footprints of great powers, their racial biases, capitalist anxieties, and epistemic influences.

In decolonizing these genealogies, papers should center around the people of East Africa and trace their movements, roles, destinies, and futures as they travel across multiple power systems in the past or present. This Special Issue will contribute to the global decolonial movement where genealogy becomes a genuine expression of local and environmental life as experienced and narrated by the people, rather than a discourse burdened by the interests of those who yield power. We invite articles that interrogate colonial constructs of any kind across East Africa as well as papers that provide insights into the life histories, struggles, and experiences of local people.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors ([email protected]; [email protected]) or to the Genealogy editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Dr. Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes
Dr. Eyob Balcha Gebremariam
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• East Africa
• decolonization
• indigenous
• nature
• coloniality
• ethnicism
• nationalism
• geopolitics
• Indian Ocean
• security