Important: Read this First
We invite all those who would like to organize panels, roundtables, and seminars for the upcoming ALA conference to post their call for papers on this page. To create a post, click here.
If you would like to submit your paper for consideration for one of the sessions listed below, please contact the session organizer directly, using the email address provided in the CFP. DO NOT CONTACT THE ALA ABOUT SESSION CFPs.
After selecting papers, organizers must submit their complete panel, roundtable, or seminar proposal for consideration here.
The ALA does not endorse any CFP and bears no responsibility for monitoring the content of CFPs.
Please note that, if you are included in an accepted session, and wish to participate in the conference, you will be required to complete conference registration and to be a paid-up ALA member. Join or renew your membership here.
SOUNDINGS
Session type: PERFORMANCE READINGS
Organized by: Pamela J Olubunmi Smith
Send abstracts or inquiries to: pamelasmith@unomaha.edu
SOUNDINGS: AN EVENING OF READINGS IN MOTHER TONGUE AFRICAN LANGUAGES (with English translations). Submitted by Pamela J. Olúbùnmi Smith & Joyce Ashuntantang, Co-Chairs
For the scholar-translators engaged in the translation of African mother tongue literary works, this annual TRACALA-sponsored “Soundings: An evening of Readings in Mother Tongue African Languages” presentation is a delightful, edifying, and affirming evening of PERFORMANCE READINGS, validating the source of the literary works from which we translate. The readings span the entire gamut of traditional African literature: fiction, poetry, songs, dirges, oriki, folk tales, adages, etc.
12 readers will lead the session with selections in their mother tongue, followed with English translations (copies of which, ideally, will be available to the audience). We are looking for participants in North African, Southern African and East African languages. PLEASE RESPOND NO LATER THAN FEBRUARY 28, 2018.Old and New Directions in Francophone Studies
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Edgard Sankara
Send abstracts or inquiries to: esankara@udel.edu
This panel is intended as a forum for the discussion of the various trends in Francophone African literatures. We will attend to such issues as stylistic and narrative experimentation, the ideological implications of aesthetic and generic choices, the subversive, the reception aesthetics, identity in African literature, “banlieues literature,” cinematographic representations and new and old themes. We will also survey how some perspectives have remained constant or have changed over the years.
[Ce panel se veut ouvert à diverses lectures des littératures francophones d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. Il vise à réunir des analyses de textes du passé et du présent dans une optique postcoloniale et d’interrogation de l’acte d’écriture, du lieu à partir duquel il se produit et des variations temporelles auxquelles il est soumis. Nous acceptons des approches pluridisciplinaires qui prennent en compte des œuvres écrites ou filmées en Afrique, hors d’Afrique, par des auteurs d’origines africaines sans oublier la littérature coloniale ou discours du colonisateur sur le colonisé en période coloniale. Ce vaste panorama nous permettra d’englober les périodes coloniales et postcoloniales et suscitera, nous l’espérons, des analyses originales, des remises en question et des mises en perspectives.] Please send a 250-word abstract and brief bio to Edgard Sankara (esankara@udel.edu)Roundtable on Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́’s Philip Quaque’s Letters to London, 1765-1811
Session type: Roundtable
Organized by: Ato Quayson
Send abstracts or inquiries to: aquayson05@gmail.com
This roundtable will have Wendy Belcher (Princeton), Kwaku Korang (Ohio State University) and Ato Quayson (NYU) as discussants and Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ as respondent.
Surviving the Odds: Storytelling About War and Migration in East Africa
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Joya Uraizee
Send abstracts or inquiries to: joya.uraizee@slu.edu
War and migration in eastern Africa often produce remarkable narratives from both adults and children alike. This panel will focus on the ways in which war and migration have impacted storytelling, in the form of folktales, novels, memoirs, and nonfiction, in eastern Africa. It will seek to understand what kinds of narratives are produced by both children and adults who are affected by conflict and displacement. What kinds of theoretical approaches can be used to analyze such texts? What impact do such texts have on the global community?
Please submit 250 word abstracts by February 15, 2018 to joya.uraizee@slu.eduAfrican Literature and Critical University Studies
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Anne W. Gulick
Send abstracts or inquiries to: agulick@mailbox.sc.edu
This panel welcomes papers exploring intersections between the fields of African literature and Critical University Studies. Papers might consider topics such as:
- Literary treatments of the twenty-first-century African university, student debt, the corporatization of higher education, and the devaluation of the humanities
- Critical and historical frameworks for theorizing student resistance movements across the continent, including South Africa’s Fallist movements
- Critical pedagogy and its relevance to institutional critique as well as classroom practice from decolonization to the present
Please send a 200-word abstract by 19 February to agulick@mailbox.sc.edu.Human Cargoes: The Migrant Crisis in African Literature and Cinem
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Emilie Diouf
Send abstracts or inquiries to: diouf@brandeis.edu
Boats loaded with youth fleeing harsh socio-economic and political conditions have smuggled through the most treacherous point of the Mediterranean and have caused thousands of young men and women to die while others remain captive in Libya where they are dragged through several layers of exploitation and suffering. The main questions that this panel seeks to explore, then, are how do African writers and filmmakers represent the socio-economic, political, and psychological realities of Africa’s migrant crisis. How do African Literature and Cinema offer ways of conceptualizing, visualizing and critiquing the positioning of African migrants and refugees in the judicial and media discourse surrounding the global migrant crisis?
This panel welcomes proposals on (but is not limited to) the representation of:
• the figure of the African migrant in African literature and cinema;
• postcolonial violence and forced displacements;
• the economy of narrative in the mediation of African refugee experiences;
• the trauma of displacement.All interested presenters should send their abstract to diouf@brandeis.edu by Monday February 12th.
Deadline Extended! Environmental Remediation: Genre, Visibility, and Ecological Crisis in African Literatures
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Katherine Hummel
Send abstracts or inquiries to: hummel@umich.edu
Remediation has emerged as a keyword in both new media studies and sustainability discourses. While Bolter and Grusin define it in terms of repurposing old media in new forms, Leerom Medovoi traces its ethically promising, yet politically empty rhetoric for environmentalism. Further, Medovoi asserts these dual definitions of remediation converge in Global South ecologies, many of which remain marginalized by mainstream coverage of environmental crises due to their non-spectacular exposure to what Rob Nixon terms “slow violence.” Whereas Medovoi studies ongoing pollution in the Niger Delta, this panel pursues the formal and environmental definitions of remediation as they emerge in African literatures and intersect with new/multi-media more broadly. What cultural politics inform how certain environments are selected for restoration, and which vulnerable environments are subsequently ignored? Which narrative and rhetorical strategies are adopted and/or repurposed to draw media attention toward African environments? How do African writers, artists, and activists engage with the politics of visibility, in deciding who gets to see, and who controls what is seen? How might remediation elicit new ethical and political imperatives for representing African environmental crises on a global scale?
Please send a 250-word abstract and brief bio to Katherine Hummel by February 12, 2018.
Celebrating Eldred Durosimi Jones and Eustace Palmer: Reading Contemporary Sierra Leonean Literature.
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Abioseh Michael Porter
Send abstracts or inquiries to: abiosehp@drexel.edu
Known in the world of letters for their ability not only to undermine the validity of literary abstraction just for its own sake, their encyclopedic knowledge of African and British literatures in these literatures widest contexts, but also for their thorough understanding of intertextual design and connections among literary texts, Eldred Durosimi Jones and Eustace Palmer deserve to be celebrated. Indeed, there are also some other convincing reasons for which these two scholar-writers should be honored: Their pioneering and phenomenal role in bringing literary criticism of African literatures to the world stage and their extraordinary ability to nurture and guide talented young Sierra Leoneans in the development of that country’s literary culture have led to a spectacular development in Sierra Leone’s literary history, i.e. the rise and flourishing of contemporary Sierra Leonean literature as well as the study of that literature.
While saluting the immense literary, creative, and linguistic contributions of the two scholarly giants, we will simultaneously use the opportunity to examine and explain a new phenomenon that seems to be taking place in Sierra Leonean culture. Until very recently, a major difference between the literature of Sierra Leone and its other West African neighbors was the seeming absence of a sustained body of work by Sierra Leonean authors. The end of the twentieth and the early part of the twenty-first centuries seem to have changed all that. The addition, during the past quarter century, of prose fiction such as A Tale of Three Women; Canfira's Travels; and A Hanging Is Announced, by Palmer, So the Path Does Not Die, by Hollist; Redemption Song and Joy Came in the Morning, by Hunter, Moses, Citizen, and Me, by Macauley, The Diamonds, by Conteh, Forna’s Happiness, Ancestor Stones, The Memory of Love, and The Devil That Danced on the Water, “The Bite of the Mango,” by Mariatu Kamara, The forests are no Longer Green, by Tibble Kposowa, Olufemi Terry's short story: “Stickfighting Days,” Allen’s Smoke in the Kitchen, Beah’s A Long Way Gone and Radiance of Tomorrow, Cheney Coker’s Sacred River, among others, suggest quite a flowering of new and important writing by Sierra Leonean writers. Our panel will look at this fine cultural growth and ways in which Jones and Palmer may have contributed at least to an understanding of it.South African Women
Session type: Panel: The intersection of gender, time, and politics in the South African novel
Organized by: Thelma Pinto
Send abstracts or inquiries to: Pinto@hws.edu
The panel will address the importance of the intersection of place; class;time; cultural group;gender and politics as described in the South African novel.The first novel of Nadia Davids, AN IMPERFECT BLESSING, situated in Walmer Estate, Cape Town will be used as an example of the portrayal of a society riddled by religious, class and political clashes inside a global families portrayed at the intersection of the time between the end of Apartheid and the beginning of democracy.democracy.
African Literature and the Landscape of the Academy
Session type: roundtable
Organized by: Thelma Pinto
Send abstracts or inquiries to: pinto@hws.edu
In what way(s) are the landscapes of the academy conducive for the literary and critical production of African literature? How do various institutional landscapes (state versus private, religious versus non-religious, HBCUs, etc.) alter the critical reception of African literature? Send 250 word abstracts and brief bios by February 5, 2018 to Thelma Pinto at pinto@hws.edu.
Black Women Writers and the “Toxic, Ecological Other”
Session type: Panel
Organized by: P. Jane Splawn
Send abstracts or inquiries to: jsplawn@netzero.net
How have contemporary women writers from Africa and the diaspora represented what Sarah Jaquette Ray has called the toxic, ecological other? How have they described human bodies entangled in environmental transformations and social injustices? In what ways have they interrogated the connections and disconnections between culture and nature? Send 250 word abstracts and brief bios by February 5, 2018 to Thelma Pinto at pinto@hws.edu.
Teaching African literature in the American classroom: Why Culture Matters
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Ernest Cole
Send abstracts or inquiries to: colee@hope.edu
Given the cultural difference American students encounter in African literature courses, Instructors typically require such students to critically engage, explore, and interpret the cultural contexts of African literature, its subtexts, areas of contestation, and relation to identity.
This “sociological approach,” in tandem with close reading, posits the question of why culture matters in the conceptualization and delivery of instructional materials in African literature.
Perhaps, more importantly, it seeks to address another crucial question: why the negative assumptions or stereotypes of African culture persists in the American worldview, and what it means for students to internalize that perspective and use it as lens to encounter difference and otherness, and to craft meaningful reader responses to texts they are reading.
This panel seeks particularly to explore the ideologies and structures that engender interpretive activities that raise complex questions of identity, if not “Africanness,” in African literature classes.
Abstracts that explore essentialism and its deconstruction, as way of understanding stereotypes and its limitations in cultural criticism are welcomed. Papers that address how teachers of African literature engage stereotypes without being apologetic or defensive, as well as those that explore critical approaches, pedagogical strategies, and theoretical frameworks that teachers of African literatures can use to create nuanced socio-cultural perspectives that explore layers of cultural signification and its place in the praxis of criticism are especially solicited.
Please send a maximum of 2-page abstract to Ernest Cole at colee@hope.edu including name of participant, university/college by 28 February 2018.Signes, usages et présences. La (sur)conscience écologique dans la fiction africaine postcoloniale
Session type: Panel
Organized by: EL HADJI MALICK NDIAYE
Send abstracts or inquiries to: ndiayee@seattleu.edu
La relation Homme/Nature est généralement admise comme une caractéristique essentielle du schéma discursif africain. Les productions littéraires africaines ont longtemps confirmé cette tendance, mettant surtout en avant la proximité de l’homme avec son espace immédiat et son appropriation spirituelle de la Nature (Senghor, Camara Laye).
La question cependant dépasse cette seule dimension spirituelle et mythique, puis que l’environnement comme épistémè s’inscrit dans un réseau de productions esthétiques et critiques qui permet désormais de le saisir comme objet d’une parole africaine libérée du parangon exotique et désireuse de s’installer comme présence. Que ce soit dans une approche théorique (Nkashama, Mofin Noussi, Iheka…), fictionnelle (Nganang, Bessora, Ken Bugul…), voire militante (Mongo Beti) le discours sur l’environnement se veut une réappropriation de la terre africaine au sens propre.
Il s’agit donc au delà de la problématique de la Nature comme seul axe référentiel d’analyser le rapport de l’Afrique contemporaine à ses espaces, ses infrastructures, ses artefacts, mais aussi son esthétique de la transformation et de la consommation environnementales ; en tenant compte de l’enjeu postcolonial de déconstruction du mythe de l’Homme africain incarnation du vivant primordial.
Les contributions apportant un éclairage sur les productions narratives, cinématographiques ou artistiques avec une perspective écologique, biopolitique ou sémiologique sur l’environnement sont particulièrement souhaitées. D’autres pistes menant la métaphorisation du réel, à « l’écobiographie », aux récits du terroir ou de la ville, au polar, etc peuvent aussi être envisagées.Merci d’envoyer vos contributions à El Hadji Malick Ndiaye : ndiayee@seattleu.edu
Perspectives on Environmental Consciousness in North African Literature, Film, and Art.
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Lamia Benyoussef
Send abstracts or inquiries to: lbenyous@bsc.edu
One of the most understudied topics in North African Studies is the issue of environmental deterioration and justice. Even in the few cases studied by scholars residing in Western academic institutions, the focus is less on the local population who is affected by environmental degradation than by the constraints that such a degradation would pose for a sustainable economic development in the region.
This panel has three main objectives: First, it seeks to identify how North African writers and filmmakers have addressed the issue of environmental justice in their creative works. The second goal is to investigate the methodological paradigms and the critical lenses through which the social, political, and physical environments of North Africa have been studied and theorized from independence to the present. The third aim of this panel is investigate how the environments of North Africa have been examined and theorized by European and/or American expatriate population living in North Africa or beyond.To those ends, we seek submissions that address the issues related to Environmental Consciousness in North African literatures, films, and art.
Please submit abstract and a brief bio to Lamia Benyoussef at lbenyous@bsc.edu by February 9, 2018, using the subject heading “ALA North Africa.”
North African Literatures Beyond the Francophone Maghreb
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Ziad Bentahar
Send abstracts or inquiries to: zbentahar@towson.edu
The study, research, and teaching of North African Literature has been predominantly rooted in Francophone perspectives, and centered on the Maghreb, the region generally seen as consisting of the three former French colonies of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. While Francophone and Maghrebi frameworks are certainly not the only ones within which North African literatures are studied, they remain the dominant ones.
In hopes of creating dialogue between scholars who are often separated into different disciplines and departments, this panel seeks to expand the scope of research on North African Literatures and Cultures, and reach beyond the traditional axes of the French language and the three countries of the Maghreb.
How do other languages in the region, such as Arabic, Tamazight (Berber), and Spanish intersect with French? How do individual North African works, writers, artists, or filmmakers problematize monolithic definitions of nationalism and regional identities? How do the literatures and cultural productions of the Maghreb relate to the rest of North Africa, or to other spaces, namely sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, or the Mediterranean?
In order to begin answering these questions, we seek submissions that address the linguistic diversity of North African literatures, or their ties to other regions and spaces. Other topics of interest include: Immigration, Sexuality and Identity, Religion, Film and Literature, and Music and Cultural studies, but we welcome submissions on any North African subject.Please submit abstracts of 250 words to Ziad Bentahar at zbentahar@towson.edu by February 9, 2018, using the subject heading “ALA North Africa.”
Modeling mobilities in the literatures of Islamicate Africa
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Matthew Brauer
Send abstracts or inquiries to: matthewbrauer2017@u.northwestern.edu
Selected papers will be considered for publication in Revue CELAAN in 2019.
From the Riḥla of Ibn Baṭūṭa (1355) to Naguib Mahfouz’s Ibn Faṭūma (1983), travel, geography, and cartography have played important roles across the literary history of Islamicate Africa. This capacious geographical term, derived from Marshall Hodgson, denotes a common historical and cultural thread that crosses many languages and regions of Africa. Peopled with preachers, sailors, merchants, scholars, soldiers, and travelers, these literatures offer models of (im)mobility and circulation that precede and persist under the current moment of globalizing literary studies. This panel will explore how those models relate to contemporary conceptions of literary space, such as world systems theory (Immanuel Wallerstein), the world republic of letters (Pascale Casanova), the global atlas of the novel (Franco Moretti), the translation zone Emily Apter), and so on. At a time when spatial approaches are at the forefront of literary analysis, what critiques, supplements, or alternatives might these literatures’ rich histories provide? How might they help us to understand why they have not been mobilized (and, more generally, why any literature in particular does or does not get mobilized) to think about the present status of literary studies as a discipline?Teaching African Literature in the American Classroom
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Ernest Cole
Send abstracts or inquiries to: colee@hope.edu
Given the significance of encounter with cultures in African literature, instructors typically require (American) students to critically engage, explore, and interpret the cultural contexts of African literature, its subtexts, areas of contestation, and relation to identity.
This “sociological approach,” in tandem with close reading, engages the question of why culture matters in the conceptualization and delivery of instructional materials in African literature.
This panel seeks abstracts that seek to address another crucial question: why the negative assumptions or stereotypes of African culture persists in the American worldview, and what it means for students to internalize that perspective and use it as lens to encounter difference and otherness, and to craft meaningful reader responses to texts they are reading. Papers that strive particularly to explore the ideologies and structures that engender interpretive activities that raise complex questions of identity, if not “Africanness,” in my literature classes are encouraged.
Further, papers that explore essentialism and its deconstruction, as a way of understanding stereotypes and its limitations in cultural criticism, engage stereotypes without being apologetic or defensive, and posit critical approaches, pedagogical strategies, and theoretical frameworks that teachers of African literatures can adopt to create nuanced socio-cultural perspectives and its place in the praxis of criticism are strongly solicited.
Please send a maximum of 2-page abstract to Ernest Cole at colee@hope.edu including name of participant, university/college affiliation, topic, title of paper, and description of key ideas in paper. Papers received before 28 February 2018 will be given full consideration.Aminatta Forna’s Happiness
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Ernest Cole
Send abstracts or inquiries to: colee@hope.edu
Aminatta Forna’s Happiness is an epic novel. Ranging from psychiatry to wildlife biology, pop culture to trauma studies, ecological literature to psychology, the novel depicts human life as defined by and in coexistence with animals, nature and the environment, violence and traumatic memory, migration, love, and death.
A predominant theme in the novel is trauma and the suffering that constitutes traumatic memory. However, the novel posits a new construct of post-traumatic stress disorder that makes a distinction between symptoms and emotions, and argues for a paradox in which agency and joy can be reclaimed from traumatic memory.
Exploring the paradigm that trauma is not damage, and that suffering is integral to human experience, this panel solicits proposals on Happiness that engage the interconnections between violence and trauma, human and animal coexistence, the challenges and opportunities confronting the African diaspora, and nature and the environment.
Please send abstracts of proposals to Ernest Cole, PhD, at colee@hope.edu no later than 31 March, 2018.Lusophone/Hispanophone Caucus (LHCALA) Panels
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Joanna Boampong
Send abstracts or inquiries to: jboampong@ug.edu.gh
In line with the theme proposed for the 44th annual meeting of the African Literature Association in 2018, “The Environments of African Literature”, the Lusophone/Hispanophone Caucus (LHCALA) invites submissions for roundtables, paper or poster presentations that engage Lusophone and/or Hispanophone perspectives. We seek submissions that consider ways by which multiple environments as cited in the general ALA call—physical, institutional, ideological, symbolic, discursive, cultural, and technological (among others)—feature in and affect the production, dissemination and reception of Lusophone and Hispanophone literature (comprising various expressions of creative endeavor including essays, film, music, narrative, poetry, digital material, and visual texts). While addressing ways in which Lusophone and Hispanophone literary texts reflect on these environments, the challenges and promises they present, submissions may also consider equally relevant related issues. In what ways has the environment determined the course of Hispanophone and Lusophone literature to date? What aspects of the current “environment” of Lusophone and Hispanophone literature need to be rethought and what interventions are called for?
Proposals are to be sent to jboampong@ug.edu.gh/hughesa@ohio.edu by February 10, 2018 and should comprise the following:
• Name,
• Institutional Affiliation,
• Email address,
• Short bio,
• An abstract of up to 250 words,
• Request for A/V equipment if neededChallenging the Visual, Taming the Gaze: African film in the Classroom Environment
Session type: Panel
Organized by: P. Julie Papaioannou
Send abstracts or inquiries to: julie.papaioannou@rochester.edu
African films have become an essential part of classroom experience. Viewed as carriers of cultural meaning, African films enhance the understanding of cultural difference with visual representation and artistic expression to dispel the notion of an exotic continent in perpetual conflict, disease, and poverty that has long been maintained by Western media. However, the realistic representation of African culture in film has long raised the question as to expectations about the cinematic representation of African life, and expression. In recent years, African filmmaking has also been negotiating artistic trends in the geo-economic sphere of globalized and mediatized world. This panel seeks to investigate the pedagogical, analytical, and critical interventions that assist the scholar to navigate and negotiate the mediacy of the cinematic lens and the immediacy of cultural difference vis-à-vis the student-viewer. How do current theoretical trends in African filmmaking affect our critical understanding and discussion of African films in a diverse classroom? What are the pedagogical and interdisciplinary approaches and practices to address topics of discussion, such as trauma, war, “slow violence,” body mutilation, human trafficking, immigration without falling into the conundrum of creating cultural stereotypes in the process of criticizing them?
Please submit abstracts by February 5, 2018Environmental Remediation: Genre, Visibility, and Ecological Crisis in African Literatures
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Katherine Hummel
Send abstracts or inquiries to: hummel@umich.edu
Remediation has emerged as a keyword in both new media studies and sustainability discourses. While Bolter and Grusin define it in terms of repurposing old media in new forms, Leerom Medovoi traces its ethically promising, yet politically empty rhetoric for environmentalism. Further, Medovoi asserts these dual definitions of remediation converge in Global South ecologies, many of which remain marginalized by mainstream coverage of environmental crises due to their non-spectacular exposure to what Rob Nixon terms “slow violence.” Whereas Medovoi studies ongoing pollution in the Niger Delta, this panel pursues the formal and environmental definitions of remediation as they emerge in African literatures and intersect with new/multi-media more broadly. What cultural politics inform how certain environments are selected for restoration, and which vulnerable environments are subsequently ignored? Which narrative and rhetorical strategies are adopted and/or repurposed to draw media attention toward African environments? How do African writers, artists, and activists engage with the politics of visibility, in deciding who gets to see, and who controls what is seen? How might remediation elicit new ethical and political imperatives for representing African environmental crises on a global scale?
Please send a 250-word abstract and brief bio to Katherine Hummel by February 2, 2018.
Afrophone Literatures: Reshaping African National Environments
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Bojana Coulibaly
Send abstracts or inquiries to: bojana.coulibaly@ugb.edu.sn
While the creation of African national literatures in African languages as a decolonial alternative to African Europhone literatures is not a new concept, the standardization of African languages and a growing body of Afrophone literatures participate in reshaping the political, social and epistemological environments of the continent. This panel seeks to examine how African Afrophone imagination helps build a sustainable global cultural future through the various themes and literary devices used by writers and how African national environments are being impacted by the growing presence of Afrophone literatures. Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Bojana Coulibaly, (bojana.coulibaly@ugb.edu.sn) by February 5, 2018.
Post-Conflict Environments in African Literature: Reconciliation, Justice, Memory
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Saumya Lal
Send abstracts or inquiries to: slal@umass.edu
Post-conflict environments are fraught with tensions and paradoxes as they grapple with enduring legacies of past violence and hostilities while imagining a peaceful future. The proliferation of new models of transitional justice bear witness to the challenges that these environments continue to pose for questions of reconciliation, justice, and collective memory. This panel seeks to examine how contemporary African literature has engaged with these concepts to critique and reinvigorate our understanding of post-conflict environments. Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Saumya Lal (slal@umass.edu) by 1 February, 2018.
African Literature and Big Data: A Call for A New Formalism
Session type: Panel
Organized by: Tejumola Olaniyan
Send abstracts or inquiries to: tolaniyan@wisc.edu
Paper abstracts are hereby invited for critical examinations of the potentials and limitations of big data application to the study of African literature. Papers can explore the history of big data in the humanities, and the intersections of formal and structural analysis of sedimented information and cultural interpretative evaluations that must still be made. Papers can also review existing apps and softwares for the collection, aggregation, and sorting of literary data--their production, circulation, and usefulness.