Call For Papers: APR Special Issue: Interartistic Afrikan diasporic performing arts: de/post-colonial performance, places, and pedagogies

Calling all researchers in Afrikan and diasporic performing arts to submit research on interartistic Afrikan de/post-colonial performance, places, and pedagogies

This call for proposals is for conference proceedings arising from the international African Theatre Association (AfTA) conference in July 2026, hosted by the Tshwane University of Technology in South Africa. It proposes that the non-western world such as Afrika and its diaspora recentre its own cultural practices and ways of knowing and doing. The conscious choice to use the “k” in the Afrikan title is since most languages on the continent spell Afrika with a K. The embracing K symbolises a kind of Lingua Afrikana, though it draws on more than one Afrikan language. In contrast, we also provocatively chose to refer to the West with a lowercase “w”. The preference is for interartistic as a term within the arts disciplines rather than interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, where the notion of discipline is associated with rules, norms, and boundaries that delineate an artistic field. Afrikan performing arts encompass drama, theatre, dance, song, and music, and denote a field where these arts intersect.

We invite scholars, performers, and researchers with an interest in performance and design arts of Afrika and the diaspora in its various manifestations to submit papers in the following areas:

• De/Post-colonial aesthetics and experiential design

• Entanglements in contemporary performance practice

• New epistemes, new theories and new pedagogies

• Creative industries, performing arts and cultural discourses of the global south

Submitted articles should develop ideas that emerged from the conference discussions and engagements. As a post-conference reflection, only papers presented at the AfTA 2026 conference are eligible for submission.

Submission Instructions:

Full academic articles from conference papers that fall within the themes identified above are welcome. Reflexive essays, reviews, interviews, and reflections based on the performances and panels presented at the conference are welcome. Images are encouraged. Please include 5-6 keywords for indexing. Articles of 5000-8000 words, including references and footnotes.

Please email the submission to: editor@african-theatre.org

• Papers to be submitted by 15 September 2026

• Acceptance of papers to be sent out for peer review will be available by 31 October 2026

• Full papers must be in by 15 March 2027

• Online publication date tba in 2027