Introduction

Since the Mande Studies Association (MANSA) held its 2017 triennial meeting in Grand Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire, various members, including the authors of this special feature, have been reassessing the relationship between MANSA’s name and its mission. The contributors to this collection believe that the very notions of “Mande” and “Mandeness” risk restricting MANSA’s recent expansion. Whereas that growth seems to have occurred in response to an openness to research on topics beyond the realm of Mande, a nostalgia for Mandeness in our work may occlude a well-documented tendency toward adaptation and diversity within both the Mande world and the field of Mande Studies. We believe that our concerns mirror those of our colleagues in African Studies, anthropology, art history, the arts, education, history, literary studies, and other disciplines, who have, for some time, been critiquing notions of ethnicity as definitive of their research-related concerns.

This special feature therefore aims to generate an association-wide, multidisciplinary, trans-Atlantic conversation about the fit between our field of study and how we conceptualize it. In this introduction, I want both to explain how the contributors came to feel the need for this discussion and to summarize the content of our contributions.

How We Arrived Here

Before the Grand Bassam conference, MANSA had held previous African conferences in Bamako, Mali in 1993 and 2011; Serrekunda, Gambia in 1998; Kankan and Conakry, Guinea in 2005; and Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso in 2014, all in majority Mande-speaking areas. Grand Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire was the exception, since Mande-speaking peoples constitute a minority population in that country.

Barbara Hoffman, MANSA’s president at the time, had chosen Côte d’Ivoire as the conference site, and Jeanne Toungara, longtime friend and colleague of Sam Koffi, the chief operating officer of the International University of Grand Bassam, secured the university as our venue. As president-elect then, I asked my Ivorian colleague, Patrick Zadi Zadi, in the summer of 2016, about how best to publicize plans for the conference. He kindly held a meeting at his home in Abidjan and invited colleagues of his from Ivorian research institutes and universities to meet and talk with Barbara and me. Yao Marcel Kouakou, now MANSA’s West Africa coordinator, then spread the word through his networks in Côte d’Ivoire. As a result, the Grand Bassam conference hosted a greater number, and more diverse group, of African-based researchers—and in particular Ivorian colleagues, many working beyond the bounds of “Mande”— than had any previous MANSA triennial conference. The number of European participants was also heartening. The conference signaled a potential sea change in the topical orientations and geographical focus of our members, calling us to reconsider the potential limits of our focus on Mande.

Some four years later, on October 10, 2021, while Maria Grosz-Ngaté was visiting the United States, she, Rosa de Jorio, Renata Serra, Alioune Sow, and I met together in Lake City, Florida to discuss the roundtable that Rosa and I were preparing on the future of Mande Studies for the online meeting that fall of the African Studies Association (ASA). Alioune, Maria, Rosa, Baba Coulibaly, Sten Hagberg, and I then met virtually on October 30 and November 13 to discuss our presentations.

We held our roundtable on Thursday, November 18, 2021, under the title, “Renewing Mande Studies: Resisting Stasis, Recentering Places,” to reflect the conference theme, “Re-Centering Africa: Resistance and Renewal in a World beyond COVID-19.” In the months following the conference, all of us, save Sten, who needed to attend to other obligations, revised and expanded our presentations for publication here, in the order in which I introduce each essay below.

An Overview of the Contributions

Maria Grosz-Ngaté (Indiana University and former ASA president) interrogates the risks of organizing our association so exclusively around Mande identity. She does so in light of scholarly critiques of ethnicity by Mande specialists, the trajectory of MANSA’s own historical development, Mali’s recent political history, and the geographical, rather than ethnic, orientations of contemporary West African intellectuals. She ends by asking if MANSA...