Daniel Mulugeta (SOAS): “Oceanic Pan-Africanism: Mobility, Memory, and the Struggle for Belonging” | Transoceanic Exchanges

Tuesday, 4 November 2025, 2pm-4pm CET
Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum, room HZ 8

Co-organised by Prof. Dr. Nadia Butt and Prof. Dr. Barbara Alge, funded by ZIAF.

The lecture series is part of the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.

Daniel Mulugeta (School of Oriental and African Studies, UK)

This lecture reconceives Pan-Africanism through the lens of the ocean. It proposes a maritime framework for understanding Africa’s global entanglements—not only as routes of dispersal or vessels of trauma, but as dynamic sites of political imagination and cultural renewal. While the Atlantic has long anchored Black diasporic thought, this lecture expands the lens to include the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. These seas have shaped African mobilities for centuries—through trade, pilgrimage, exile, piracy, and forced migration—and continue to structure contemporary struggles over sovereignty and belonging. African global identities have taken shape through Swahili trade routes, Cape Verdean Atlantic crossings, and Red Sea passages linking the Horn to the Arabian Peninsula.

Rather than treating the ocean as a backdrop, this lecture foregrounds it as a formative medium—both a historical record and a site of transformation. As such, it presents Africa’s maritime zones as arenas of political struggle and cultural production, where communities have navigated between domination and autonomy, forging new solidarities and creative forms of resistance. This exploration casts new light on Pan-Africanism—not as a fixed, land-bound vision of unity, but as a shifting, plural, and contested field shaped by migrations of people and ideas, insurgent aesthetics, and submerged epistemologies carried across the sea.

Bio Note:

Dr Daniel Mulugeta is Lecturer in the International Politics of Africa at SOAS University of London and Director of the SOAS Centre for Pan-African Studies. He holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for his project Pan-African Frontiers: The Remaking of Africa in World Politics. His work explores Pan-Africanism as both a political philosophy and a policy tool, bridging theory, practice, and public engagement across Africa and its global diasporas.