Classis Africana – V Dies Academicus.
The World and Africa (published in 1965) is the title of a collection of papers which the great Afro-American intellectual William Edward Burghardt Du Bois wrote from 1955 and 1961.
In that volume the author with a very strong polemical verve outlined the main contributions that Africa gave to human civilization and strived to reassess the role that the “Black continent” played on the scene of world history.
The convenors of conference take as a starting point the idea of the existence of a continuous interplay between Africa as an extremely variegated and multifaceted cultural reality and the rest of the world but, differently from Du Bois’ approach, they would like to try to shed light on the bijective nature of the relationships linking Africa to the global civilizational landscape: therefore they chose the title “Africa in the world, the world in Africa”, meaning a reciprocal meeting with an Other and the reactions to it.
The conference would thus like to call up experts from different fields to discuss historical phenomena and events (e.g. maritime history; exploration; colonial expansion), individual personages and figures (e.g. ambassadors and messengers; traders, scholars, rulers and administrators), cultural products, art items and elements of the material culture (including manuscripts and literary texts), which exemplify the steady reciprocal connections between the African continent and other areas of the planet.
Prof. Alessandro Gori
Universy of Copenhagen
Accademico della Biblioteca Ambrosiana
Organizer of the V Dies Academicus of the Class of African Studies
