Footprint 38: Africa Dreams: Re-enchantment through Relational Ontologies

Following Walter Mignolo (2009), this issue of Footprint is a response to the ‘epistemic silences’ within the journal’s output regarding non-Western, specifically African discourse. Such silences amplify conceptions of Africa as either a pathological condition framed through indices of population growth and unemployment, or as an extractive testbed for Euromodernity in which notions of informality and incrementality are rehearsed. Consequently, research centred on the continent is largely pragmatic – focusing on sustainability and resilience (e.g. the imposition of sustainable development goals)– or alternatively, romantic, fetishising vernaculars. Critical reflections on and from Africa appear constrained to the present or past, denying dreams of an alternative future. 

Attempts to decolonise architectural theory, education and production have historically expanded reflections and theorisations about the African context from within the academy or relied on scholars to translate ideas of African urbanity into Western canons. These configurations of centre and periphery characterize Western thought and perpetuate the domestication of non-Western knowledges. Discourse about Africa has thus remained limited to representation rather than expression. This, despite growing consensus that the continent and its peoples will shape responses to questions of planetary habitability. 

In the ‘Global North’, theory from Africa is often treated as an object of study, enclosed in a given structure and confined to a predetermined future. In an attempt to work beyond such simplifications, this call invites contributors to explore epistemic operations of (in)formation that affirm a multiplicity of African worlds. As such it echoes recent decolonial projects, most prominently the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, which aim to centre heterogenous voices and aspirations from the African continent. For historian and cultural theorist Achille Mbembe, such efforts articulate a process of re-enchantment that sutures, according to Silvia Federici (2009), what racial capitalism has divided: ‘our relation with nature, with others, and with our bodies’.

We put forward that re-enchantment entails what Arturo Escobar refers to as relational ontologies: knowledges produced not about, but from intimacies with the material and non-human world. Consequently, we invite contributors to respond to their own milieu through diffractive engagement with places, artifacts, and persons. We are a ‘storytelling species’, as Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick claim (2015), and our stories impact behaviours (neurobiological and physiological), with the capacity to move us. These cosmotechnical flows and assemblages precipitate as relationships of nature-culture. Thus, we call on authors to explore ‘African Dreams’ as sympoietic modes of intra-action with: 1) places, reflecting worlding practices or habitations, the techno-environmental production of Africa and Africa in the world (e.g. African diasporas and their relationalities), 2) artifacts, focusing on technicities (socio-technical operations) of becoming-with or making-with that allow for generative more-than-human encounters and new materialist socialities and 3) persons, engaging genealogies and biographies (e.g., historical figures, canonical texts) which flow through the milieu, collapsing past and present.

Proposals for full articles (6000–8000 words), review articles (2000–4000 words) and visual essays will be evaluated by the editors in the form of abstracts (max. 1000 words for full articles; max. 500 words for review articles and visual essays) based on originality, conceptual clarity, pertinence and contribution to the growth and development of knowledge on the subject. Abstracts must be submitted by 2 December 2024.

Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to develop their contributions by 31 March 2025. Full articles will go through a double-blind peer review process, while review articles and visual essays will be evaluated by the editors. We ask authors to refer to the Footprint author guidelines, available at:

https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/about/submissions

All contributors are responsible for securing permission to use images and copyrighted materials.

For submissions and all other inquiries and correspondence, please contact Serah Calitz and Gert van der Merwe at editors.footprint@gmail.com.

Footprint 38 will be published in the spring of 2026.